Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of Jewish Thought, JTS 
New York, New York
A Jewish Perspective

I first encountered Heschel as a teenager. My Conservative synagogue in Philadelphia had an assistant rabbi named Nahum Waldman, who had the brilliant idea of taking the teens out of services and forming a discussion group about modern Jewish thought. I met Heschel, Kaplan, and Buber with a group of other teenagers. I concluded that the rabbi must have been as bored with services as we were. I often tell the story, which has a mythic air to it, that I opened God in Search of Man, where Heschel says, “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid” – and was convinced that he had must have been to my synagogue. 

Several years later, I was a reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian when Heschel came to speak at Penn. I covered the story, and I screwed up my courage, which was an effort because I was very shy, and asked if I could interview him in New York.  Months after I wrote about his speech at Penn, I drove up to New York, and knocked on the door of Heschel’s office at JTS. I will never forget the room. It was a tiny office that was full of books–not just on the shelves but piled high on the floor. There was barely room for our chairs. I spent an hour and three quarters with him and wrote up the story, which appeared in the Daily Pennsylvanian feature magazine. 

This interview changed my life. Heschel realized quickly that I had personal questions that I needed to ask, and he met me where I was and spoke to me from the heart. I walked into this meeting needing Heschel to prove to me that Jewish life and the life of the mind were worthwhile: that ideas matter; Judaism matters; that religion can make a difference in the world. By the time I walked out of his office, I had no doubt about these things.

I try to be there for students when they are talking to me in my office, as Heschel was for me.  Martin Buber wrote somewhere that you have to not only answer the questions that are asked by the person before you, you have to answer the questions that are not asked. Heschel  certainly did that when I sat before him.   

In the interview I asked:  where did you get the chutzpah to say that religion declined because it became irrelevant, oppressive, insipid and dull? You don’t exclude Judaism from this generalization, so you’re saying that the religion that many Jews are practicing is irrelevant. Where do you get the authority to say that? And first he tried to duck the question– he said that some people like vanilla ice cream, some people like chocolate ice cream. I replied, Rabbi Heschel, we’re not talking about ice cream. We’re talking about people’s lives. And then he said:  President Nixon thinks the war in Vietnam is justified, and I think it’s evil. Then he said something close to the following,  which I must confess I didn’t quote it exactly like this in the Daily Pennsylvanian piece, but this is what I remember:  “I am the heir to a great religious tradition. And as such it is not only my right, it is my duty to speak in the name of that tradition as best I can, knowing that other people will speak differently.”

That has meant everything to me. Heschel’s stance on civil rights was popular, but his leadership in the anti-war movement was extremely controversial. He wasn’t just saying, “on balance, I have concluded that the war is wrong.” Heschel said the war was evil.

When I became Chancellor Elect of JTS, we had to make a decision about the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy,  following the historic halakhic ruling by the Law Committee of Conservative Judaism. I Heschel’s words in my mind: I’m an heir to this religious tradition that I love. And as such I had not only the right, but the duty to speak in its name as best I could Heschel gave me the justification that I needed for taking on this enormous issue. I resist answering questions about “what would Rabbi Heschel do or say in our day about this or that matter?”   Because we can’t know what a person who passed away decades ago would do today. But Rabbi Wolfe Kelman said something to me that was very wise. He said that Heschel sometimes opened doors for people that he himself did not walk through. 

I belong to the generation of people who  tried to follow him, were inspired by his words and tried to take them further. 

My academic career has focused on understanding modern Judaism in terms of the challenges Jews faced and the responses major thinkers and “Jews in the pews” have made to those challenges.  I chose a historical perspective as opposed to a sociological one because I didn’t want to be an outsider to my own tradition, looking at figures like Heschel in terms that come from secular disciplines. The texts and thinkers I study are of personal importance to me. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Mordecai Kaplan often asked versions of the same questions that concern me by day and keep me up at night. Heschel influenced my career choice. And he changed my life.  Here was a man of great learning and immense piety, the author of many beautiful books who was also and an activist who put his learning into practice in pursuit of justice.

