Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907 to a family of Hasidic aristocracy: his father descended from the Apter Rov (Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt, 1748–1825), one of the major figures of the early-19th-century Hasidic generation; his mother from the Berditchev dynasty. He was groomed from boyhood as a Hasidic rebbe — a marked child, recognized within the community for unusual intellectual and spiritual gifts. In his late teens he made the unprecedented decision to leave the Hasidic milieu for secular education in Vilna and then Berlin, where he completed a doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1933 (his dissertation on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible became the seed of his later masterpiece). He was a Hochschule student of the major figures of late-Weimar Jewish thought — [[martin-buber|Martin Buber]] chief among them.

In 1937 Buber, returning to Germany to direct the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, called Heschel back to Frankfurt as his successor at the Mittelstelle für jüdische Erwachsenenbildung. In October 1938 the Polish-born Heschel was deported by the Nazis as part of the Polenaktion — expelled into the Polish border zone with thousands of other Polish-born Jews. He returned briefly to Warsaw, then escaped to London in 1939 and to the United States in 1940. His mother and three of his sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.

In America he taught first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and from 1945 at the Jewish Theological Seminary in [[beacon-ny|New York]]. He spent the rest of his life there, producing the books and sermons that have made him one of the most read Jewish theologians of the 20th century.

What he taught

Heschel’s theology is characterized by a series of distinctive notes:

• Radical amazement. Heschel’s recurring claim is that the proper response to the world is not analysis but awe. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What he calls radical amazement — being struck dumb by the sheer fact of existence — is, for Heschel, the precondition of any genuine religious thought.
• Prophet rather than philosopher. Heschel’s The Prophets (1962) is one of the great works of 20th-century theological writing. He argues that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were not predictors of the future but witnesses to God’s pathos — God’s emotional concern for the world and its inhuman suffering. The prophet is the human who has felt, briefly, the divine grief at injustice; the prophetic life flows from that contagion.
• [[the-sabbath-heschel|The Sabbath]] as a cathedral in time. [[the-sabbath-heschel|The Sabbath]] (1951) is his short masterpiece. The Sabbath, Heschel argues, is a sanctuary in time; Judaism is not primarily a religion of sacred space but of sacred time. The book is a sustained meditation on the practice of [[rest|stopping]], weekly, and on what gets noticed when one does.
• Action as prayer. Heschel’s civil rights activism flowed directly from his theology. I felt my legs were praying — his remark after marching with King at Selma — was not a rhetorical flourish; it was a precise theological claim. To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child.

The friendships

Heschel’s relationships with Martin Luther King Jr. and with the Catholic theologians at the Second Vatican Council shaped major strands of mid-20th-century American religious life. He worked behind the scenes (with Cardinal Bea and others) to help draft Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that transformed the Catholic theological position toward Judaism. He spoke alongside King on civil rights and against Vietnam — sometimes literally on the same platform. In a Christmas season speech in 1968, after King’s assassination, Heschel said: Martin Luther King Jr. is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us. His presence is the hope of America.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[jewish-mysticism]]
• Parallels: [[thomas-merton]] · [[howard-thurman]] · [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel. [[the-sabbath-heschel|The Sabbath]]. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951. Source class: book / primary.
2. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951. Source class: book / primary.
3. Abraham Joshua Heschel. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955. Source class: book / primary.
4. Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Prophets. Harper, 1962. Source class: book / primary.
5. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Ed. Susannah Heschel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Source class: collected essays.
6. Edward K. Kaplan & Samuel H. Dresner. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness. Yale, 1998 (vol. 1) / 2007 (vol. 2). Source class: book / definitive biography.

Lenses still to grow

• The Berlin years in the 1920s and 1930s — the formation in late-Weimar academic Jewish life.
• The prophetic theology of The Prophets in detail; one of the major theological works of the century.
• The King friendship as a piece of American religious-civil-rights history.
• His Vatican II involvement and the drafting of Nostra Aetate.
• His daughter Susannah Heschel as a continuing scholarly voice; the family’s American Jewish theological lineage.