We published a unit on Rabbi Heschel’s 1963 speech “Religion and Race” with our online Voices of Democracy project. I believe it is one of our more powerful units in our growing collection of speeches and essays because of Heschel’s strong commitment to civil rights in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. His words are as profound and meaningful in 2023 as they were in 1963. The image of Heschel and King marching together is a poignant reminder that we need to work collectively and find commonality if we are to create more just and nonviolent communities.

Let us dodge no issues, let us yield no inch to bigotry, let us make no compromise with callousness.

—From his 1963 speech on “Religion and Race”

University of Warsaw
Poland
A Christian Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

Heschel’s prominent students Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin and Professor Harold Kasimow told me about their master.

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

It is a very difficult question for me, because each of books affected me in different way. But if I have to mention one, I will say that his essay “No Religion Is an Island” shaped my perception of Judaism as a dialogical religion and Christianity as a religion closely related to its mother religion. Reading The Prophets was a revelation for me, showing the common ground for both religions which should be a sensitivity to the suffering of poor people. Honestly I cannot think about myself as a Christian and follower of Jesus of Nazareth for whom religion was a religion of the prophets of Hebrew Bible without the books by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

What of Heschel lives in you?

For me the most important from Heschel’s legacy is his commitment to social justice and his passion to transmit to others the beauty of belief in the God of the Hebrew Bible. What inspired me most is Heschel’s involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue and his contribution to the declaration Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council.

Perhaps it is the will of God that in this eon there should be diversity in our forms of devotion and commitment to Him. In this eon, diversity of religions is the will of God.

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

I don’t remember the exact time, but it must have been when I was in my early 20s. I was the campus pastor at Liberty University, and I encountered Rabbi Heschel’s book The Sabbath.  As a young evangelical growing up in the Baptist tradition, I felt a powerful love for the Jewish community, but I had never read any theological text written by a Jewish rabbi. I shortly thereafter discovered his book The Prophets and used it heavily when preparing sermons on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. In many ways, discovering Heschel launched me into a lifelong passion for Jewish texts. At this very moment, a copy of The Prophets sits on my desk (a gift from a rabbi mentor of mine) and it sits next to several other books by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Lau’s three-volume commentary on Pirkei Avos, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s book On Repentance, and a copy of some Chofetz Chaim readings. I’ve found a deeper understanding of my own faith by engaging substantively with rabbinic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. My relationship with Jews and Judaism isn’t sentimental any longer. It is about shared learning and shared serving.

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

As a millennial evangelical, I felt a commonality with Heschel’s passion for justice and the fact that he still taught the biblical text seriously. His teaching gives us a prophetic theology that isn’t political theology, per se. His sermons shook the foundations of the culture, but they were still sermons drawn from and anchored in the biblical text. Sometimes, clergy preach politics and shimmy in the Bible. Rabbi Heschel taught the Bible and linked it to our present time with effortless elegance. 

I really love the remarks he delivered on the first occasion he and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shared a pulpit.

What of Heschel lives in you?

Heschel always challenges me to leave my comfort zone, to embrace righteousness and justice, and to know that the Bible says something about all of it.  

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

I was inspired by the Jewish concept of working for social change, promoting equality and dignity in the name of the Judaism. This is especially vital these days when the Israeli government is espousing a very narrow version of Judaism that is completely opposite to what Heschel believed in.

What of Heschel lives in you?

The image of Heschel marching in Selma together with Martin Luther King, Jr., is powerful and is on my mind when we march for peace and coexistence in Jerusalem or when we march with Torah scrolls at the entrance to the Western Wall.

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

As a teenager, I saw Heschel’s book God in Search of Man on my parents’ bookshelf. My LTF leader and Torah-reading instructor, Dov (Denny) Elkins, said to me at that time that Heschel’s thought was very challenging. He also reported that in the JTS student body (to which he belonged at the time), half the students were Kaplanians and half were Heschelians.

