Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was a leader in the civil rights movement.^[1][2]
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907 as the youngest of six children of Moshe Mordechai Heschel and Reizel Perlow Heschel.^[3] He was descended from preeminent European rabbis on both sides of his family.
In late October 1938, when Heschel was living in a rented room in the home of a Jewish family in Frankfurt, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. He spent ten months lecturing on Jewish philosophy and Torah at Warsaw's Institute for Jewish Studies.^[4] Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe and Alexander Guttmann, later his colleague in Cincinnati, who secretly re-wrote his ordination certificate to meet American visa requirements.^[4]
Heschel believed that the teachings of the Hebrew prophets were a clarion call for social action in the United States and inspired by this belief, he worked for African Americans' civil rights and spoke out against the Vietnam War.^[9]

Each decade of his life represented a significant metamorphosis.

• At the age of ten, he was a Hasidic prodigy in Warsaw;
• at twenty, a modernist Yiddish poet leaving Vilna.
• The thirty-year-old Heschel was part of the spiritual resistance movement of Jewish intellectuals in Nazi Germany.
• Heschel at forty had recently arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, after spending most of the war years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
• Heschel at fifty was the author of a string of theological works – The Sabbath, Man Is Not Alone, Man's Question for God, and God in Search of Man – that place him in the first rank of American Jewish thinkers.
• At the age of sixty, Heschel was penning a theological response to the events of the Six Day War. At that stage of his life, he was one of the leading voices of conscience, interreligious dialogue, and spiritual awakening in American society, having also published two volumes of a monumental study of rabbinic theology, reworked his Berlin dissertation into The Prophets, and published a collection of his more popular articles entitled The Insecurity of Freedom.
• Five years later, having recently completed a study of Menahem Mendl of Kotzk, whose spirit had presided over his earliest years, Heschel died.

Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder, Michael Marmur

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

The Relationship Between Prayer and Social Justice
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.
Susannah Heschel, Intro to Essential Writings

Tikkun Olam
Heschel emphasized the idea of tikkun olam. Heschel believed that this charge, tikkun olam, “obligated each Jew to participate in this world’s affairs through what he labeled, in an inspired phrase paraphrasing Kierkegaard, a ‘leap of action.’”
In contrast to other Jewish thinkers at the time, Heschel felt that Judaism should get involved in politics, rather than stay away from it, and that the political arena was the perfect place to fulfill this duty. This, undoubtedly, led Heschel to participate in civil rights activism, protests against the Vietnam War, against Nuclear proliferation, and in awareness of the Holocaust and the safety of the State of Israel. It was in the face of possible nuclear war that Heschel, like so many during his time, started to wonder if humanity was “up to the task” to repair the world, or if it faced total annihilation.
During this time, Heschel wrote in his autobiography a recollection of the story of the Akeda, of the binding of Isaac:
Isaac was on his way his way to Mount Moriah with his father; then he lay on the alter bound, waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even faster; it actually sobbed in pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifted the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly the voice of the angel was heard: “Abraham, lay not thy hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God.” And here I, crying, broke out in tears. “Why are you crying?” asked the rabbi. “You know that Isaac was not killed.”
And I said to him, still weeping, “But Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?” The rabbi comforted me and calmed me, saying that an angel cannot come late.”
A nice moment, but Heschel concluded this story in his autobiography with the realization that: “An angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, may be.”
Angels in the classic understanding are extensions of God’s wishes; beings that can only obey the word of God, and when an angel comes, it comes when God says so, and thus cannot be late. But as Heschel noted, humanity—you and me—when it comes to doing the right thing—saving each other from poverty, violence, hunger, discrimination, intimidation—too often we come late. Too often we don’t hear what Heschel called the “call to action.” As Rabbi David Ellenson writes, “For Heschel, responsibility is not some abstract commitment. It is an urgent and relentless call, and if it remains unheeded, the implications are ominous indeed.”
excerpt from Michael Harvey

What is the Task of Humanity?
This is the decision which we have to make: whether our life is to be a pursuit of pleasure or an engagement for service. The world cannot remain a vacuum. Unless we make it an altar to God, it is invaded by demons. This is no time for neutrality. We Jews cannot remain aloof or indifferent. We, too, are either ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 75

There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.

The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 224-225

"Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society."

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."

The Connection Between Mitzvot (Commandments) and Prayer
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."

Radical Amazement
“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.”

Does Judaism Need Revelation?

• Revelation: To believe that God somehow communicates something to us that we otherwise would not have known
• Is there something that Jews need to learn from God about God?
  • For Heschel – revelation is a Divine act of God reaching toward humanity