Author, Poet, Theater Director
Jerusalem, Israel

My “dialogue” with Heschel, particularly with his “Shabbat” crosses my novel Snapshots, presenting a radical reading of the Sukkah and Shmita commandements. I regularly presented his reading of the “cathedral of the Sabbath,” a term he probably borrowed from Bialik’s important essay (translated to German by the young Gershom Scholem) “Halacha and Aggadah,” and his presentation of the unique Jewish foundation of the “cathedral in time.” I read it with my students at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, in my lectures on Sukka and Shmita in a seminar led by the poet David Shapiro.

I often juxtaposed Heschel’s thoughts originally presented to the Yiddish society in New York after World War II to Heidegger’s essays, written at the same time concerning space and building, with a palpable contrast in defining the metaphysical dimension.

Heschel’s attitude toward Zionism, hinted at in this book, interested me in my formulation of a complex attitude to the Topos—Zion, in the actual phase of Jewish thinking from within sovereignty and implantation. 

Castle in Time Orchestra
Israel
A Secular Israeli Perspective

Transcribed from an interview

As music students, my friend Shalev Ne’eman (co-artistic director of Castle in Time Orchestra) and I first encountered Abraham Joshua Heschel as we engaged many different ideas—creating a hybrid orchestra with classical instruments and a rhythm section including electric guitar and a computer, exploring the concept of time, and contrasting the intensity of the work week with the peace of Shabbat and the intersection of black culture with Jewish and Israeli life. Shalev found Heschel online while searching for the last of these. He saw this incredibly strong image of Heschel walking with Martin Luther King, Jr. And through this, we discovered The Sabbath.

Everything clicked suddenly: We were already working on a song about Shabbat. We started sampling his interviews and inserting them into a hip hop song. The project, which started as a performance, became bigger—a series of workshops on the Sabbath with Bet Avi Chai, a premiere, and then a huge question: What should we do? We decided, maybe naively, to create an orchestra. When selecting a name, we based it on The Sabbath: Castle in Time Orchestra (In Hebrew: Armon B’Zman). As a dancer and a composer, this name merged both the physical and the metaphysical—a castle is part of the material world and time is a different dimension. What is a place in time? Shabbat kept the Jewish people unified when they were exiled from Israel, and Shabbat was the place that they came back to. But more and more than the historical thing, I just love the poetics of it—how time can be a place. And then it also kind of like echoing and place refers to movement and the body and time. Shabbat can be a cure to modern society, this Jewish idea to give a resting day. 

If someone spoke about Shabbat in a very religious or specific way, I don’t think it would have touched me. But something about how Heschel’s poetic and relevant way of connecting spoke to me, igniting my thinking. 

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?
When I began to be observant, I was inspired by Heschel’s The Sabbath. Inspired by his walking out of JTS one day to pray with his feet, marching with Rev. King, I established an annual interfaith MLK-AJH Shabbat in 1998 and built a strong social action program in my congregation and community. His approach to Matan / Kabbalah Torah and The Prophets inspired my commitment to the evolution of Jewish law, practice, and justice as a reflection of our evolving understanding of Kabbalat Torah in my work on the Committee for Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS), in social action, and in my Jewish feminist writings and lecturing.

How did Heschel and his thinking inspire your work, religious life, or civic engagement?
Heschel inspired me in all aspects of my rabbinate, from my civic engagement to my personal theology and religious life, to my teaching. 

In civic engagement, his model inspired me not only to be active in justice issues but to build strong interfaith coalitions that worked together on issues of mutual concern for the Black, Muslim, East Asian, and Jewish communities. This coalition began early in my rabbinate in Westchester as I established the first interfaith black/Jewish Martin Luther King / Abraham Joshua Heschel Sabbath there during MLK weekend in lower Westchester in 1990. I initiated a similar program in Howard County, Maryland, beginning in 1998, that grew into a celebrated part of the Howard County Martin Luther King Weekend Holiday Commemoration, included an interfaith choir, and was attended by most elected and appointed officials, interfaith leaders, congregants of participating houses of worship, neighbors, and friends. This annual event, held in partnership with Black churches and held at my synagogue, Beth Shalom of Columbia, Maryland, laid the foundation for deeper interfaith relationship-building and transitioned to our award-winning Howard County Courageous Conversations, of which I was a founding clergy member with the leading Black minister in town, Rev. Turner, and in cooperation with the late great acolyte of Rev. King, Congressman Elijah Cummings.

