Student, Yeshivat Maharat
New York
A Halakhic Perspective

How did you first encounter Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work?

I attended the Toronto Heschel School in Toronto, Canada. The school believed in integrated subjects – my art classes were influenced by my limmudei kodesh (holy studies). This framework – inspired by Heschel’s radical amazement with the world in its entirety – is most likely why I became the person I am today.

How did Heschel influence your life, thinking, and/or work? What of Heschel lives in you?

My undergraduate thesis was on Heschel, so I have much to say. Here are two pieces I wrote on his yahrzheits (the anniversary of a death):

I first encountered Heschel in JTS Prozdor, a fantastic program for high school students. Some teachers and the other students mentioned Heschel, so I went and got a copy of God in Search of Man. I don’t know how much of it I read at the time, but when I reread it a couple of decades later, I was utterly shocked because so much of what I think as my essence was what I had read in Heschel. He shaped the way I see life. I absorbed the first part of the book into the very fiber of my being, but the rest of the book was completely new to me re-reading as an adult. Here is this thinker whose words shaped the essence of how I think about Judaism, how I think about life, the way I am as a human being, the way I am as a Jew, as a rabbi and a teacher.

The pieces that most appealed to me explored ultimate questions—how much human beings must strive to meet God, how we can think deeply amid all the busyness of life. I see these ideas in who I am as a person, in my vocation, and in my hobbies. I am someone who spends a great deal of time in nature. This is part of God’s Torah. For me, the field guide to the birds of Puerto Rico is almost as much Torah as the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud), or the Book of Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) in the Bible. There’s something fantastic and wondrous about nature. This also emerges in my love of travel, because I’m going to places and seeing the world and societies as other people have shaped them.

Within the university, I run a Muslim-Jewish student dialogue group. Since October 7, I have been astonished by the Muslim alumni who have called to say they are thinking about me and they’re praying for peace. I don’t know how much I specifically knew of Heschel’s involvement in interfaith work, but the message I took is that human beings are human beings at the core, and we all think about the same things and struggle with the same things. This shared humanity was what I was striving for in my dialogue group so that the Muslim and Jewish students would know how much they share.

I am starting work on a commentary of Exodus. In a recent course I taught on Exodus, the students were surprised that the book continued after the Decalogue (Ten Commandments). Why does the book of Exodus keep on going? Wouldn’t the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) be an appropriate culmination of yetziat Mitzrayim (the Exodus from Egypt)? The story continues with a description of how the Tabernacle is to be built and then returns to the details a second time by describing how the Tabernacle was built. God took up a presence in the Tabernacle, and God’s presence was felt by the community. These details highlight a Heschel connection. Religion is not just the top three inches of a person, not just in the mind and in thought. We must reach out and work to bring God’s presence into the world.

Heschel wrote in God in Search of Man:

The Bible is a seed, God is the sun, but we are the soil. Every generation is expected to bring forth new understanding and new realization.

I’ve taught this in class, and for students it opens their eyes. It’s a new way of thinking, a new way of understanding the religious texts that we study. Scripture is at the center, but we all come to Scripture through different paths.

Sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen delivered as part of a series on “The Lives of the Spirit.” The civil rights activist and Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel understood God as pathos. He explores Heschel’s belief that religious piety and social justice activism, which he named the prophetic, were inextricably linked. 

Chancellor Emeritus Arnold Eisen spoke with Christa Tippet about Heschel’s embodiment of “the passionate social engagement of the prophets, drawing on wisdom at once provocative and nourishing.”

A clip from a documentary that explores Abraham Joshua Heschel’s poetry through songs by musician Basya Schecter.

Documentarian Martin Doblemeier’s film which explores Heschel’s activism. The site includes clips and educational materials on themes relating to Heschel’s justice work, his theology, and his interfaith dialogue.

God in Search of Man

The Prophets

Repairing the World

No Religion is an Island

Heschel and the Vietnam War

Heschel and Jewish Tradition

The Sabbath

How does the legacy of Heschel speak to us today? On the 50th yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Cosgrove calls upon us to honor his values and to do our share to redeem the world.

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. 

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.