B’nai Jeshurun
New York, New York
A Jewish Perspective

Transcribed from an Interview

I was born and raised in Argentina. My rabbi growing up was Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a graduate of JTS and a devotee of Heschel. Meyer worked with Heschel as a student and was very close with Heschel. He went to serve in Argentina and brought Heschel’s teaching with him. I never met Heschel personally, but through Meyer, I met him when I was six years old and never stopped meeting him, learning from him, and deepening my understanding of his work. 

It wasn’t until I entered the Seminario to study with Rabbi Meyer that I fully realized how deeply rooted Rabbi Meyer was in Heschel’s teachings. Rabbi Meyer worked to put Heschel’s ideas into action: his ideas about prayer, his approach to halakhah, his inclination to social justice. Each of these aspects became part of the living community in Argentina, which Meyer passed down to his students, steeping us all in Heschel. All of Rabbi Meyer’s students are stamped with Heschel. 

After 25 years in Argentina, in 1985, Rabbi Meyer returned to New York at the time I was entering my last year of rabbinical school. After my ordination in 1986, Rabbi Meyer invited me to join him at B’nai Jeshurun. He died at the end of 1993, but in those seven years we worked together to translate Heschel into a living community; Heschel’s program as it lives in a synagogue, which continues to be central to this synagogue. 

For example, our approach to prayer is consistent with Heschel’s teachings in his amazing book Man’s Quest for God, ideas he synthesized from his inherited rabbinic and Hasidic Judaism. Heschel discusses the ideal form of Jewish prayer, which is deeply rooted in tradition, very alive and connected with kavanah (intent). Prayer is a serious and consequential matter. There is a tension between the fixed and the spontaneous prayers, which must be felt. Bringing this book into our services changed the culture of B’nai Jeshurun.

Another of many aspects of Heschel’s teaching we incorporated was his approach to Jewish law. Jewish law is not total. It’s very subtle, focused on seeing yourself through the mitzvot (commandments) as serving God and serving other human beings. Performing mitzvot is not just an obligation, but an opportunity to do service with a sense of reverence for God and service. It’s not all or nothing, but it can be selective and informed by justice and ethics. 

Associate Professor of Jewish Theology, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Jerusalem, Israel
A Jewish Perspective

I never met Abraham Joshua Heschel. I was a 10-year old Londoner when he died. Nonetheless, he has been a presence in my life for as long as I can recall. He lived on my father’s bookshelves, where the mysterious paradox inherent in such titles as God In Search of Man and Who Is Man? caught my young attention. He came alive when his aphorisms, more evocative than abstract reasoning or unbridled polemic, were quoted in sermons and conversations.

As a young rabbi casting around for a doctoral research topic, my initial idea had been to compare aspects of the thought of Heschel and Mordecai Kaplan. I was guided by the instinct that Israel (where I had moved) needed to undergo significant processes both of Kaplanization and of Heschelization, and I wanted to help think this through. When I decided that acquiring expertise in the work of both of these giants of 20th-century Judaism was overly ambitious, it was clear to me with whom I preferred to spend the time I would dedicate to this research. 

I was in the library of the University of Haifa, rereading God In Search of Man slowly and carefully, when my particular link to Heschel was forged. I noticed that appended to almost every chapter were intriguingly extensive and suggestive endnotes. What was their purpose and to whom were they directed? This question—and the questions it in turn triggered—have preoccupied me for the past 30 years. 

It may seem odd to have developed such an interest in an aspect of Heschel’s work that is so literally marginal. Most of those who have been drawn into Heschel’s magnetic field have been attracted by his spirituality or his activism or his language. Drawn to all these as I surely was and still am, it was in fact his footnotes that captivated me. I was intrigued by the way in which Heschel based his challenging theology not in the dictates of Kantian philosophy (which he respected) or Freudian psychology (which he respected less), but from within the rich and varied sources of Judaism. He turned to these sources not as literary embellishments, but as urgent and vibrant expressions. The great Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen had sought to make the case for a Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, but here was an approach to Judaism and to life that was not just derived from Jewish sources—it was marinated in them, immersed and informed by profound learning. I was hooked. 

Since then, following Heschel’s writings has provided a more rigorous syllabus than any I have encountered in a seminary or university. That which Heschel had committed to memory at a young age, I have intended to chase up and track down. He has not only been the primary object of my research, he has also been my teacher. 

It is certainly the case the Abraham Joshua Heschel was a very learned Jew. This places him in select company, but he was not unique in his erudition. It was the combination of deep learning with his commitment to action, his unwillingness to stay ensconced in his study room, his engagement with the great questions of his day that set him apart. I hear Heschel’s voice every time I am tempted to settle for vapid progressive slogans, and every time I am tempted to stay in my comfort zone when I should be protesting. His particular form of praxis, the welding together of doing and learning, has been my principle guide. 

One of the hundreds of works I would never have encountered were it not for Heschel is entitled To’ameha Chayyim Zachu. This expression has its roots in the additional Sabbath prayer, and it relates to the Sabbath itself. Those who taste and experience it are privileged with life. As I consider decades of reading, thinking, and responding to Heschel, it is this expression that comes most readily to mind. To taste Heschel, his remarkable combination of learning and activism, his call to wonder and response, his critique and his poetry, his hints and his slogans, his certainties and his vulnerability, his intellect and his soul is a dose of life. Had it not been for him, I would have done less, cared less, thought less, lived less. 

I am surely not alone. Fifty years after he breathed his last, Abraham Joshua Heschel continues to offer a taste of life for contexts and generations he could not have imagined. So long as he is quoted (and misquoted), so long as his example serves as inspiration, he has not breathed his last. 

Reading through the Heschel papers at Duke University some years ago, I shed a tear. I had just come across a page (there are many of them to be found there) upon which Heschel had written out a teaching. This one is from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. To paraphrase, "When a student repeats the teaching of a tanna, a foundational sage, there is a kind of embrace between the tradition and the tradent, the propagator and the broadcaster. You kiss the tanna, and the tanna kisses you. I never met Abraham Joshua Heschel. But I sense his embrace." 

His memory is for a blessing, and those who experience it are privileged with the gift of life.  

I was a student at JTS from 1956 to 1961.  In 1957 I took two courses with Professor Heschel: one on Genesis with an emphasis on Rashi’s interpretation and one on Jewish theology in which we read Heschel’s book God in Search of Man. In 1971, when I was a graduate student at Temple University, in preparation for my dissertation on Heschel, I traveled from Philadelphia to New York City once a week to attend a seminar that Heschel was teaching to his rabbinical students on his book Torah min Hashmayim. After every class I went to his office where Heschel gave me many sources for my thesis. When he left, I walked him home. Sometimes we would converse in Yiddish, our common birth language. 

I was very challenged by the statement that “Providence may someday create a situation which would place us between the river Jordan and the river Ganges,” from his book God in Search of Man. To me, this statement seemed to mean that Professor Heschel was encouraging dialogue between Jews and members of Asian religions. So I devoted a great deal of time to the study of Asian religions. I was even more challenged by his essay “No Religion Is an Island,” where he argues that no religion has a monopoly on truth or holiness and says “In this eon, diversity of religions is the will of God.” In my books on Heschel, I have devoted a great deal of time to his vision of other faiths.

Heschel, who devoted his life to love and peace, was for me not just a superlative teacher but my interreligious hero. He remains the most important spiritual teacher of my life. At Grinnell College, I have offered a seminar: Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Jewish Saint of the 20th Century. Here are just a few of his ideas that I think may have been very moving for students at Grinnell, most of whom were not Jewish:

1.  Human responsibility rather than divine responsibility. Heschel said “few are guilty but all are responsible.” I devote a great deal of time to this issue, especially when we read Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, to which Heschel contributed a response.

2.  Heschel always looked for harmony and the positive. Heschel said “just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.” Very often, I showed the interview that he had with Carl Stern just before he died. The interview ended with Heschel’s message to young people: “Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power . . . Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.” I think this was a very powerful message for my young students.

3. His stress on wonder and radical amazement. Heschel said, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement . . . Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” He also said “I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don’t be old. Don’t be stale.”

4. His engagement with the Civil Rights Movement and his stress on social justice.

Heschel may be best known for his 1965 Selma to Montgomery march with Martin Luther King, Jr. After the march he wrote, “I felt my legs were praying.” He was also an early activist against the war in Vietnam and in the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union.

I focus on his great contribution to interreligious dialogue and on his original idea of pathos. I always remember to tell my students what Heschel once wrote (or perhaps just said in class), that if he could teach only one central idea from Judaism, it would be, "And God said I will make man in my image after my likeness, and God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female, He created them."

Additional Text:

Interfaith Affinity: The Shared Vision of Rabbi Heschel and Pope Francis

Biographer
Waltham, Massachusetts
A Jewish Perspective

Upon meeting and reading Heschel in 1965, for the first time in my life I found a Jewish writer who convincingly evoked the presence of God. Heschel calls this spiritual attitude toward human experience “radical amazement,” a mode of religious thinking about reality. His ultimate goal as writer and teacher was to guide us to “holiness in words.” Henceforth, I began to confront my aspirations and perplexities through Heschel’s perspective. Heschel’s erudition and teaching, rooted in his ethical and political standards derived from the Hebrew prophets, became my models in life and scholarship.

Heschel’s story is the story of the 20th century—its horrors and its marvels. How did Heschel preserve his faith in the God of pathos, justice, and compassion during and after the Holocaust? After he immigrated to the United States in 1940, Heschel developed a prophetic critique of war, economic and spiritual poverty, racism and bigotry, and political corruption. He addressed the terrible ambiguities of religious faith and the fragility of truth. The interfaith consequences of Heschel’s own trajectory provide models for our search for meaning. His scholarship and activism exemplify a sort of neo-Hasidism that inspired Jewish renewal in our lives and observances within and beyond official denominations. In the end, for all his exquisite emotion and subtle interpretations of tradition, Heschel urges us to practice Judaism as best we can. 

There is mystery but no secret. Ruaḥ ha-kodesh, the Holy Spirit, lies waiting in our primal texts: the Bible and the prayerbook. These are the foundations of Sabbath observance—eventually, they may guide us in daily prayer, thinking, and feeling. Of course, we need teachers and activists, such as Heschel, impassioned with the divine imperative. Yet, we may find that books maintain the vision more authentically than do most human beings. That remains our challenge—rising to the standards God has defined. Half a century since Abraham Joshua Heschel’s death, his ultimate message is profound yet simple to grasp: Whatever the yearning is that throbs within us—whether or not we call it the Holy Spirit—it is our responsibility to make it live.

Additional Text:

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul (Jewish Publication Society, 2019)

Metaphor and Miracle: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Holy Spirit (Conservative Judaism, Winter 1994)

T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
New York, New York
A Jewish Perspective

Transcribed from an Interview

I first encountered Heschel at Prozdor at Hebrew College in Boston when I was in high school. In Bible class, The Prophets was one of our textbooks. This book wasn’t presented as a treatise from a philosopher who speaks about justice. I remember going through it and being intrigued; I didn’t understand 99 percent of it, but it stuck in my head. At some point in college and rabbinical school, I reread The Prophets, found God in Search of Man and then Moral Grandeur. Then in a class with Neil Gillman (z”l) in my first year of rabbinical school, we spent quite a lot of time with Heschel.

In The Rabbinical School, I was developing an ambition of doing social justice as a rabbi, which was not a thing that people were talking about in the late 1990s, early 2000s. Now it’s completely and totally normal. But at JTS at the time, the response was, “Why don’t you go to law school, social work school, or something else?” When I read Moral Grandeur the first time, it felt like he had said all of the things. Not only did somebody already write what I’ve been looking for, he wrote it better than I could even imagine. 

He offered me an urgency that I hadn’t felt in my Judaism before then. I didn’t have models for how Judaism interacted with engagement in the world and with justice work. I grew up in a Conservative congregation and we went to a soup kitchen every Christmas, but social justice wasn’t really built into what we were doing. And it certainly hadn’t been put in theological or Jewish language besides tzedakah, nothing deeper than that. This was extraordinary. 

Through books like The Prophets and God in Search of Man, Heschel provided me with the sense that God cares about what's happening here and that what we're doing has an impact on God. For me, Heschel put together that observance and social justice are connected. It is all unified because God cares about what we do. He provided a model of an observant person with a relationship with God, deeply immersed in text, for whom social justice is part of his daily life.

I don’t go to protests on Shabbat. I work six days a week. Shabbat is important to me; it is a check on our hubris. There is a sense that I must work 24 hours a day, because there is an emergency. But the truth is, there is always an emergency. And it’s been an emergency since the world was created. I can check out of my activism for 25 hours each week. God created the world in six days, but the world wasn’t finished. Even if I work that one extra day, there wouldn’t be less work to do the next day.

I aspire to Heschel’s integration between his life as a traditionally religious Jew with a relationship with God and his deep involvement in justice work. There is no division; it is all part of a whole. I see Judaism as an integrated way of living that doesn’t make divisions between my activism and religious practice. 

Additional Text:

Stop Looking for the Next Heschel. They Are All Around You (The Forward)

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

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.

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.