Faith, as the name suggests, requires – well, faith. It’s something that defies measurement, that often slips away the moment you try to explain it. Faith begins where logic ends; it lives in the space where reason falters. If there is anyone who managed to put into words the process of believing, of holding on to goodness when everything collapses, it is Etty Hillesum.

Born in 1914 in Middelburg, the Netherlands, Etty Hillesum grew up in a Jewish family with a mother of Russian descent and a Dutch father. She studied psychology and Russian, read Rilke and Carl Jung, and fell in love with life – and at some point with her therapist, Julius Spier. At the beginning of her diaries, she appears like many of us: confused, yearning, endlessly self-questioning. But as her writing unfolds, you can feel her transformation, her awakening to something vast and sacred.

While the Nazi occupation closed in, Etty’s inner world opened. Between 1941 and 1943, she filled her notebooks with prayers, reflections, and moments of startling clarity. She wrote not from a monastery or a synagogue, but from her Amsterdam apartment. Later, she wrote from the Westerbork transit camp – the last stop before Auschwitz, where she would be murdered in November 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.

Her diaries, discovered after the war and published as “An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943”, became a kind of scripture for many who found in her words a radical form of faith. One unprotected by illusion, and burning with love.

“I find life beautiful, and I feel free,” she wrote in her diaries circa July 1942. “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.”

To find beauty in the midst of horror, to speak of freedom inside a camp, is almost impossible to imagine. And yet, Etty’s faith was not blind. It was not denial. It was a deliberate choice to see light, even when the world was ending.

For the past 5 or so years, I’ve found myself returning to her book, its pages soft from being handled, its margins marked with frantic notes. Her words have followed me through continents, becoming my most precious possession. In moments when the world feels cruel or absurd, I think of her, sitting by a narrow window in Amsterdam, writing:

“There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there too. But more often, stones and grit block the well, and God is buried. Then God must be dug out again.”

That, to me, is faith. Not certainty. Not triumph. But the stubborn, quiet act of digging God out again, every single time.

Etty wrote, in May 1942, “I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance… I shall try to make you at home inside me.” She even prayed for the enemy, writing, “Out of all those uniforms, one has been given a face now. There will be other faces, too, in which we shall be able to read something we understand: The German soldiers suffer as well. There are no frontiers between suffering people, and we must pray for them all.”

It’s hard to comprehend such compassion, such radical empathy. But Etty never saw herself as a saint. She was flawed, insecure, and at times full of doubt. That’s what makes her so human, and so Jewish, in the truest sense. In Judaism, faith אמונה (eh-moo-nah) is not about perfection, or having all the answers. It’s about the ongoing conversation with the divine, even when the world is silent.

We don’t have “saints” in our tradition, but if we did, Etty Hillesum would be one. A woman of אמונה שלמה, “complete faith” – who believed in God and in humanity at the very moment both seemed lost. Like Abraham and Moses, she doubted, she argued, she wrestled. And through that wrestling, she found her freedom.

When I think about faith now, I think of Etty’s sky. The one within her, and the one above her. She taught me that even when the external sky supposedly collapses, there can still be an inner expanse that no one can destroy.

In the last few years, I’ve learned to look for that sky within me, too. It’s not always visible; sometimes it’s buried under rubble, under trauma or fear. But when I find it, I recognize what she meant. In that sky, there is a God – not distant or punitive, but loving, thoughtful, and kind.

Maybe faith is not the absence of doubt, but the willingness to keep believing anyway. To keep loving life even when it breaks apart, as Etty phrases beautifully: “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”