Student, Yeshivat Maharat
New York
A Halakhic Perspective

How did you first encounter Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work?

I attended the Toronto Heschel School in Toronto, Canada. The school believed in integrated subjects – my art classes were influenced by my limmudei kodesh (holy studies). This framework – inspired by Heschel’s radical amazement with the world in its entirety – is most likely why I became the person I am today.

How did Heschel influence your life, thinking, and/or work? What of Heschel lives in you?

My undergraduate thesis was on Heschel, so I have much to say. Here are two pieces I wrote on his yahrzheits (the anniversary of a death):

I first encountered Heschel in JTS Prozdor, a fantastic program for high school students. Some teachers and the other students mentioned Heschel, so I went and got a copy of God in Search of Man. I don’t know how much of it I read at the time, but when I reread it a couple of decades later, I was utterly shocked because so much of what I think as my essence was what I had read in Heschel. He shaped the way I see life. I absorbed the first part of the book into the very fiber of my being, but the rest of the book was completely new to me re-reading as an adult. Here is this thinker whose words shaped the essence of how I think about Judaism, how I think about life, the way I am as a human being, the way I am as a Jew, as a rabbi and a teacher.

The pieces that most appealed to me explored ultimate questions—how much human beings must strive to meet God, how we can think deeply amid all the busyness of life. I see these ideas in who I am as a person, in my vocation, and in my hobbies. I am someone who spends a great deal of time in nature. This is part of God’s Torah. For me, the field guide to the birds of Puerto Rico is almost as much Torah as the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud), or the Book of Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) in the Bible. There’s something fantastic and wondrous about nature. This also emerges in my love of travel, because I’m going to places and seeing the world and societies as other people have shaped them.

Within the university, I run a Muslim-Jewish student dialogue group. Since October 7, I have been astonished by the Muslim alumni who have called to say they are thinking about me and they’re praying for peace. I don’t know how much I specifically knew of Heschel’s involvement in interfaith work, but the message I took is that human beings are human beings at the core, and we all think about the same things and struggle with the same things. This shared humanity was what I was striving for in my dialogue group so that the Muslim and Jewish students would know how much they share.

I am starting work on a commentary of Exodus. In a recent course I taught on Exodus, the students were surprised that the book continued after the Decalogue (Ten Commandments). Why does the book of Exodus keep on going? Wouldn’t the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) be an appropriate culmination of yetziat Mitzrayim (the Exodus from Egypt)? The story continues with a description of how the Tabernacle is to be built and then returns to the details a second time by describing how the Tabernacle was built. God took up a presence in the Tabernacle, and God’s presence was felt by the community. These details highlight a Heschel connection. Religion is not just the top three inches of a person, not just in the mind and in thought. We must reach out and work to bring God’s presence into the world.

Heschel wrote in God in Search of Man:

The Bible is a seed, God is the sun, but we are the soil. Every generation is expected to bring forth new understanding and new realization.

I’ve taught this in class, and for students it opens their eyes. It’s a new way of thinking, a new way of understanding the religious texts that we study. Scripture is at the center, but we all come to Scripture through different paths.

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
Houston, Texas
A Christian Perspective

Transcribed from an interview

I consider Heschel one of the religious giants of the 20th century, and it’s probably worth noting here that I’m a Unitarian Universalist. My dad is a secular Jew from the Jewish socialist tradition, and my mom’s family was connected to the Christian socialist tradition—one of my grandparents grew up in the Amana Colonies. When they got together, they joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation because they were in the Midwest and there wasn’t a progressive Jewish community that they felt comfortable in. My brother and I were raised as Unitarian Universalists, and I became a minister. Heschel was just one of those people, like Martin Buber or Arthur Waskow, who was just around in the background of my early life. 

My deeper engagement with Heschel came through my engagement with African-American religious studies. Prior to joining the clergy, I earned a PhD from Harvard in American Studies, and over the years I have held a couple of nonresidential fellowships in African American studies. I have had the opportunity to engage with many people—like Albert Raboteau (professor of religion at Princeton University)—who were deeply influenced by Heschel.  

My congregation, First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Houston Texas, is doing a yearlong program looking at some of the spiritual giants of the 20th century. I selected Rabateau’s book American Prophets as a guidepost for determining whom we might explore. He dedicates a whole chapter to Heschel. We ended up focusing on Heschel in September 2023. 

