Essential Writings, pg. 93
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!
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pg. 258
Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.
Moral Grandeur & Spiritual Audacity, pg. 259
Prayer serves many aims. It serves to save the inward life from oblivion. It serves to alleviate anguish. It serves to partake of God’s mysterious grace and guidance. Yet, ultimately, prayer must not be experienced as an act for the sake of something else. We pray in order to pray. Prayer is a perspective from which to behold, from which to respond to, the challenges we face. Man in prayer does not seek to impose his will upon God; he seeks to impose God’s will and mercy upon himself. Prayer is necessary to make us aware of our failures, backsliding, transgressions, sins. Prayer is more than paying attention to the holy. Prayer comes about as an event. It consists of two inner acts: an act of turning and an act of direction. I leave the world behind as well as all interests of the self. Divested of all concerns, I am overwhelmed by only one desire: to place my heart upon the altar of God.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pg. 262-263
"Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow forces that destroy the promise, the hope, the vision."
Between God and Man, pg. 194
“What is a mitzvah? A prayer in the form of a deed. And to pray is to sense His presence. 'In all thy ways thou shalt know Him.' Prayer should be a part of all our ways. It does not have to always be on our lips; it must always be on our minds, in our hearts."
The Insecurity of Freedom, pg. 255
The only way we can discuss prayer is on the basis of self-reflection, trying to describe what has happened to us in a rare and precious moment of prayer. The difficulty of self-reflection consists in the fact that what is given to us is only a recollection. You cannot, of course, analyze the act of prayer while praying. To worship God means to forget the self; an extremely difficult, though possible, act. What takes place in a moment of prayer may be described as a shift of the center of living – from self-consciousness to self-surrender. This implies, I believe, an important indication of the nature of man. Prayer begins as an “it-He” relationship. I am not ready to accept the ancient concept of prayer as dialogue. Who are we to enter a dialogue with God? The better metaphor would be to describe prayer as an act of immersion, comparable to the ancient Hebrew custom of immersing oneself completely in the waters as a way of self-purification to be done over and over again. Immersion in the waters! One feels surrounded, touched by the waters, drowned in the waters of mercy. In prayer the “I” becomes an “it”. This is the discovery: what is an “I” to me is, first of all and essentially, an “it” to God. If it is God’s mercy that lends eternity to a speck of being which is usually described as a self, then prayer begins as a moment of living as an “it” in the presence of God. The closer to the presence of Him, the more obvious becomes the absurdity of the “I”. The “I” is dust and ashes. “I am dust and ashes,” says Abraham; then he goes on in dialogue to argue with the Lord, about saving the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. How does Moses at the burning bush respond to the call to go to the people and to bring to them the message of redemption? “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh…”
Susannah Heschel, Intro to Essential Writings
A journalist once asked my father why he had come to a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. “I am here because I cannot pray," my father told him. Confused and a bit annoyed, the journalist asked him, "What do you mean, you can't pray so you come to a demonstration against the war?" And my father replied, "Whenever I open the prayerbook, I see before me images of children burning from napalm." Indeed, we forfeit the right to pray, my father said, if we are silent about the cruelties committed in our name by our government. In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible. How dare we come before God with our prayers when we commit atrocities against the one image we have of the divine: human beings.
What is it, after all, to pray? "Prayer must never be a citadel for selfish concerns but rather a place for deepening concern over other people's plight." Rather than making us feel reassured, relaxed, and self-satisfied, "prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive.” Subversive, that is, of our callousness and indifference - for the opposite of good, my father writes, is not evil, but indifference. To be religious is never to be callous or indifferent, never to be self-satisfied; looking at the world from God's perspective means living in the prophetic tradition: to give voice to those who live in silent agony, to eradicate injustice, to emulate God's compassion for human beings.
