Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007

Heschel for a New Generation

Edited by Or N. Rose

One of the most celebrated Jewish leaders of the twentieth century, and an inspiration to the Tikkun community, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) is a model of personal piety and social responsibility. Born into a Hasidic dynasty in Warsaw, Heschel earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin before fleeing from the Nazis. After arriving in the United States as a refugee scholar, Heschel quickly emerged as a powerful voice for spiritual renewal and societal change. He wrote eloquently on a broad range of Jewish topics—from the prophets to the Sabbath to the founders of Hasidism—and beginning in the early 1960s became an outspoken activist. Not only did he march alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. for African American civil rights, but Heschel also played a key role in the Second Vatican Council, and was one of the founders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Abraham Joshua Heschel's birth, Tikkun has invited three young Jewish leaders to reflect on the legacy of this visionary figure.

Descendents of the Prophets BY SHAI HELD

God takes an enormous risk in creating human beings. God is "in search of man," Heschel emphasized again and again, but man can—and all too frequently does—turn away. If there is one idea that animates Heschel's theology, it is surely his insistence that God is vulnerable, that God can be disappointed and even angered by human cruelty and callousness. Against the abstract, unmoved God of medieval philosophy; against the less-than-personal God of Mordecai Kaplan; and, I hasten to add, against the mystical theology of many of his Hasidic forebears, Heschel returned always to the personal God of biblical revelation, to the God who seeks a relationship with human beings, to the transcendent, commanding God whose will it is that we respond to Him. "The notion that God can be intimately affected," Heschel writes, "that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also feeling and pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God."

If Heschel's God could be moved by human behavior to the point of suffering, his ideal human being could be "convulsed" by that divine pathos "to the depths of his soul." The prophet is the person who is able to see the world through God's eyes, to see the pain caused by injustice and oppression both to human beings and to the God who created them. Faced with depravity and degradation, the prophet cannot help but cry out: "A single crime—to us it is slight, but to the prophet—a disaster.... Exaggeration to us is understatement to him." On one level, Heschel was a traditional Jew who recognized that prophecy had come to an end in antiquity. But on another level, he seemed to affirm that something of the prophetic remained available to the authentically religious Jew; although we can no longer be prophets, we can become worthy of our status as descendants of the prophets (mibenei hanevi'im). "Let us hope and pray," he told Carl Stern, "that I am worthy of being a descendant of the prophets."

We would do well to remember that far from advocating some secularized reduction of Judaism to Tikkun Olam, Heschel calls us to a life of Avodat Hashem (the service of God). And we ought to caution ourselves lest some Jewish thinkers read Heschel's evocations of the prophets and be reminded of ... well, themselves; the line between righteousness and self-righteousness is, sadly, almost imperceptibly easy to cross. Somehow the spiritual life demands that we marry prophetic passion with genuine humility.

Jewish theology, then, is above all a story about a covenant, a story about the relationship between the divine and the human, the heavenly and the earthly, the eternal and the temporal, the sacred and the quotidian. It is the story of a personal God seeking love and choosing to need us, of a transcendent God whose immanence depends on the countless decisions we make each day.

"The words of the wise are like goads" (Ecclesiastes 12:11). May Heschel's legacy be a blessing, and may his Torah remain an inspiration.

Rabbi Shai Held, Lecturer on Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is co-founder of Machon Hadar: An Institute for Prayer, Personal Growth and Jewish Study.

Limitless Concern: Divine and Human Response to Suffering BY MELISSA WEINTRAUB

  The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the
  more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the prophets
  sought to convey: that morally speaking there is no limit to the
  concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings.
  —Abraham Joshua Heschel

A woman was weeping. Somewhere, outside my Jerusalem living room, a woman was crying out her pain. Instinct-ruled, heart-led, I was at my window in a breath. There, I looked out to find four faces. Other women in their living rooms, pressed up against windows, peering out in concern.

The cries stopped. Four women caught sight of each other's empathic, searching faces.

It had been a time of suffering in my life. I had been feeling alone, wondering where the loving Presence who'd hummed within me for years had vanished in my pain.

Can I explain this? Looking out at these women—I beheld.

No roaring thunder. No flaming glory. God: in the faces of women registering anguish, pulled involuntarily towards another's pain.

Years later, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel re-gifted me this moment in poetry and theology.

For Heschel, God is first and foremost the One who suffers with us.

Heschel builds on rabbinic and Kabbalistic portrayals of God's empathic identification with our distress. A midrash teaches that God speaks to Moses from within the burning thorns, as "a companion in our anguish." Another, that God enters into exile with us weeping, resonating with our pain like a twin, crying out: "When your arm is heavy, my arm is heavy."

The Kabbalah weaves an entire cosmology around this concept: the celestial Bride separates from her Husband to accompany us into exile. Human pain mirrors and feeds an abyss at the heart of the divine, a state of agonized estrangement within God. Only human action can restore the Bride to her supernal Husband, can reunify God through the raising up of the world.

