Abraham Joshua Heschel: Changing the World One Word at a Time

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Assistant Director

Twice in the past several months I've had the opportunity to attend conferences on the life and thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel, marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

My fascination with Heschel's life and work began on the very first Shabbat of my college experience. After lunch, I took a full stack of reading outside, to try to make some headway in the unbelievable amount of work I had. Assaying the books, I did what any student in their right mind would have done – picked the shortest one. This way, I rationalized, I'd feel a sense of accomplishment at motivation to plow through the rest of the stack.

When I looked up again, the sun had begun to set and I had finished Heschel's slim volume entitled, The Sabbath. I knew that I had just experienced something life changing and indeed, my sense of myself as a Jew and my Jewish identity as a whole were transformed that day.

Over the course of the next few years I read my way through most of Heschel's writings, feeling awe and inspiration all along the way. I began to teach his material to others, wanting them to be touched in the way I had been touched, transformed in the way I had been transformed.

Sitting in these conferences, I've been struck by how many people have had the same experience of reading Heschel that I have and how much we all return to the fount of Heschel's wisdom for our spiritual nourishment and the energy to go on.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907. Scion of a Hasidic dynasty, he left that world behind to study in university, wedding secular knowledge to traditional passion. In 1940 he was rescued from the ravages of World War II by the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which had marshaled its resources to save Eastern European Jewish scholars from an untimely demise. That gift was not only a gift to Heschel and those who would later constitute his family, but a gift to all of us.

After several years at HUC, Heschel moved to New York to join the faculty of The Jewish Theological Seminary. As bookshelves bulged with his contributions, he began to transfer his passion for conveying God's word to action as well. In 1965 he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, a moment when, in Heschel's word, "I felt my legs were praying." He spoke out against the war in Vietnam and was, until his death in 1973, a well-known advocate for social justice.

To read Heschel's words, or to see his 1972 NBC interview with Carl Stern, is to be drawn into a world of the possible, of God's immanence. In many ways, Heschel's writing reads more like poetry than prose, its mellifluence a lure to its myriad possibilities.

About Shabbat he wrote: "What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time, to raise the good to the level of the holy, to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity."

About race relations he wrote: "There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs doe unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted."

About Israel he wrote: "What is so precious about the land? What is the magnetic quality of its atmosphere? The land of Israel -- biblical chapters hovering everywhere. Places like Hebrew letters, waiting to be vocalized, waiting for crowns with which to be adorned. The land is a text. Here you are illiterate unless you remember words of Scripture. Wherever you stand you are at the frontier of biblical moments. It is a land where the Bible is at home."

About the war in Vietnam he wrote: "In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."

The rich and nuanced legacy Heschel left for us continues to ring true and the timelessness of his words is increasingly evident. To lose yourself in Heschel's prose is to find yourself anew. Each of us should feel compelled to read and re-read, starting with The Sabbath or Man is Not Alone, moving forward to the depths of God in Search of Man and the breadth of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. Professor Ed Kaplan has written a wonderful companion volume, entitled Holiness in Words, as well as a two volume biography (volume two is due out in September 2007).

I, for one, will put my writing aside now to lose myself in the most recent of Heschel's published works, Heavenly Torah, released in translation (from the Hebrew) for the first time last year. New to my bookshelf, it is, like all of Heschel's work, a gift of lasting value.

[Posted 03/20/07]