God in Search of Man, pg. 178-179
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, pg. 184-185
If revelation was a moment in which God succeeded in reaching man, then to try to describe it exclusively in terms of optics or acoustics, or to inquire was it a vision or was it a sound? was it forte or piano? would be even more ludicrous than to ask about the velocity of "the wind that sighs before the dawn." Of course, the prophets claimed to have seen, to have heard. But that kind of seeing and hearing cannot be subjected to psychological or physiological analysis. An analysis of the poet's ability to hear the wind sigh would have no relevance to our understanding of the poem. Did the prophet claim to have encountered God in the way in which he met one of his contemporaries or in the way in which Aristotle met Alexander the Great?
If revelation were only a psycho-physical act, then it would be little more than a human experience, an event in the life of man. Yet just as a work of sculpture is more than the stone in which it is carved, so is revelation more than a human experience. True, a revelation that did not become known by experience would be like a figure carved in the air. Still its being a human experience is but a part of what really happened in revelation, and we must, therefore, not equate the event of revelation with man's experience of revelation.
The nature of revelation, being an event in the realm of the ineffable, is something which words cannot spell, which human language will never be able to portray. Our categories are not applicable to that which is both within and beyond the realm of matter and mind. In speaking about revelation, the more descriptive the terms, the less adequate is the description. The words in which the prophets attempted to relate their experiences were not photographs but illustrations, not descriptions but songs. A psychological reconstruction of the prophetic act is, therefore, no more possible than the attempt to paint a photographic likeness of a face on the basis of a song. The word "revelation" is like an exclamation; it is an indicative rather than a descriptive term. Like all terms that express the ultimate, it points to its meaning rather than fully rendering it. "It is very difficult to have a true conception of the events at Sinai, for there has never been before nor will there ever be again anything like it."(Maimonides, Guide II:33) "We believe," says Maimonides, "that the Torah has reached Moses from God in a manner which is described in Scripture figuratively by the term 'word,' and that nobody has ever known how that took place except Moses himself to whom that word reached." (Maimonides, Commentary on Mishnah Sanhedrin X:8)
We must not try to read chapters in the Bible dealing with the event at Sinai as if they were texts in systematic theology. Its intention is to celebrate the mystery, to introduce us to it rather than to penetrate or to explain it. As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.
God in Search of Man, pg. 46-47
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. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. 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, just as every intelligible fact is, by virtue of its being a fact, drunk with baffling aloofness. Does not mystery reign within reasoning, within perception, within explanation? Where is the self-understanding that could unfurl the marvel of our own thinking, that could explain the grace of our emptying the concrete with charms of abstraction? What formula could explain and solve the enigma of the very fact of thinking? Ours is neither thing nor thought but only the subtle magic blending of the two.
What fills us with radical amazement is not the relations in which everything is embedded but the fact that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all."
Who is Man, pg. 52-53
What is the meaning of my being? ...My quest - man's quest - is not for a theoretical knowledge about myself. Another discovery of a universal law in nature will not answer my problem. Nor is it simply a striving to extend the length of my life span into an afterlife. What I look for is not how to gain a firm hold of myself and on life, but primarily how to live a life that would deserve and evoke an eternal Amen. It is not simply a search for certitude (though that is implied in it), but for personal relevance, for a degree of compatibility; not an anchor of being but a direction of being. It is not enough for me to be able to say "I am"; I want to know who I am, and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
No Religion is an Island, pg. 264
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel, p. xviii
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
p. 11
The seventh day is like a palace in time with a kingdom for all. It is not a date but an atmosphere. Is it not a different state of consciousness but a different climate; it is as if the appearance of all things somehow changed. The primary awareness is one of our being within the Sabbath rather than of the Sabbath being within us... The difference between the Sabbath and all other days is not to be noticed in the physical structure of things, in their spatial dimension. Things do not change on that day. There is only a difference in the dimension of time, in the relation of the universe to G-d.
He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil...He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self. (p. 13)
The tyranny of things of space is all that brings us to the desire of having.
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
The reasons that graven images are forbidden is not that God has no image, but rather because God has just one image: the image of every breathing and living human being.
“At the end of days, evil will be conquered by the One; in historic times, evils must be conquered one by one.”
"Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society."
