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.

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

At age 50, I’d spent my adult life estranged from Judaism, but an impulse purchase of a new translation of the Torah drew me into a renewed quest for connection. The way into our foundational text was rocky, however. Who is the God who speaks to us from its pages? What is it that God most wants from us? I scoured the Judaica sections of bookstores seeking guidance. I found especially helpful the then–newly published book by Arthur Green Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. In it, he offers the following advice for beginning learners: "My own teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was a most gifted writer as well as a profound thinker. Go first to his God in Search of Man. Its opening section is the best introduction anywhere to understanding what it means to be a religious person and to be on a seeker's path." That was the clue that I needed. Green was absolutely right. I’ve been reading Heschel carefully ever since.

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel isn’t often recognized as a deep thinker about science, but he has profoundly shaped my outlook as a physicist.

When I read Heschel’s God in Search of Man, it feels as if it had been written especially for me, with the questions that a scientist and a modern would raise about our tradition. That doesn’t mean that it was straightforward to understand his answers to those questions. It has been an ongoing struggle, but I’ve always been confident that Heschel was addressing the issues that I cared most about.

Readers won’t miss his emphasis on the ineffable character of existence and on our responses of wonder and awe to the ineffable. But what is truly ineffable about our world? What is most deserving of our awe? One haiku-like sentence from Man Is Not Alone best sums up what I’ve learned from Heschel. “The world consists, not of things, but of tasks.” On first reading, the physicist in me rebels. How can the world be made of anything but things? But Heschel is being sly. Of course, there’s a valid point of view from which we can say that the world is made precisely of things. Heschel is profoundly respectful of what we can learn from the natural sciences. More important, however, is the aspect of the world in which human beings are agents, directing our energy toward fulfilling the tasks with which we are charged by the prophets—creating a world in which love of neighbor, stranger, and God govern all of our actions.

Heschel teaches us how to read the Torah for insight and guidance. “In the prophets the ineffable became a voice, disclosing that God is not a being that is apart and away from ourselves . . . but justice, mercy; not only a power to which we are accountable, but a pattern for our lives.” I no longer believe that science is the sole path toward knowledge of the world. For its material parts—yes, natural science offers the best way forward. But for that which is more real than the material world, Heschel showed me the path on which to walk.

What of Heschel lives in you?

Since retiring from my career of physics research and teaching, I’ve focused my activity on Heschel’s understanding of how Jewish thought complements the scientific project in giving a fuller account of our world. Alongside my private learning, I’m relearning Heschel’s writings with several havruta (small groups). As opportunities arise, I’m also sharing what I’ve learned with larger groups. In these small ways, I feel that I'm continuing one of Heschel's main projects: to share with modern Jews the depth and richness of Jewish thought, a sorely needed complement to the scientific worldview.

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.

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. 

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.