Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Activist

by Edward K. Kaplan

“Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us wisdom to live by – relevant not only in the isolation of our study rooms but also in moments of facing staggering cruelty and the threat of disaster. The question of man must be pondered not only in the halls of learning but also in the presence of inmates in extermination camps, and in the sight of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (1965)

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a philosopher of religion who defended human holiness. That each and every human being is made in the image of God was the foundation of his piety, his life of prayer and study, and his sometimes controversial social activism.

Rabbi Heschel asserted that scholarship cannot remain detached: “Philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” In the 1960s, his public positions often angered or intimidated the complacent or the defensive – and even many of his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary – but he inspired those who sought to reconcile progressive politics with a commitment to biblical ideals and a longing for faith. The effectiveness of his witness – for Christians as for Jews – was because he did not confuse spiritual imperatives with political tactics. The biblical God remained the ultimate judge.

From the 1960s until his death in 1972, Rabbi Heschel was recognized as the most prominent traditional Jew (that is, a Jew with a beard and skullcap) to take radical positions in matters of moral, political, and interreligious controversy. For Christians, especially, he seemed to resemble a Hebrew prophet, with his bushy white hair, his whiskers, his vehement manner, and his biblical oratory. The man felt authentic because his message was substantial and rooted entirely in Jewish sources. He earned his charisma.

Rabbi Heschel achieved national acclaim in 1960 when he addressed the first White House Conference on Youth, returning the following year to speak on aging. In 1963, he denounced American discrimination against blacks at the first National Conference of Religion and Race in Chicago, where he met the Rev. Martin Luther King. Rabbi Heschel grounded his judgment on theological insight, and it is absolute: “Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is.” The photograph of Rabbi Heschel at Dr. King’s side on the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march still recalls the vibrant civil rights alliances now past.

During these same years, 1961 through 1965, at the Second Vatican Council in Rome, Rabbi Heschel influenced the drafting of Nostra Aetate, the Roman Catholic Church document that recognized the sanctity of Judaism and the Jewish people, fostering nearly 40 years of Jewish-Christian dialogue around the world.

From 1965 on, he was a dramatic presence at press conferences, worship meetings, and national protests as he opposed the United States’ military intervention in Vietnam, which he considered criminal. Responsibility is our inescapable inheritance as free citizens, he insisted.

The Vietnam emergency became the religious imperative of Rabbi Heschel’s final years. At an interfaith worship meeting in Washington, DC, in 1967, in which I participated, he explained that the divine reality brought him to oppose the war: “The encounter of man and God is an encounter within the world. We meet within a situation of shared suffering, of shared responsibility. This is implied in believing in One God in whose eyes there is no dichotomy of here and there, of me and them. Oceans divide us, God’s presence unites us, and God is present wherever man is afflicted, and all of humanity is embroiled in every agony wherever it may be.

“Though I am not a native of Vietnam, ignorant of its language and traditions, I am involved in the plight of the Vietnamese.”

Rabbi Heschel assumed the spiritual unity of all human beings. The breakdown of trust in the U.S. government during the Vietnam period made all the more urgent a commitment to biblical standards of personal integrity and civic responsibility.

The foundation of his activism is his major study, The Prophets, published in 1962, which defines a “theology of pathos,” the assumption that God is emotionally involved with history. “The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.”

In Rabbi Heschel’s eyes, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk are spiritual radicals of ancient Israel who challenge today’s cynical expectations. When Rabbi Heschel stepped into the public arena, he drew many striking phrases from his book. In it we already find the prototype of his Vietnam era slogan, “In a democratic society, some are guilty, all are responsible.”

In his last interview, Rabbi Heschel claimed that writing The Prophets had thrust him from his tranquil study into public action. Yet his early writings in Europe demonstrate that he never separated spiritual and moral concerns. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Rabbi Heschel completed his doctoral dissertation on prophetic inspiration at the University of Berlin; he based his English-language book on this work.

That same year he also published a collection of poems in Yiddish, his mother tongue, Der Shem Ham’- Forash: Mentsh (The Ineffable Name of God: Man), in which the young poet boldly questions divine compassion and justice. As lovingly translated by Rabbi Morton Leifman, Rabbi Heschel’s poem “I and Thou” expresses his closeness to the God of pathos in these bold terms: “My nerves are clustered with Yours, Your dreams have met with mine. Are we not one in the bodies of multitudes?”

