Religion & Beliefs

Finding “faith” in Blogland

By Laurel Snyder / November 3, 2006
Jewcy loves trees! Please don't print!

So, I've been further mulling over the idea that words like "faith" make people nervous, and I decided to do a little experiment.  I visited the websites for bloggers I *know* are in some way/shape/form religious/spiritual  Jews, and I performed a search on each site, a search for "faith." 

Guess what I found?

You guessed it. No faith.

Even in the blogs of people like the amazing Amy Guth, Chicago blogger/novelist extraordinaire.  Even though her site is full of faithful posts like this one.  Still, there's not a single reference to "faith" in her blog archives. 

I mean, really, what's the big deal?  It's just

Main Entry: 1faith Pronunciation: 'fAth Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural faiths /'fAths, sometimes 'fA[th]z/ Etymology: Middle English feith, from Anglo-French feid, fei, from Latin fides; akin to Latin fidere to trust — more at BIDE 1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions 2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust 3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs <the Protestant faith> synonym see BELIEF – on faith : without question <took everything he said on faith>

POST A COMMENT

  • Joey Kurtzman
    By Joey Kurtzman 11/3/06 at 4:10 p.m. UTC

    I don't know. Traditional Judaism, like a lot of belief systems, has a pretty intense aversion to pollutants, to foreign contaminants. Of course every belief system is constantly getting polluted, being influenced and altered by others, but they work hard to pretend that they're keeping the fortifications strong and the foreign pathologies out.

    That kind of religious xenophobia is something you'd associate with the shtetl rather than with urban, bohemian American Jews, but maybe words like "faith" and "charity" and so on just sound too ineluctably Christian to these Jewish bloggers. So even if they struggle with their "faith" (and I would certainly say that an utter lack of "faith" is what keeps me from picking up my siddur and praising Hashem for a half hour, three times a day), maybe they feel the need to find another way to describe the same phenomenon, lest they out themselves as "inauthentically" Jewish.

    "??? ?? ???",

    "Joey"

Wanna post your own comments?