On the evening of March 25, 1968, 10 days before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared at the 68th annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, where he was introduced by Abraham Joshua Heschel. The event took place at the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake in the Sullivan County Catskills.

Heschel’s remarks start at the 3:30 mark.

Digitzed Audio at the JTS Library

JTS. Institutional Recordings, The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, New York, R.G. 42, (Box 79, AV_0898). Digitization and cataloging funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Additional Text:

Transcript of Heschel and King’s remarks

This march, organized by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, took place on February 6, 1968. In addition to Heschel and King who are at the center, others identified in the picture include Ralph Abernathy (next to King), Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath (with Torah), and Rabbi Everett Gendler (far right).

The Fall 1973 edition of Conservative Judaism was dedicated to the legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel. The issue included articles by Arthur Green, Louis Finkelstein, Edward K. Kaplan, Judith Hershlag Muffs, and Fritz Rothschild, among others.

A student and colleague of Heschel’s, Fritz Alexander Rothschild (b. October 4, 1919; d. March 7, 2009) was the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Professor of Philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Rothschild wrote Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, the first introduction to the thought and writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

He like Heschel was born in Europe and fled before the war. Rothschild escaped to Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) in 1938 and came to the United States in 1948. He was ordained at JTS in 1955 and received his doctorate under Heschel’s supervision in 1968. He was a longtime member of the JTS faculty.

When Pope Paul VI issued the the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, otherwise known as Nostre Aetate, it fundamentally shifted the relationship between Catholics and Jews. This process began under his predecessor, Pope John XXIII. Throughout the deliberations, Heschel was a key voice for Jewish values and concerns. When the Heschels visited Rome in the 1970s, they met with Pope Paul VI.

Additional Text:

Wide Horizons: Abraham Joshua Heschel, AJC, and the Spirit of Nostra Aetate

In Our Time: AJC and Nostre Aetate

Heschel gave the eulogy at his friend theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s funeral in 1971. They had an intense, long-lasting friendship

Additional Text:

Notes on a Friendship: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr

An Unlikely Friendship on Seminary Row

When a Broader Religious Pluralism Began to Flower

Masorti Olami
Israel, born in Uruguay
A Jewish Perspective

I have not met Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel personally, but from the moment I joined the Masorti Movement in 1974, I started to connect with his philosophy through his disciple Rabbi Marshall Meyer. During those years, a dictatorial government ruled in Argentina, led by a military junta that killed and tortured thousands of people, while many went missing without explanations. The Military Junta had a clear antisemitic bias. It was in that context that I met Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

In a society where fear and terror prevailed, very few voices dared to speak up. One of them was that of Rabbi Marshall Meyer, who had been Heschel’s secretary. Immediately after the establishment of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, Marshall devoted his time to translating Heschel’s work into Spanish and teaching Heschel’s philosophy in his classes. That is how I grew up, hearing the words of Heschel in the voice of Marshall: his relentless fight for human rights, his struggle against oppression and in favor of interreligious dialogue. He fought at the forefront, fearlessly, to show the Godly presence through his acts in favor of life. Marshall used to say that Heschel was a modern prophet.

Rabbinical models such as Rabbis Heschel and Marshall inspired my decision to become a rabbi—a rabbi who takes part in “political” topics, who fights for ethical behavior by the government and society, who gets involved and commits.

Undoubtedly, Heschel is one of the philosophers who had, and still has, a major influence in my life. What has Heschel’s influence been? First, his perception of man, his vision of the role of man in the world and his bond with God. Heschel said, “The supreme message of the Bible and the prophets of Israel is that God takes man seriously.” And “I think that God seeks man more than man seeks God.”

His famous phrase: “When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama, I felt that my legs prayed,” taught me that prayers could translate into action.

Marshall Meyer said very realistically:

Rabbi Heschel’s whole life was a prayer pronounced with commitment, love, compassion, and a perception of the final sense of history. The Jewish perception of humane, genuine and profound universalism.

Another idea that marked my vision of Judaism that came from Heschel is the notion of sanctifying life:

The image and similarity to God is not enough to grant immortality to man, but to attain sanctity.

Lastly, this paragraph by Heschel that represents how I view our role today:

This is the time to scream. We are ashamed of being human. We are embarrassed to be called religious, when religion has failed to keep alive the image of God in man’s mind. We see what is written on the wall, but we are too illiterate to understand what it means . . . we have imprisoned God in our temples and in our ‘slogans,’ and now the word of God is dying at our lips.

