Director of Arts and Culture
Boston, MA
A Jewish Perspective (Conservative)

My first Shabbat as an undergrad I took all of that week’s reading out to the main quad. I was overwhelmed and thought if I read the smallest book first, that would motivate me to do the rest. I looked up when I turned the final page of the slim volume and the sun was setting. An entire afternoon had passed and I was unaware, so deeply had I been pulled into The Sabbath.

In that moment, Shabbat went from something I did to somewhere I dwelled. The other six days of the week changed too, seen through the lens of the seventh. I didn’t know then that I was on a path to the rabbinate. I didn’t know that it would become a passion for me to teach Heschel’s words in the hopes of opening that same portal for others. I didn’t know that I would come to see the work of justice as sacred and holy. But not a day passes that I don’t feel the imprint of Heschel’s words on my life. Awe and wonder are with me daily, in spite of the brokenness of the world.

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.

I do not know how/if I would be a committed and searching Jew, let alone a healing-oriented rabbi, without Dr. Heschel. Though I was raised in a loving, observant home, and my parents (a Conservative rabbi and rebbetzin) were true “disciples” of Heschel (my mother kept The Sabbath and other Heschel books in her night table for decades), it was my own encounter with Heschel’s writings as an adolescent and young adult that challenged me to pray with self-evaluation, searching, praise, and wonder; to both uplift and spiritually ground my Shabbat; and to merge my Jewish particular practice of Rites with my also Jewish universalist pursuit of Rights. In many of Dr. Heschel’s precious words come to mind; let me cite just three quotes related, I feel, to these areas of Prayer, Shabbat, and Social Justice:

 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.

—God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.

—The Sabbath

Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

—Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Fifty years after Rabbi Heschel’s death, finding ourselves in a violently self-destructive, hate-saturated, and dangerously fragmented society and world, I think of these prescient words:

Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of honor is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of honor.

—God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

A one-act play that was written to inaugurate the 24:6 Theater Company as part of The Sabbath Variations. Heschel’s The Sabbath was a jumping off point for these one-act plays.

The story of this theater company was shared in Yoni Oppenheim’s reflection. 

“In The Sabbath, Heschel attempts to reawaken the spirituality and holiness of the Sabbath, and impart the wisdom and gifts it can bring to those who observe the Sabbath. After reading Heschel’s work, I connected the Sabbath tradition with my community’s dinner, despite the religious disparities. Aspects of the Sabbath tradition are present in many meal rituals.”
—Passing the Salt: How Eating Together Creates Community

Edward K. Kaplan Research Collection on Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, New York, ARC.2021.07.000, (Box 13:24). Digitization and cataloging funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Annotation

Side A. Opening remarks (01:40min.) — Introducing Abraham Joshua Heschel (04:32 min.) — Lecture / Abraham Joshua Heschel (32:29) — Side B. Lecture [continued] / Abraham Joshua Heschel (21:33 min.) — Questions (01:33 min.) — Thanking Professor Heschel / Hugo Leventhal (03:24 min.) — Closing remarks (03:22 min.)

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.

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)