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

My religious life has been a constant tug between the demands of philosophical rationalism (represented by Maimonides and Milton Steinberg) and existentialist commitment (represented by Heschel). From the Maimonidean pole: intellectual honesty; be true to what your reason tells you is true and credible. From the existentialist pole: commitment to the divine imperative, expressed in ethical obligation not as mere humanistic ideal but as empathy with the divine pathos. “Perform God’s will as if it were your will” (Avot 2:4). To Heschel, this meant an integration of the human and the divine wills, and ultimately working toward harmony of all human wills under the aegis of the Almighty.

It has been one of my greatest privileges to work with Gordon Tucker on delivering to the English-reading audience Heschel’s masterpiece on rabbinic thought, Heavenly Torah. Not coincidentally, he makes the tug in my own thinking the axis of rabbinic thought, with the Ishmaelian tradition representing the rationalist side and the Akivan tradition, the side of absolute commitment and mystical ecstasy.

In teaching Jewish philosophical theology, I, too, present Maimonides and Heschel as the two outstanding thinkers of the Jewish philosophical tradition and the integration of their perspectives as the ultimate challenge for the student of Jewish philosophical theology.

Additional Texts

Adult Education Curriculum to Heavenly Torah

Heavenly Torah Handout, Part 1

Heavenly Torah Handout, Part 2

Heavenly Torah Handout, Part 3

Heavenly Torah Handout, Part 4

A. J. Heschel’s Heavenly Torah Epitome

Rabbi Micah Lapidus first encountered Heschel as a young learner at Los Angeles Hebrew High School. Melvin Myles first encountered Heschel through Ebenezer Baptist Church’s partnership with The Temple in Atlanta.

Heschel is an inspiration in many ways. Most relevant here is that he is the inspiration for the composition “Praying with our Feet,” written by Rabbi Micah Lapidus and performed by Lapidus and Melvin Myles, often accompanied by the Ebenezer Baptist Church and Temple choirs.

He imbued in us a sense of wonder and a commitment to justice.

Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
A Jewish Perspective

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

In high school I read God in Search of Man, and in my senior year I heard Heschel lecture at Washington University in St. Louis on the Insecurity of Freedom. I then studied with him at JTS for eight years, 1962–1970.

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

Heschel’s example and advice has inspired most of my academic life—from my doctoral thesis on Rabbi Yochanan, which was his suggestion, to my writings on theology, liturgy, ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations from the classical period to the modern one. His legacy grows every year through more commemorations, articles, and books about him. Truly great men become greater posthumously.

What of Heschel lives in you?

My commitment to Jewish practice, thought, religious audacity, and social engagement are all filtered through his example and writings (best reflected in Who Is Man?). During my years in The Rabbinical School, he was my spiritual father.

Additional Text

Review, The Sabbath

Review, Torah Min Hashamayim

Heschel Memorium, in Hebrew (Part 1, Part 2)

The Inexplicable Phenomenon

The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel

Response Memorium (Winter 1972–1973)

Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Jewish Christian Relations

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Theology of Judaism and the Rewriting of Jewish Intellectual History

Mishkan Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
A Jewish Perspective

I first encountered Heschel with Professor Arnold Eisen at Stanford University; he recalled aloud how the opening words of Heschel’s book God in Search of Man inspired him to pursue a career in Jewish academia. I, in turn, found deep inspiration in those words and that book:

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. 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.

Where did you first encounter Heschel’s work?

As a young student, I read his theological writings, but it was through his daughter, Susannah, that I encountered his writings in a more personal way when I was lecturing on religious existentialism at Dartmouth.

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

For me as a Roman Catholic, I find Heschel’s involvement in shaping Nostra Aetate with Cardinal Bea is something that needs more attention. Heschel’s treatment of Kierkegaard is something that I hope to explore further when an opportunity presents itself.

What of Heschel lives in you?

I found Heschel’s emphasis on the wonder that we are, which awakens us to action, profound. This quote highlights Heschel’s approach to the Torah:

We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Additional Text:

Abraham Joshua Heschel and Nostra Aetate: Shaping the Catholic Reconsideration of Judaism during Vatican II

The Time and Name of Mercy: Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Pope Francis in Dialogue