I see myself as a Heschelian theologian, building upon his distinction between Matan Torah and Kabbalat Torah as a religious Jewish feminist and in my approach to halakhic development and change, as reflected in my teshuvot (responses) and other work for the CJLS.

What of Heschel lives in you?
Heschel lives on in me as I teach his story to my students of all ages, when we discuss the Holocaust, when we discuss where God is, and as we explore how to live the Sabbath as a temple of time. He lives on in me in my beliefs and my social and interfaith activism, as I expect our partners to stand by us as we stand by them. And he lives on in me, seeking to experience the wonder of creation each day.

Additional Text

Opening Remarks, Twentieth Anniversary, MLK-Heschel Shabbat

The Gates of Prayer Are Always Open

Rabbinical Assembly
Israel
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

As a student in The Rabbinical School in the late 1960s.

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

I was deeply inspired by the model of social activism that Rabbi Heschel brought to the JTS community. It helped that his views echoed my views. My wife and I were involved in anti–Vietnam war efforts, as was Rabbi Heschel. As I entered JTS, I knew that all graduating rabbis were obligated to serve as US military chaplains. Before my graduation, JTS canceled this obligation because of opposition to the war.  I met with Rabbi Heschel, and he encouraged me to honor my commitment to the chaplaincy. His view was that Jewish military personnel needed rabbis. Following his advice, I served for two years as a US Navy Chaplain with the Marine Corps and realized how necessary and valuable was my time with the Jewish members of my military community.

What of Heschel lives in you?

I honor Rabbi Heschel’s involvement with the non-Jewish community and his support for civil rights and the cause of Soviet Jewry, just to mention a few of his righteous acts. I have no doubt that my involvement in these same causes throughout my career were because of his influence upon me.

At Camp Ramah in the early 1970s and subsequently throughout my time at The Rabbinical School.

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

As the product of an Orthodox Yeshiva education, I never encountered Heschel in a serious way until being introduced to his thought at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, and then, of course, at JTS. “Revelation” as an idea to be explored or understood beyond the notion of “Torah MiSinai” was just not a part of my spiritual world. Neither was studying Midrash as a discipline ever considered to be “serious” Torah. Halakhah dominated all that I was taught. The lines between Midrash and written Torah text were completely and intentionally made invisible.

Heschel introduced to me the idea that the Torah itself was not to be understood literally, that the Torah’s recounting of the revelation at Sinai was, if understood literally, a dramatic subversion of the text, and that those chapters of Exodus describing the experience at Sinai were to be understood more as a painting than a “news report.” When I was introduced to that piece of writing by Heschel, it quite literally changed everything about my own understanding of Judaism, my religious life as a whole, and its direction going forward. It was as if my whole religious world had been challenged, in a good and positive (if earth-shattering) way.

What of Heschel lives in you?

The more I studied Heschel’s thought, the more I came to realize and appreciate that doubt is as irreducible a component of a religious life as faith is. If the intention of Torah is to celebrate the mystery of God and our relationship to God and God’s world, then it must surely be true that that celebration requires religious imagination, and imagination requires the freedom to think both within and outside of accepted norms and structures.

At this point in my life, after a pulpit career of 42 years and preaching to and teaching so many Jews, I cannot imagine how I could possibly have led a Jewish life with sustaining meaning if his words and thoughts were not a part of my everyday practice.

From God in Search of Man, Chapter 19 on “The Mystery of Revelation”:

We must not try to read chapters in the Bible dealing with the event at Sinai as if they were texts in systematic theology. Its intention is to celebrate the mystery, to introduce us to it rather than to penetrate it or explain it. As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is midrash.

Albany, New York
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

Though I knew from an early age that my mother had studied with Dr. Heschel, my first formal encounter with him was through an anthology of his writings given to me as a gift by my high school social studies teacher. Heschel’s ideas about prophecy, radical amazement, and communal responsibility, as well as the beauty of his writing, have inspired me for decades.