Shelter Rock Jewish Center
Roslyn, New York
A Jewish Perspective

I never met Professor Heschel in person. In fact, we just missed each other: he died in the winter of 1972 and I only began my studies at JTS in the fall of 1974. But even so I can say that he was responsible both for my choice of JTS for rabbinical school and for my choice of the rabbinate, and particularly the congregational rabbinate, as my life’s profession.

As I moved closer to organized Jewish life and to Jewish observance, I was all over the map: I worked at one of the UAHC summer camps and taught in a Reform Religious School, but on Shabbat I davened in an super-traditional shtibl. I wore a tallis koton under my shirt, but walked around bareheaded in the street. In a strange inversion of my parents’ custom, I kept strictly kosher only outside of the house. I owned a pair of bar-mitzvah tefillin (the purchase was, as I recall, requisite), but I had no idea how to adjust the head strap to make it fit my grownup-sized head. My rabbinic models were both Conservative rabbis: Rabbi Max Arzt and Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, both now of blessed memory. But I was still smarting from being refused admission to the Hebrew high school in the synagogue I thought of as my own because my parents weren’t actually members, just non-members who sent me to Hebrew school there, made my bar mitzvah there, and paid a fortune for non-member seats on the High Holidays. So I was the embodiment of the wandering Jew: at home everywhere and nowhere.

And then I discovered Heschel and things began to clarify. First, I came across God in Search of Man in a second-hand bookshop in North Adams, Massachusetts. I was confused (there were whole chapters I didn’t understand at all), but also intrigued. A few months later, I noticed a copy of Man’s Quest for God in, of all places, my barbershop on Queens Blvd. in Forest Hills. When I asked the barber why it was there among all the magazines, he told me that someone had left it there and not returned for it. I was free to take it if I wished. I did take it, and I read it through in a day or two. I had no idea at the time, but in retrospect I see myself being drawn forward in a specific direction. And then, in the fall of my sophomore year in college, I bought a copy of The Prophets, published for some reason in those days in two volumes. I was still reading the first volume when I saw in the paper one morning that its author had died the day before.

I didn’t attend the funeral. Why would I have? But Heschel’s death only made it seem more urgent that I read even more intently; since I was obviously not going to meet the man in person, all I could do was try to know the author through his work. Reading that book, Heschel’s The Prophets, was transformational for me. I had just begun to understand how the Tanakh was put together, which books went where, which were the earlier works and which the later. I was at the very beginning of my studies, and in every imaginable way. But here was a work that showed me—not told me or suggested to me, but showed me graphically and profoundly—just what it could mean to live a life immersed in the literary heritage of Israel. Heschel seemed to know these people—these ancient prophets whose words he appeared not only to know inside-out, but to be able to look through into the souls of their speakers. He wrote about Isaiah, about Amos, especially about Jeremiah (I thought) as though he knew them. Or, even more amazingly, as though he knew them intimately, as though he and they were—impossibly—friends.

More to the point was the God-talk in that book: Heschel was able to paint a portrait (an aniconic one, of course) of God using the chapters of the prophets’ visions and oracles as his paintbox. It wasn’t only God’s prophets that he appeared to know as contemporaries and intimates; it was the God they served whom Heschel seemed to know personally. And that concept of Friend God, as opposed to Judge God or Sovereign God, appealed mightily to me. I read the second volume (much more difficult, I thought, than the first). Then I read both books a second time. Eventually, I set them aside: I was a college sophomore and was drowning in my “real” reading assignments. Reading Heschel and, particularly, The Prophets, seemed to me at the time mere happenstance. But when I think about things after all these many years, I can see that some seed had been planted, that some germ of an idea had taken root somehow deep within. It took a while for that idea to make itself fully manifest to me (how that happened would be a different story), but that book—almost more than any other—set me on the course that eventually became my life. 

The Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible,
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, Texas
A Christian Perspective

I encountered the writings of Rabbi Abraham Heschel during my formation at Howard University School of Divinity, some 30 years ago. It stays with me. I carry with me, in part because of the gift of this volume, a notion of Sabbath that transcends time and the human person while remaining tethered through its umbilicus to the Seventh Day. Rav Heschel's teaching, his torah, to me was the sacredness of time and his particular gift to me, to his readers, to the world was an invitation to Sabbath keeping that was at once thoroughly Jewish but also universally available—and more than that, necessary for our survival. The challenge of surrendering to that Sabbath, itself a freedom from things and obligations lays ever before me as I return to his words and enter the timeless space of the Sabbath to discover anew that it is, within and without, as he learned from his father’s reading of the Zohar, the very Name of God.