Interreligious Affairs Director (DATES), American Jewish Committee
Fort Meyers, Florida
A Jewish Perspective

Transcribed from an Interview

I’m very proud that my rabbinical school, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, brought Rabbi Heschel to the United States, where he taught for some years. I want to pay tribute to the HUC president at the time, Rabbi Julian Morgenstern, who had the commitment and resources to save Rabbi Heschel’s life.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was able to position religious mysticism into an academic context. Prior to that, Jewish academia was largely a world of rationalism, Talmud, and maybe Midrash, but certainly not mysticism. He brought a sense of awe and wonderment into the academic world and also into the mainstream of Jewish religious thought. Part of the reason that he could accomplish this was because of his deeply rooted Jewish learning. He married this sense of wonder with his intellectual rigor. 

I was ordained as a rabbi in 1960. I went into the Air Force military chaplaincy and was stationed in Japan and Korea for two years. When I returned to civilian life, I served in Kansas City for two years as an assistant rabbi. By that time, Rabbi Heschel was becoming nationally and internationally known. 

And of course, in 1963, he gave a now-famous speech at the Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago, where he first met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was there that Rabbi Heschel said, “At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses . . . The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate.” This speech also included the notable statement, “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.” His link to Dr. King was notable; they saw in one another modern-day prophets and charismatic leadership qualities. 

Heschel deeply affected my own professional life: specifically, the role he played at the Second Vatican Council. The Council adopted the Nostra Aetate Declaration in 1965. The Latin means “in our time,” and it fundamentally changed the ways Jews and Catholics interacted with each other. 

A year earlier on September 14, 1964, the day before Yom Kippur, he met with Pope Paul VI in Rome because a proposed version of the Declaration included some troubling conversionary language. Rabbi Heschel pushed the church leader on the issue of conversion, saying,  “As I have repeatedly stated to leading personalities of the Vatican, I am ready to go to Auschwitz any time, if faced with the alternative of conversion or death.”  Heschel made it very clear that the statement’s language on conversion was unacceptable, not only to him, but to the global Jewish community. This language was removed, changing thousands of years of church doctrine.

The next time Heschel impacted me was in 1967. I was one of the first rabbis to travel to Israel after the Six Day War. He had written a superb book about Israel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, and he expressed for all of us the dread and fear Jews everywhere experienced during the run up to the Six Day War.

After hearing about him since I was a student at HUC-JIR in New York, I first met Rabbi Heschel when he came to the American Jewish Committee headquarters in 1970 or 1971. At that point, he was the Jewish voice of opposition to use of destructive napalm and, indeed, the war in Vietnam, which resonated with me because I had been in Asia when the American military buildup was starting. 

Rabbi Heschel broke out of the narrowness of some parts of the Jewish community. Heschel was in America, doing American things. He was involved with civil rights, whether you agreed with him or not. He was there with MLK in Selma, Alabama. He was also anti–Vietnam War. He was in many public arenas taking personal, religiously inspired stands. 

One of the most important things he did for interreligious work was leaving the JTS building and crossing the street in Morningside Heights in NYC to teach at neighboring Union Theological Seminary. By crossing the street, he built a human bridge. Those connections at Union and his personal meeting with the pope made my work much easier because I could talk about Rabbi Heschel’s extraordinary commitment to interreligious dialogue. This gave me enormous credibility in my work as the director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee. I may not have been an actual classroom student of Heschel’s, but I could, and did, stand on his shoulders.  

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.  

Emeritus Professor, Grinnell College
Grinnell, Iowa
A Jewish Perspective

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)

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. 

Beth Shalom Congregation
Columbia, Maryland
A Jewish Perspective

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