This program has many different elements. I give a sermon once a month on one of the spiritual giants, then we have a book discussion group that meets twice. For Heschel, we read Man’s Quest for God. We had a workshop that was led by a rabbi and a Jewish member of our congregation. I was impressed by the level of response. I thought we would have about 40 people engaged in the programs throughout the course of the month, and we had almost double that. 

Reflecting upon my personal connection to Heschel, I am struck by his civil rights activism and engagement across communities of faith. I look to the incredible speech he gave at the Conference of Religion and Race (where he met King for the first time) as a model. 

Heschel was going to host King for a seder in 1968 right before King was assassinated. That loss continues today. Maybe if King had lived even just a little bit longer, and there had been an even deeper connection between the two of them, perhaps it could have added more resources for us to navigate the complicated relationships that sometimes exist between the Jewish and African American communities. Heschel provided a connection between his experiences in the Holocaust with the civil rights struggle and Jim Crow.  Fifty years later, we're in a place where dialogue is so difficult, and I celebrate Heschel who relished those moments and found many ways to be in conversation.  

Rabbi Emeritus, Beit T’shuvah
California
A Jewish Perspective

Transcribed from an Interview

I “met” Rabbi Heschel in 1987, when the prison rabbi where I was incarcerated, Rabbi Mel Silverman, introduced me to him through the Carl Stern interview. I immediately knew that Rabbi Heschel understood me and knew me in ways I hadn't even realized that I didn't know myself. That began 36 years of learning, immersing myself, and listening to the words of Rabbi Heschel. I was introduced to Rabbi Heschel at a moment when I was desperate and willing to change my life. I changed everything about myself. I got out of prison, and I finished my undergraduate degree in 1995.

In the Garden of Eden story, where it says, “God calls Adam and Adam hid.” By immersing myself in Torah, I realized how many times God had been calling me throughout my life. I sat in my prison cell and cried like a baby. That was the beginning of my relationship with Rabbi Heschel. When I was released, I was able to work at Beit T’shevua, a non-sectarian, Jewish-based residential recovery center in Los Angeles. I began leading Shabbat services and doing Torah study. I led an ethics group using Pirkei Avot and Rabbi Heschel. Rabbi Heschel informed everything I did, which led me to rabbinic school.

After I was ordained from American Jewish University, I became the rabbi of Bet Teshuva, and we had a Heschel group that met every week for people in recovery. Pieces of Rabbi Heschel helped and impacted their recovery. Rabbi Heschel was talking about the recovery of our soul, the recovery of our essence, the recovery of the self we were created to be, in the words of Thomas Merton.

Every Friday night when I would do services, I would begin the service with an opening quote from Rabbi Heschel. Rabbi Heschel’s writing is deeply connected to God. People experiencing addiction who can’t believe or whose belief in God was stunted need to have a belief in a greater power to get beyond their self-centeredness and the selfishness of addiction.

He was a visionary. I look to his 1971 essay, “In Search of Exultation,” where Heschel wrote about the challenge of drug addiction:

We have a major curse in American today, the epidemic of drug addiction. Sometimes I have a strange feeling that this problem may be a blessing in the form of a curse. Perhaps this will wake us up to discover that we have gone the wrong way.

Rabbi Heschel, for me, always went to the core of the problem, and the core is always inside humans. His main teaching for me is radical amazement; the greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions and mental clichés. Every day, I close my eyes and open them up again to see the world anew.

Temple Beth Zion
Brookline, Massachusetts
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I encountered Heschel’s work as a little kid. Growing up in South America, Heschel was an intrinsic part of the teachings. Most of his books have been translated into Spanish, and I still have them in my library. My father, Rabbi Angel Kreiman-Brill (z”l), was one of the first two graduates of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano and a student of Rabbi Marshall Meyer (z”l). Heschel's teachings were so embedded in the teaching I grew up with that I remember being very surprised when I learned in my 20s that the "palace of time" from the book The Sabbath was not in the Torah. For a long time (and perhaps still) my Judaism was fully shaped by Heschel’s writing, without even knowing.

How did Heschel and his thinking inspire your work, religious life, or civic engagement?

Heschel’s thinking was/is the base of my religious practice and the basis of my social justice engagement as a religious obligation. A few things come to mind:

My relationship to prayer, especially to the tension/relation between keva (straightforward prayer) and kavanah (the intention behind prayer). I wrote my final paper for rabbinical school on that question and I have applied this question not only in religious practice and prayer but beyond in my teaching and my own practice.