Heschel integrates these existential and mystical teachings with prophetic outrage at social injustice. Heschel's God weeps over the state of the world, the unnecessary suffering sown in injustice, violence, and oppression. Justice, says Heschel "is not only a relationship between man and man, it is an act involving God, a divine need."

God needs us, to hear, to heed, and to respond. Redemption—restoration of the broken, weeping God—hinges on the degree to which we as human beings allow ourselves to commune with divine anguish in the face of suffering—and join in solidarity with the oppressed.

We are "wired" for empathy. Our moral grammar is innate, evolutionists tell us. And yet, Kitty Genovese: neighbors look on as a woman screams and is stabbed before their eyes.

For Heschel, our "wired" response to suffering is God operating within us. And our turning away—Pharaoh's hardened heart. The worst evil: indifference, callousness, paralysis.

My activism right now is difficult. I oversee the Rabbis for Human Rights Jewish Campaign against Torture. Sometimes I must pore through detainee testimonies narrating unspeakable acts of cruelty. Sometimes my heart wants to close to the gruesomeness and the pain. I believe it is on account of—not despite—my encoding with empathy that I want to turn away.

Can I explain this? Meeting courageous survivors of torture whose lives go on; trauma counselors sitting each day with victims; Rabbis willing to speak out against torture, even as three congregants walk out, saying "Don't talk about this in shul!"; and other congregants who rise up from their seats—and say, "What can I do?"

Looking out at them—and you, in whatever ways your heart calls you to respond--I behold. No roaring thunder. No flaming glory. God: in the faces of all of us registering anguish, pulled involuntarily to ease each other's pain.

Rabbi Melissa Weintraub is Director of Education at Rabbis for Human Rights, North America, and Co-founder and Co-Director of the Encounter Program bringing Jewish Diaspora leaders to Palestinian communities.

Looking for the Law BY YEHUDAH MIRSKY

  Spiritual ends come with a claim upon the person. They are imperative,
  not only impressive; demands, not abstract ideas."
  —Abraham Joshua Heschel

Halakhah was central to Rabbi Heschel's religious vision. He waged a dual polemic, with moderns who dismiss halakhah as barren legalism, and with the kind of Orthodoxy that degenerates into what he called "religious behaviorism." This moral-spiritual polemic ran parallel to how he read the tradition: using historical criticism to loosen Orthodoxy's hold on the meaning of scripture and thus of revelation, and using Orthodoxy's rigor to chastise the flabby self-indulgences of mere "spirituality" and smug liberal ethics.

This dual vision served him as polemic stance and interpretive strategy because it resonated with what he saw as the dual, if you will dialectic, structure of Judaism itself; an endless Co-incidentia Oppositorum of reason and bafflement, criticism and vision, clarity and mystery. The never complete effort to reconcile these opposites, in his reworking of the Mai-monidean mean, is itself the work of Torah.

What, though, can hold all of this together, keep it from dissolving into a mist of incoherencies? Presumably, the halakhah, the law.

And this is where we have a problem. Though Rabbi Heschel bespeaks a new halakhah, in which the intensity and authenticity of the tradition is brought to bear on the new and complicated moral and spiritual imperatives of our day, he never concretely spelled out his halakhic vision, takhles, what it might look like and how it might work.

He did seem to find a form of new halakhic praxis via his involvement in the Civil Rights movement at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But in deep ways Dr. King and the movement were operating prophetically, outside the comparatively quotidian realms of politics and law—a stance whose limitations Dr. King himself seemed to realize toward the end of his life.

At times one is left wondering whether Rabbi Heschel's ethics, his new halakhah, is in the end anything more than the most lyrical and moving rendition imaginable of an editorial page in a well-respected publication. And what is the wrong with that? It's that sort of liberalism—like any political stance, and certainly one based on morals—that is routinely in danger of falling deeply in love with itself, to the detriment of its ostensible beneficiaries and of its practitioners themselves.

Rabbi Heschel took much from Hillel Zeitlin, above all the sense of wonder and the ineffable as the starting point of religion. But Zeitlin was rooted day in and day out in a thick, traditional milieu, and his aesthetic religion was intimately bound up with a living practice. On what ground are we to stand while living out the demands of the ineffable? How do we discover what it is that we are to do?

Zionism, for better or worse, has provided one sort of framework for working out, or trying to work out, the new Halakhah, albeit not without great difficulties of its own. Can diaspora Judaism generate anything comparable—and within the terms of liberal democracy, the only terms that can guarantee Jewish survival?

As ever, Rabbi Heschel provokes large questions, and indeed part of the beauty of his teaching is his refusal to claim that he has them solved. Indeed his figure as it emerges from his writings eludes his own dichotomies. In his posthumous magnum opus Torah min Ha-Shamayim he argues at the discursive level for the primacy of the rationalist jurisprudence of Rabbi Yishmael, but in the sheer force of his writing and fire of his vision proves himself to be an apostle of the God-intoxicated Rabbi Aqiva on almost every page.

Yehudah Mirsky, an Orthodox rabbi, served in the U.S. State Department's human rights bureau in the Clinton Administration and is now a fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

Source Citation 

Rose, Or N. 2007. Heschel for a New Generation. Tikkun 22(1): 53.