Rabbi Emeritus, Forest Hills Jewish Center
New Jersey
A Jewish Perspective

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

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

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

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

What of Heschel lives in you?

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

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

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

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

Albany, New York
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

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

Additional Text:

The Aroma of Paradise

What Do We Make of the Nighttime Stars

Interfaith Alliance
Virginia
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I first encoutered Heschel in United Synagogue Youth.

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

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

Additional Texts:

Cosmic Outrage

A Life to Emulate

Playing Dice with the Universe—Leviticus 8:8

Comfort, Comfort

This Is Not a Sermon

Golda Och Academy
New York
A Jewish Perspective

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.

Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano
Buenos Aires, Argentina
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

In the 1970s in Argentina, I learned about Heschel through the impact of Marshall Meyer’s rabbinic work, but my first direct personal encounter with Heschel’s work was in the 1980s, while living in New York.

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

Heschel, for me, is a true prophet in our times, in every sense of the word. What he describes of the prophet, the prophetic experience, and prophecy in many of his works (The Prophets, Prophetic Inspiration After the Prophets, God in Search of Man, and others) is born out of his own personal experience. One can sense in the poetry of his youth how he was almost “accosted” by God as the prophets of the Bible were.

Then we have Heschel’s own personal hint in God in Search of Man, where he tells us that “the philosopher is never a pure spectator . . . his books are . . . as windows, allowing us to view the author’s soul . . . All philosophy is an apologia pro vita sua.” Thus, also, what Heschel writes about Saadia, Maimonides, Abarbanel, the Baal Shem Tov, or the Kotzker Rebbe often reveals his own life, ideas, and struggles.

For Heschel, the prophet, the man is more important than prophecy; the life of a person more important than his ideas. Heschel’s ideas are profound and spiritually transformative, for me more so than those of any other religious master or philosophical thinker I have ever read in my life. But even more amazing is to feel the enormous privilege of the close connection to Heschel that is created when one reads his works. When he writes, every reader is addressed personally, and his ideas are applicable to the lives of all people at all times. This is the distinctive quality of divine revelation. Through it, God speaks to us, in our time. Heschel was His prophet for our times. God is concerned for us, for the desperate and possible terminal state of humankind and our inability to find a way out of our quandary by ourselves, without His help. He never loses faith in us, and Heschel lived in great anxiety and almost despair in the face of the human condition. He was given the gift of prophecy but also the gift of poetry and language to translate into human terms the divine concern. His message will only grow more and more meaningful for humankind with the passage of time. As Marshall once told me, Heschel will be understood 500 years from now.

What of Heschel lives in you?

His passion for truth about the deeper wisdom and significance of Judaism is a spiritual adventure that unfolds in history as a response to the divine call to all humankind. He is sensitive to each and every sacred source of Judaism: the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Prophets, and Writings), rabbinic literature (Talmud and Midrash), medieval Jewish philosophy, and mysticism and Hasidism. He is the last great master of Judaism, able to integrate all of the Jewish tradition, understanding the significance of each period in Jewish history and the right tenor of each sacred source. He was able to create a bridge between them and our times and culture, which he also embraced and mastered with unique depth and sensitivity. He was able, also, to dialogue meaningfully with all people and groups, knowing how to speak to each one of them and what message they each needed to hear. In this he was like Aaron, “ohev et habriyot umekarvan la Torah” (be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving mankind and drawing them close to the Torah).

In response to the question of whether he was a prophet, Heschel said:

I won’t accept this praise, because it’s not for me to say that I am a descendant of the Prophets, which is an old Jewish statement. It is a claim almost arrogant enough to say that I’m a descendant of the Prophets, what is called Bnai Neviim. So let us hope and pray that I am worthy of being a descendant of the prophets.

—Eternal Light interview, 1972; transcribed in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Sinai Temple
Los Angeles, California
A Jewish Perspective

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

My parents told me when Heschel first arrived in his inaugural lecture, he began with a niggun. Everyone thought, at the intellectually charged JTS, that this was from another planet. Heschel’s confidence in the power of the tradition and his ability to transmit it, even in the face of incomprehension and ridicule, was a constant example throughout his life. And he triumphed.

What of Heschel lives in you?

In my rare best moments, his courage, his wonder, his eloquence, his audacity.

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man

First Baptist Church in America
Providence, Rhode Island
An American Baptist Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

As a student in divinity school.

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

In the late 1990s, the Rev. Dr. Vincent Harding offered a course on Beloved Community at Harvard Divinity School. He taught about how Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others in the struggle for civil rights. The idea of praying with our legs and feet opened my concepts of embodied faith. Petitions for justice and peace take root in deep intercession and thrive in community. Heschel’s embrace of active service as a complementary mode of prayer expanded my theology and practice. Alongside faith, he urged leaps of action towards the righteous world we desire to inhabit. Protest can be a form of prayer, heard both in the rhythm of the psalms and soles on pavement.

Decades later, I heard Heschel’s call put to music by Paul Vasile, in his song, “Pray with Our Feet.” May the teachings of this good rabbi continue to inspire action and awe for generations.

It’s not enough to offer thoughts and prayers.
It’s not enough to say that we care.
It’s not enough to hope that things will change.
We’ve got to pray with our feet,
pray with our feet, pray with our feet
and get out, out on the street.

Paul M. Vasile, LovedIntoBeing Music ©2018

The Nearness
New York, New York

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

Harvard Divinity School, where I found Heschel’s The Sabbath in the library stacks. I read it in one weekend and fell completely in love with his theological imagination and clear conviction.

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

Personally, he inspired my own “tech sabbath” practice. I started to turn off my phone and laptop on Friday nights in early 2014, and that practice has sustained me for nearly a decade! I don’t always manage to keep to the full 24 hours, but the rhythm of the week (and my own sanity!) is totally inspired by this Heschel-shaped practice. Because I’ve added a note to my emails about my tech sabbath, I’ve had countless people ask about it; I always point them to Heschel.