At the foundation of all of Rabbi Heschel’s writings and actions is what I call a “sacred humanism,” an ethical theology that demands reverence for human beings as literally, in both body and spirit, an image of God. The “human” is not a synonym of weakness and corruption but “a disclosure of the divine, and all men are one in God’s care for man. Many things on earth are precious, some are holy, humanity is holy of holies.” As he continues: “To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense the image of God, the presence of God.” This mystical core energizes his prophetic ethics. Each and every person is sacred.

Given the horrors of daily life, this is an astounding doctrine, and one that violates common sense. How little proof we possess that being human is a privilege, almost a miracle. But for Rabbi Heschel, God and humankind are inextricably, metaphysically intertwined.

Readers of today can gain a sense of Rabbi Heschel’s charisma in The Insecurity of Freedom (1966), a collection of his essays and speeches from the 1950s and 1960s on such topics as religious education, interfaith dialogue, medical practice, Soviet Jewry, racism and segregation, and the state of Israel. His 1960 address on “Children and Youth” opens with a judgment on American culture. Alienation – an unhealthy introversion and lack of meaning – is our enemy: “The problem of our youth is not youth. The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual. The central problem is that we do not know how to think, how to pray, how to cry, how to resist the deceptions of too many persuaders. There is no community of those who worry about integrity.”

Rabbi Heschel examines the context of each problem in order to guide educators, and parents, not to blame. “The mainspring of tenderness and compassion lies in reverence. It is our supreme educational duty to enable the child to revere. The heart of the Ten Commandments is to be found in the words: ‘Revere thy father and thy mother.’ Without profound reverence for father and mother, our ability to observe the other commandments is dangerously impaired. The problem we face, the problem I as a father face, is why my child should revere me. Unless my child will sense in my personal existence acts and attitudes that evoke reverence – the ability to delay satisfactions, to overcome prejudices, to sense the holy, to strive for the noble – why should she revere me?”

The situation of elderly people also receives a prophetic audit. Instead of fulfilling their potential as divine image, the elderly are most vulnerable to depression. They are haunted by the sense of being useless to family and society, and being rejected by them; by a nagging emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and the fear of time. Rabbi Heschel proposed that we might alleviate these realistic uncertainties by enhancing elderly people’s education toward wisdom. The years of old age may enable us to attain high values we failed to sense, the insights we have missed, the wisdom we ignored. They are indeed formative years, rich in possibilities to unlearn the follies of a lifetime, to see through inbred self-deceptions, to deepen understanding and compassion, to widen the horizon of honesty, to refine the sense of fairness.

Rabbi Heschel summarized the preciousness of human existence in a striking aphorism: “There is no human being who does not carry a treasure in his soul; a moment of insight, a memory of love, a dream of excellence, a call to worship... It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, A Soul, And a Moment.

“And the three are always there.

“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” Rabbi Heschel was convinced that true prayer could save our religious institutions. Prayer can create commitments, strengthening the self and its ability to judge and to act with moral independence. Addressing an interreligious convocation held in Milwaukee, he upheld liturgical inwardness – not abstract ethics or theology – as the measure of democracy: “Religion as an establishment must remain separated from the government. Yet prayer as a voice of mercy, as a cry for justice, as a plea for gentleness, must not be kept apart. Let the spirit of prayer dominate the world. Let the spirit of prayer interfere in the affairs of man. Prayer is private, a service of the heart; but let concern and compassion, born out of prayer, dominate public life.

“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.”

Have these biblical ideals been irremediably perverted by fundamentalists, both political and religious? It is a painful historical irony that for centuries lethal conflicts have been fostered by “peoples of the Book.” The Old and New Testaments and the Qu’ran seem to have engendered viciously self-righteous progeny, poised to devour each other. Universal justice and compassion too often have been forgotten, as we have silenced the One God speaking in those pages. We can only speculate how Rabbi Heschel might have judged the fanaticisms of our times.

For Jews particularly, Rabbi Heschel’s universal application of biblical ethics challenges a narrow destiny for the state of Israel. While nationalism and the struggle for ethnic autonomy seem to be sundering humanity, Heschel warned Israeli Jews not to confuse religious responsibilities and political rights: “It would be a fatal distortion to reduce Judaism to individualism. [...] At the same time, it would be suicidal to reduce Judaism to collectivism or nationalism. Jewish existence is a personal situation.” His notion of polarity preserves both individual and group identity. Inwardness and community cannot be separated.

Rabbi Heschel’s spiritual radicalism emboldens us to seek truth, justice, and compassion, in our politics as well as in our hearts. The prophetic model helps us judge the civil and ethnic wars that continue to threaten the “new world order.” There is only one human race. Religious and educational institutions – as well as government – must submit to judgment.

Can we accept his challenge?