The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues it literal-mindedness.
The error of literal-mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning. The truth is that things and words stand for different meanings in different situations. Gold means wealth to the merchant, a means of adornment to the jeweler, "a non-rusting malleable ductile metal of high specific gravity" to the engineer, and kindness to the rhetorician ("a golden heart"). Light is a form of energy to the physicist, a medium of loveliness to the artist, an expression of grandeur in the first chapter of the Bible. Ruah, the Hebrew word for spirit, signifies also breath, wind, direction. And he who thinks only of breath, forfeits the deeper meaning of the term. God is called father, but he who takes this name physiologically distorts the meaning of God.
God in Search of Man, p. 178-179
Carl Stern: You recently told an interviewer that "what keeps me alive is my ability to be surprised." What has surprised you lately?
Rabbi Heschel: Everything. This may be my weakness. You know, you once quoted a statement from the Book of Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the sun." And I disagreed with that statement. I would say there is nothing stale under the sun except human beings, who become stale. I try not to be stale. And everything is new. No two moments are alike. And a person who thinks that two moments are alike has never lived. The secret of it is a very profound principle of philosophy. And that I would call the sense of the unique. Do you know that among a billion faces in this world, no two faces are alike? The other day a person complained to me that he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and he was bewildered because no two paintings looked alike.
1972 NBC Interview with Carl Stern
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
Awareness of the divine begins with wonder...Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.
Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.
The grandeur or mystery of being is not a particular puzzle to the mind, as, for example, the cause of volcanic eruptions. We do not have to go to the end of reasoning to encounter it. Grandeur or mystery is something with which we are confronted everywhere and at all times. Even the very act of thinking baffles our thinking.
God in Search of Man, p. 46-47
God follows me everywhere,
Weaves a net of glances around me,
Dazzles my blind back like a sun.
God follows me everywhere like a forest.
My lips are constantly astonished, heartfelt-mute,
Like a child stumbling upon an ancient shrine.
God follows me everywhere like a shudder.
I yearn for rest, but within me sounds the call: "Come!
See how visions linger in the streets."
I stroll about my thoughts like a mystery,
Down a long corridor through the world,
And sometimes high above I see the faceless face of God.
God follows me in trams, in cafes–
Oh, only with the backs of my pupils can I see
How mysteries arise, how visions transpire!
Essential Writings, p. 93