You ask:  What of Herschel does not live in me? I will never be as learned or pious or courageous as he was. I value Heschel’s teaching that we are not all prophets but there should be something of the prophet in every one of us. Heschel taught me that we’re not just here  to sit in shul or in the study hall. There is work to be done and we must be active doing that work in the world. Torah must lead to action. Heschel wanted us to take God seriously to take the study of Torah seriously and to take action in the world seriously. I got that from him at the age of twenty and it has remained fundamental to who I am and try to be. That’s an incredible gift for one person to give to another. I will be indebted to this man for as long as I live.

Connected Texts:

“Heschel Urges Festivity and Sense of Awe in World of ‘Tedium, Humdrum Inevitability.” The Daily Pennsylvanian. (2/26/1971).

“Miracles and a Shrug of the Shoulders.” 34th Street. (10/7/1971)

First Executive Director, Masorti Movement
Omer, Israel
A Jewish Perspective

I first encountered Herschel as a teenager in the Lincoln, Nebraska. Our rabbi, Harold Stern, had been Heschel’s secretary at JTS. He went on to lead a large congregation in Skokie, Illinois and became an important figure in the rabbinical assembly. Stern was a fascinating rabbi—he had been in intelligence in the US Army during World War II and spoke sixteen languages. We loved him; we were happy to go the cheder in those days because of him. He organized a group of post-bar mitzvah students who were interested in studying more deeply. We started off by studying The Sabbath. The course ended up going through much of modern Jewish thought, but Heschel was the starting point.

Stern continued my education—he gave me God in Search of Man, which grabbed me right away and I became enamored of the concept of a Jewish philosophy. Prior to that I had only thought of Judaism in terms of ritual and practice.

Eventually I got to meet Heschel in person. I attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in part to study with Heschel. He was just one of the many luminaries that drew me to the JTS for the dual degree with Columbia. It was enthralling to learn from the people who I first met through their books. My first meeting with was at a Shabbat dinner he hosted when I was an undergraduate. Later, he was in my interview for rabbinical school. It was truly intimidating. He pulled me aside after it was over and invited me to his house to discuss what I had learned in the interview.

In rabbinical school, I began working with Torah Min Hashamayim. I started reading through the volumes and I was hooked. I had never seen encountered anything so clearly laid out and insightful, delving into rabbinic thought and its cores values, while exploring the inherent contradictions in the texts. Heschel saw the genius and vibrancy in these contradictory concepts. For me this was a huge opening of the mind. Right before Heschel died, I was working with him on a translation of this book.

The main pillar that influenced me—one that I have worked on and stressed throughout my life—was that of amazement. It is essential to cultivate this sense of wonderment in your soul, in your psyche. Heschel rooted this sense of wonder in Jewish tradition and I have carried this with me. I see the wonder in everything—in the restaurants I go to, in the desert and its flowers. He shot an arrow into thinking about religion; it wasn’t just about don’t do this, do that, but instead make yourself open to the amazement of the world. Of nature. Of humanity. Of variances.

Christ Church by the Sea
Newport Beach, CA
A Methodist Perspective

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

I have known of Heschel for a long time but just finished reading his book God in Search of Man which deeply impressed me and touched my heart and soul. I intend to read his other books. I heard his daughter speak at a synagogue in Minneapolis a few years back and I read a book by her.

How did Heschel influence your life, thinking, and/or work? What of Heschel lives in you?
I have always felt a deep spiritual connection with Judaism. Heschel’s interpretation of Judaism helped me to understand why. Like Buber, there is an existentialist strand in Heschel's interpretation of religion that speaks to our common humanity and thereby invites non-Jews into dialogue with Jewish tradition.

Congregation Eshel Abraham
Be’er Sheva, Israel
A Jewish Perspective

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

When I was child in Chile, I heard from my Rabbi about some of Heschel’s ideas, as my rabbi was Rabbi Marshall Mayer’s student who was Heschel’s student. He was kind of a “Hassidic Rebbe” for us there.

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

During Rabbinical school I learned more in depth Heschel’s ideas and the one that remains with me the most is his view of Revelation. As a non-fundamentalist movement, we struggle often to reconcile Divine revelation with human authorship and Heschel's words: "A minimum of revelation, a maximum of interpretation (...) the Torah is a Midrash of the Revelation" has been very helpful to me in order to explain others the way we (I) undertsand the Divinity of the Torah and Revelation itself.

Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, MO
A Jewish Perspective

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.

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

Physicist, MIT and Syracuse
Rhode Island
A Jewish Perspective

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.