What does it mean to "witness" God?
To Be a Jew - What Is it? -Heschel
Who is a Jew? A witness to the transcendence and presence of God; a person in whose life Abraham would feel at home, a person for whom Rabbi Akiva would feel deep affinity, a person of whom the Jewish martyrs of all ages would not be ashamed.
Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Who is a Jew? A person in travail with God’s dreams and designs; a person to whom God is a challenge, not an abstraction. he is called upon to know of God’s stake in history; to be involved in the sanctification of time and in building of the Holy Land; to cultivate passion for justice and the ability to experience the arrival of Friday evening as an event.
Who is a Jew? A person who knows how to recall and to keep alive what is holy in our people’s past and to cherish the promise and the vision of redemption in the days to come.
A Time for Renewal -Heschel
There is a passion that animates the Jewish soul: a craving for ultimate meaning. Sacred and precious as it is to fight for our people living in dignity and security, the questions that vex young people are: What is the ultimate meaning of living in security and dignity? What direction should determine our way of living? What values to cherish? What qualities to cultivate?
I believe that the ultimate meaning of existence is to be a religious witness.
Why a witness? Because the reestablishment of the state of Israel is an unprecedented incredible event in man’s spiritual history. Its sheer existence is an exclamation of the power of the Jewish spirit over the chaos of history. Those who are present at the unfolding of such a marvel must bear witness to the world, to generations to come.
What do I mean by a religious witness? Compassion for God and reverence for man, celebration of holiness in time, sensitivity to the mystery of being a Jew, sensitivity to the presence of God in the Bible.
(1) Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. (2) An angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. (3) Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?” (4) When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.” (5) And He said, “Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. (6) I am,” He said, “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
If Religion is About Witnessing God,
Why Do We Have Rituals and Principles of Faith?
Man in Search of God, pages 162-163 -Heschel
How can we be sure that oneness is really a way of God? How do we presume to know what is beyond the mystery?...
Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited.
Something is asked of us. But what? The ultimate question that stirs our soul is anonymous, powerful, yet ineffable…
In moments of insight we are called to return. But how does one return? What is the way to Him? We all sense the grandeur and the mystery. But who will tell us how to answer the mystery?...
Man does not live by insight alone; he is in need of a creed, of dogma, of expression, of a way of living. Insights are not a secure possession; they are vague and sporadic. They are like divine sparks, flashing up before us and becoming obscure again, and we fall back into a darkness “almost as black as that in which we were before.” The problem is: How to communicate those rare moments of insight to all hours of our life?... How to convey our insights to others and to unite in a fellowship of faith?
- Describe a way in which a Jewish ritual helps bring the awesomeness of experiencing God into our regular lives.
- Imagine that you have experienced God through an incredible ordeal (e.g., surviving the Holocaust, witnessing the birth of the State of Israel, nearly dying on an operating-room table). You want to share that feeling of revelation with your grandchildren. What type of ritual can you create that will help your grandchildren "bear witness" to your revelation?