Doubt is a part of faith

Frigate32, excellent point. "personal doubts" should have been left off the question entirely. It only allows avoiding the question, as the Rabbi has mostly done here.

Of course his answer is correct, the preacher should leave the pulpit, but that is the start of this discussion, not the end. The nonbeliever preachers featured in the study show how difficult that can be.

PS Can you even imagine standard preaching without the "X to the Y and Y to the X"? What is this called anyway? Transposing something?

With respect, your examples of doubt don't stand up, and are irrelevant to the skepticism—not doubt—about religious claims.

The fact is that Abraham never expresses any doubt in God throughout Genesis— I challenge you to cite a single example, and Abraham laughing to himself at the prospect of his 100-year-old wife giving birth doesn't count.

Doubt is based on a feeling, but skepticism is based on hard facts. For example, we may doubt God's special covenant with Abraham and his descendants because of the highly dubious and dangerously racist idea that the creator of the universe would choose a special class of people, but skepticism is about the religion itself comres from confronting hard facts like these:

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

The great silence from the religious community about these facts tells me that most faithful, especially their leaders, are not really serious about their faith. Ironically, it is the clergy that admit they have lost their faith by grappling with the tough questions who are the ones that are serious about faith.

Rabbi Hirschfield stated, "From Abraham and Moses to Jesus and so many more, wrestling with doubt........"

It needs to be made clear that Jesus never had, nor expressed, doubt. Many people cite Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 when He uttered, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" as proving that Jesus doubted. That is not the case. For the first time ever, Jesus' relationship with the Father was broken when He took the sins of all mankind upon Himself. God is Holy and He cannot have fellowship with sin. When Jesus became "sin" for us, He experienced that separation from the Father. So, it was not doubt on Jesus' part, but an actual experience of what had happened.

Fortunately, that relationship was immediately restored and now, all believers are able to have relationship with, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. This Easter, let us shout, "Hallelujah! He is risen."