Additional Text:

The Aroma of Paradise

What Do We Make of the Nighttime Stars

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I first encoutered Heschel in United Synagogue Youth.

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

Heschel’s activism in the Civil Rights Movement, especially his presence in Selma, Alabama, was a powerful example to me. I wish I could say it motivated me directly to my engagement in interfaith and civil rights causes, but more accurately it was his impact on the non-Jews that I encountered in my rabbinate that inspired me to be that kind of rabbi. The activists I encountered always wanted to know if I knew him, did I hear him speak, did he influence me. If I wanted to be credible in my work toward societal justice, then it was essential that—across a generation and the gap between our adult lives—I had to make him one of my mentors. When I had the privilege of marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, many years later, I felt like my legs were in Heschel's minyan.

Additional Texts:

Cosmic Outrage

A Life to Emulate

Playing Dice with the Universe—Leviticus 8:8

Comfort, Comfort

This Is Not a Sermon

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I spent the year after high school studying in Jerusalem at Yeshivat HaMivtar (Brovenders), where I struggled with issues of religious doubt and observed the darker side of religious zealotry. Somehow I found a copy of Heschel’s Passion for Truth, and learned that there was a rich literature on these topics, especially on the danger of egotism found in elite settings like the Beit Midrash. I appreciated the Kotzker’s intolerance of hypocrisy and pride—it served as much needed tokheha (correction) for my incipient arrogance. And the hesed (compassion) of the Besht reminded me that kindness is the foundation of righteousness.

I returned to Heschel again in college when I studied the prophets as models of social criticism and used a Heschel quote as a frontispiece for my senior thesis on Brit Shalom, a bi-nationalist organization in Mandatory Palestine. In rabbinical school I was drawn to Torah min hashamayim and found appealing the idea that Talmudic sages stood for spiritual world views (even if historians doubted the reliability of such accounts). On the CJLS (Committee for Jewish Laws and Standards), I looked to Heschel’s The Sabbath to frame my responsum on electricity and Shabbat, and then returned to his “Patient as Person” address to the AMA when studying artificial intelligence. Of course we were all proud of Heschel’s social justice activism, but it was his writing that most moved me.

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

A 50-year legacy: Heschel symbolizes for me the importance of being deeply rooted in one’s own religious heritage while remaining wide open to finding friendship and meaning far from one’s own path. It’s not just that Heschel made alliances, but that he was open to being changed by others. It would have been easy for someone whose world was so thoroughly destroyed to turn inward and angry. What a remarkable model he established in the opposite direction!

What of Heschel lives in you?

The fact that his most memorable public actions came at the very end of his life. I look at him and wonder what spiritual opportunities await as I approach 60.

What constitutes being human, personhood? The ability to be concerned for other human beings . . . The truth of being human is gratitude, the secret of existence is appreciation, its significance is revealed in reciprocity. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish from lack of appreciation. Being human presupposes the paradox of freedom, the capacity to create events, to transcend the self.

—“Patient as Person,” Insecurity of Freedom

Additional Text:

Electricity and Shabbat

Artificial Intelligence

Bnai Torah Congregation
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I was first “introduced” to Heschel when my mother came home from a talk Heschel gave in 1963 at my synagogue. I was only 10 years old, but I have a vivid memory of my mother’s enthusiasm. She was from a rigid orthodox “yekke” family. That night she was exposed to a visionary, a philosopher, a freedom fighter, a humanist steeped in tradition. And she said: “One day, David, you will have to hear him.” I believe he renewed her sense of being Jewish in the post-Holocaust world.

In high school I read some Heschel and was exposed to his thought through teachers from JTS at my shul and Ramah. And I was alive and aware during the Vietnam War days and the struggles for civil rights. My own identity became renewed by the idea that Judaism and Jewish values and Jewish actions could be and should be brought to the streets, to the community, to the fight for social justice, freedom, and the deeper places where the spirit resided.

I met Rabbi Heschel in 1970 in the cafeteria at JTS long before my college or rabbinical school years. My teacher had brought me to NYC to pick up some work he had submitted to Heschel. One memory from that moment: this man of greatness was very interested in speaking to me and hearing about me.