Remembering Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: two videos

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I confess that I react quite negatively to any disrespect directed toward the Hebrew Scriptures or to the evolving — and internally debated — revelation of God they contain (to denigrate them, even mildly, is a surefire way to lose my respect and regard for one’s intellect, if not my toleration). They are to me, and unequivocally always will be (as they must be for all disciples of the Jewish Jesus), sacred, “God-breathed” texts. I reverence the Torah, love the Writings and the Prophets, and I pray the Psalms daily. As a Christian myself (a title as old as the first-century Jewish-gentile church in Antioch that I won’t disparage — I wear it, historical warts and all), I find that revelation brought to its sharpest clarity in the person and halakhah of Jesus; but I also believe that the portrait of God made humanly visible in him is already to be glimpsed in the great Prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. And that’s my personal introduction to one of the most cherished theological influences in my life, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 - 1972). He wrote, in fact, one of the best introductions (in two volumes) of the Prophets of Israel in print, and it’s my opinion that his two books (which I have turned to again and again throughout the years), Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion and God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, belong in every serious theological collection.

Below are two videos, one a PBS documentary that explores Rabbi Heschel’s remarkable life, and the other a full NBC interview with him from 1972, taped shortly before his death. Both are stimulating, and they constitute an invitation to read him. He was anything but an arid scholar or pedant. His books are filled with warmth, occasional humor, and much wisdom. About Heschel, the “My Jewish Learning” website has this to say (you can read the entire article by clicking here):

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), a descendant of two important Hasidic dynasties, was born in Warsaw. After receiving a thorough Jewish education in Poland, Heschel entered the University of Berlin, where in 1934 he received his doctorate for a study of the biblical prophets… . In 1937 Heschel became Martin Buber’s successor at the Judisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt and head of adult Jewish education in Germany, but the following year, he and other Polish Jews were deported by the Nazis. [Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a German-Jewish social and religious philosopher. The Frankfurt Lehrhaus, an experimental center for adult Jewish education, aimed to teach marginal, acculturated Jews about Judaism.]

After stays in Warsaw and London, in 1940 he came to the United States to teach at the Hebrew Union College. In 1945 Heschel became professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and began to publish a series of works, ranging from studies on the piety of East European Jewry and the inward character of Jewish observance, to religious symbolism, Jewish views of humanity, and contemporary moral and political issues. Before his untimely death, Heschel had become highly respected among American religionists of many faiths not only for his writings but also for his active role in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s and in the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Describing his religious and mystical perspective, the article continues:

How can modern man regain a personal awareness of God? A universally accessible feeling is the experience of the sublime—for example, in the presence of the grandeur of nature. A sense of the sublime entails wonder and “radical astonishment” Astonishment is radical because it embraces not only what one sees but the very act of seeing and the very self that is astonished in its ability to see.

The individual confronts the “ineffable,” that which cannot ever be expressed in words. Heschel insists that the ineffable is not a psychological state but an encounter with a mystery “within and beyond things and ideas” The divine is “within” because the self is “something transcendent in disguise.” The divine is “beyond” because it also is, “a message that discloses unity where we see diversity; that discloses peace where we are involved in discord…God means: No one is ever alone.”

A second experience that, according to Heschel, awakens the individual to the presence of God is a pervasive, underlying anxiety that he calls “the need to be needed.” Religion entails the certainty that something is asked of man and that he is not a mere bystander in the cosmos. When the individual feels the challenge of a power, not born of his will, that robs him of self-sufficiency by a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of his actions—then God’s concern for his creatures is grasped.

For Heschel, it is the Bible—particularly the prophets—that provides a primary model for authentic spirituality. Biblical revelation is not a mystical act of seeking God but an awareness of being sought and reached by Him: The prophets bear witness to an event that they formulate in their own words, but the event itself is God’s reaching out. It is not propositonal truths about God or general norms and values that the prophets transmit but the “divine pathos” (pathos from the Greek root denoting emotion, feeling, passion). The divine pathos is God’s outraged response to man’s sin and his merciful response to man’s suffering and anguish. Heschel does not actually attribute “pathos” to God’s metaphysical essence, but sees it as a corrective to a conception of monotheism that restricts the scope of God’s knowledge to universal principles only…

A third mode of apprehending God’s presence is the life of holiness. A few of Heschel’s aphorisms convey his rejection of a utilitarian, sociological approach to Jewish observance and his supracognitive, mystical feeling for halacha [Jewish law]. The halacha sharpens men’s sympathy to the ineffable: “To perform deeds of holiness is to absorb the holiness of deeds.” “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does.” Whereas the term ceremony merely expresses what we think, mitzvah expresses what God wills: a mitzvah [commandment/good deed] is “a prayer in the form of a deed.”

For Heschel, Jewish survival is a spiritual act. God’s concern with man is expressed in Judaism through the idea of a covenant imposing a mutual, correlative responsiveness on man and God both, because God needs man for the attainment of his ends in the world.

Heschel stands in that stream of modern Jewish thought which emphasizes the limitations of reason to grasp the full significance of the religious life. His approach has been called “devotional philosophy”, a religious rhetoric, mystical apologetics—all honored and accepted types if religious writing. Heschel himself characterized his method as “depth theology,” the attempt to rediscover the questions to which religion is the answer…

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And with that, here are the two videos:

First, you can access the hour-long PBS biography by clicking on this link.

And here is the 1972 interview: