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.

An excerpt from The Eternal Light, a documentary by Diva Communications.

Journalist Carl Stern discusses the long term impact of this interview.

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. 

When I was 11 years old, Professor Heschel came to my congregation in Phoenix, Arizona, to dedicate our new sanctuary. Completion of the building was a moment of great anticipation for my community. And I, who attended Shabbat services each Saturday with my father, knew that for Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer, sharing this moment with his teacher mattered to him greatly. I do not remember what Rabbi Heschel said, but his voice and appearance were imprinted on me. Years later when I began to read Heschel’s writing, I could conjure his physical presence and that helped transform abstract ideas into testimony. So much of the power of Heschel’s writing for me is that his ideas emerged from his lived experience.

I will add that after I became a rabbi and participated with my community in building our sanctuary, I wrote this story to Professor Elie Wiesel, who I knew from my student days working at the 92nd St. Y. I said to Professor Wiesel, “Would you dedicate our sanctuary and stand as a presence for our youth the way that Professor Heschel had for me?” He agreed and flew in on a red eye and returned on a red eye. In the afternoon before the evening dedication, I invited all the Jewish religious schools in our county to bring their students to our sanctuary for a public conversation. Of the many events of celebration, that gathering with Wiesel endures as the most gratifying and significant.

Back to Rabbi Heschel, his writings evoked spiritual yearnings. His Sabbath conveyed the power of an image, “a palace in time.” His description of the piety of Eastern European Jewry in The Earth Is the Lord’s motivated me to combine a pursuit of Jewish learning with cultivating humility and compassion. I read God in Search of Man slowly with a havruta, savoring Heschel’s description of God’s Presence and Mystery. And I turned to I Asked for Wonder as a compendium of Heschel quotes, drawn to his emphasis on human, spiritual potential and God’s yearning for us. And last, Heschel’s emphasis on the need for “text-people,” prompted me to know that his life of learning, inspiration, and activism was Torah, conveying that what I do as a rabbi and as a Jew has sacred consequences.

Connecting Cultures for Peace
Baltimore, Maryland
A Jewish Perspective

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s legacy is not only his scholarship, but also his leadership as he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and taught us to pray with our feet. I learned from Dr. Susannah Heschel that as she grew up, she was able to watch and learn as those two great men of their age became friends, ate together, prayed together, and spoke out for one another time and time again.  I learned this through my involvement in launching a new nonprofit, Connecting Cultures for Peace. Our founder and president began this organizational journey with a conversation between Dr. Susannah Heschel and Rabbi Capers Funnye (with whom she often presents). We are inspired by and learning from the mid–20th century relationship between Heschel and King. There is so much more to learn about this era and their leadership. 

For me, this is one of the key emotional links to my ability to stay the course today as I seek to address and confront the rising tide of hate speech and violence against Jews, against people of color, against people who are different, against outsiders, against anyone who is not white.  Rabbi Heschel is quoted as having said we must fight nihilism. He meant it then, and if he were alive today, he would mean it now. Connecting Cultures for Peace is an organization of like-minded people who seek out ways to stay the course, fight nihilism, and never give up as the challenges befall us. I believe this is one of Heschel’s greatest gifts to me personally and to all of us who seek support each day as we awake to the frightening news of the day. To this legacy, I am ever grateful. 

Center for Contemporary Mussar
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A Jewish Perspective

Fifty-two years ago I was a college dropout working for Jewish Family Service of Long Island as an outreach worker with drug-abusing teens. My job was to blend in with teens congregating at various hangouts, primarily Jewish kids, and steer them toward social workers, doctors, and other professional services if they found themselves in crisis. At one particular hangout, many of the kids were cutting their evening Hebrew high school classes. I was out on the street for hours and developed the practice of reading the books that were lying around on the pavement. One of these books was Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism from the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Fritz Rothschild. While I had had something of a Jewish background and education typical for a Conservative Jew of the time—I attended Hebrew school and had even liked it—it had been years since I had had any contact with Jewish life. I didn’t even go to shul on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, much to my mother’s chagrin. Reading excerpts from Heschel changed my life. I will skip all the details of the rest of the journey that began that night, the important points are: I returned to college, graduated with a degree in religious studies, and entered The Jewish Theological Seminary in 1972 with the primary goal of studying with Heschel. He died during that first semester.

During that same first semester, in my first philosophy class in The Rabbinical School, I wrote a paper entitled “On the Possibility for a Modern Mussar Practice.” While I would eventually use the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to craft what I believed was a theological basis for a contemporary Mussar practice, in this course I propose to honor what I now realize sent me in the direction of Mussar, and more importantly, still very much reverberates in the subconsciousness of my Mussar mind, namely the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Additional Text:

Lectures on Who Is Man?