Heschel’s activism, as a religious man and in response to the teachings of the prophets, is perhaps at the center of my activism (through the teachings of Rabbi Marshal T. Meyer). I see in social justice activism a religious obligation, and that is at the center of my rabbinate.

The Sabbath (which I read first in Spanish) shaped my understanding of Shabbat from early age.

Lastly my relationship with God, as a seeker. I am searching for God at all times. As a student of Rabbi Art Green, I use the concept of seeker; I believe that Rabbi Green’s teachings are also influenced by Heschel.

I do not know how/if I would be a committed and searching Jew, let alone a healing-oriented rabbi, without Dr. Heschel. Though I was raised in a loving, observant home, and my parents (a Conservative rabbi and rebbetzin) were true “disciples” of Heschel (my mother kept The Sabbath and other Heschel books in her night table for decades), it was my own encounter with Heschel’s writings as an adolescent and young adult that challenged me to pray with self-evaluation, searching, praise, and wonder; to both uplift and spiritually ground my Shabbat; and to merge my Jewish particular practice of Rites with my also Jewish universalist pursuit of Rights. In many of Dr. Heschel’s precious words come to mind; let me cite just three quotes related, I feel, to these areas of Prayer, Shabbat, and Social Justice:

 When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

—God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

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.

—The Sabbath

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

Fifty years after Rabbi Heschel’s death, finding ourselves in a violently self-destructive, hate-saturated, and dangerously fragmented society and world, I think of these prescient words:

Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of honor is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of honor.

—God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

In 1957, only after I accepted the honor of leading High Holy Day services at the seminary synagogue, did I realize I’d be alone—no family, no friends, no meal plans! I knew my family in Baltimore would be disappointed, but I felt, since it was my final year of rabbinical school at JTS, it was time to experience a rabbinic position and responsibility. Nevertheless, as I headed to shop for yom tov–type food, my mood and spirits were low. 

When I returned to my room, the phone was ringing. It was an invitation to come for dinner erev Rosh Hashanah at the home of my favorite teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel (z”l). I accepted with joy and excitement. The mitzvah and importance of hachnasat orchim was forever etched in my heart, and it was an evening I’ve never forgotten. 

I must confess there is another reason it turned out to be the sweetest, most wonderful Rosh Hashanah ever.  A Ramah friend Barbara Goldsmith Levin had promised to introduce me to her new roommate in the Joint Program and said they’d be coming to JTS on Rosh Hashanah. When I met Barbara’s roommate, our eyes locked for a moment, there was an appropriate introduction after, we sat and talked for hours, and, as they say, the rest is history. As I write this 65 years later, I’ve never forgotten the best yontif of my life! How could one ever top receiving an invitation from a brilliant scholar, my most unforgettable professor; experiencing the excitement of leading a most distinguished congregation (the seminary faculty and community); and meeting my bashert, the love of my life, Kay Kantor Pomerantz, now a recognized Jewish educator, author, the mother of our four extraordinary children, and savta to our grandchildren and first great grandchild.

Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV) emerged as a pivotal organization during the Vietnam War, bringing together a diverse group of religious leaders and laypeople who shared deep concerns about the escalating conflict. Heschel was one of the notable figures playing a crucial role in CALCAV’s founding. He worked with Rev. John Bennett (president, Union Theological Seminary), John Berrigan (Jesuit priest), Rev William Sloane Coffin (chaplain, Yale University), Pastor Richard Neuhaus (St John the Evangelist Church, Brooklyn), and David Hunter (Deputy General Secretary, National Council of Churches). His moral authority and commitment to social justice were instrumental in shaping CALCAV’s mission. Together, they provided a unified voice, transcending religious boundaries, and advocating for peace amidst the turbulent backdrop of the Vietnam War.

It was under CALCAV’s auspices that Martin Luther King delivered his 1967 speech at Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam.”

Transcription

May 29, 45

Dear Professor Finkelstein:

I wish to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of May 24 and to accept herewith the invitation to join the faculty of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

In accepting this great task and high distinction I am fully aware of the responsibility it implies.

אֲנִי מִתְפַּלֵּל שֶׁלֹּא תֶאֱרַע תַּקָלָה עַל יָדִי

I pray that no mishap should occur on my account¹

I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Cordially yours,

Abraham Heschel

1. This quote is taken from Mishnah Berakhot 4:2. Rabbi Neḥunya ben Hakana would say this blessing upon entering and leaving the study hall. ↩︎