A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It

The New York Times
December 24, 2007
CONNECTIONS

A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food to be had.

In response, according to a new biography, “Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972” by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale), Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?”

Yes, she acknowledged.

“Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?”

Perhaps, she admitted.

Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?”

“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”

“What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”

And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.

Of course Heschel, with his rabbinic features, could not have looked too much like the jolly gentleman expected to visit homes late Christmas Eve. But the spirit evident in this anecdote must have served him well over the years as he taught aspiring rabbis, met with Pope Paul VI and became a leader in the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War and interfaith movements. At his death in 1972 he was one of this country’s best-known Jewish figures.

This year’s centennial of Heschel’s birth, commemorated by the new biography and a conference this month at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, takes place in a very different world. Surely no one today could write, as he did in his landmark 1955 book, “God in Search of Man,” that there is an “eclipse of religion in modern society.” If anything, there is no escape from talk about faith. Nor is the relationship between religious convictions and political activism as simple as it might have once seemed.

But in turning again to Heschel’s writings, which had such an impact in the 1950s and ’60s, I was startled by how much vitality they still possess. The Heschel biography shows how many people were touched by his charismatic persona; the potential for such contact is evident in his own books as well.

Admittedly there are times when Heschel can seem sentimental or, as in his early book “The Earth Is the Lord’s,” can romanticize the past. He turns the lost world of his fathers — the communities of Eastern European Hasidim and their rabbis — into an almost utopian realm. The scholarly skepticism of his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where close textual analysis was more eagerly embraced than Heschel’s inspirational philosophy, does not always seem unmerited.

But no modern Jewish thinker has had as profound an effect on other faiths as Heschel has; the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said he was “an authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.”

Nor has any Jewish theologian since Heschel succeeded in speaking to such a wide range of readers while rigorously attending to the nuances of Judaism.

Some of this uniqueness can be felt in the way Heschel approached the woman in the airport. Her mockery is defused, the interaction shifted to the mundane. It is as if Heschel were saying: “I understand I’m not what you’re used to. But I’m prepared to meet you casually, accepting your comparison to a make-believe figure. But surely you can see that your anger is not justified?”

The confrontation dissolves into a conversation, the hostility into humor. The temptation would have been to do the opposite — to chide or stiffen with resentment — particularly given Heschel’s own personal trials. A yeshiva student in Poland, he rebelled not by becoming a secular Jew but by getting a doctorate in theology and philosophy from the University of Berlin. He fled the Nazis (who murdered one of his sisters and caused the death of his mother) but never found a comfortable intellectual home in the United States — neither during his early years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati nor during his long career at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Perhaps that history of trauma and dislocation made him more alert to disruptions in others. But in the airport conversation, Heschel gently found a way to dispose of opposing social roles — the protesting rabbi scorning racism, the put-upon woman threatened by difference — and establish the beginnings of an understanding.

The quest for common ground seemed to inspire his theological explorations as well. Heschel, influenced by German phenomenology, was preoccupied with experience rather than fact, with poetic evocation rather than explication. At the seminary he was a professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism. He was intent on communicating the incommunicable, exploring the ineffable.

In a book about the Sabbath he describes Judaism’s focus on the sanctification of time. In referring to God he does not imagine an Aristotelian prime mover but a transcendent being who needed humanity to fulfill himself. In thinking about humanity Heschel asked, “What way of living is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of life?” Such speculations crossed doctrinal boundaries and helped make him an important ecumenical force. “No religion is an island,” he wrote.

But amid this fervor Heschel was also a follower of Jewish laws, putting an emphasis on ritual and actions, not just on devotion and belief. This was also the source of Heschel’s ethical perspective: Every deed poses a problem with moral and religious implications.

“Judaism,” he wrote, “is not a science of nature but a science of what man ought to do with nature.” No act is permitted to escape scrutiny.

These poles of devotion and deed combined in Heschel’s activist politics in the 1960s, resulting in positions that still tend to determine his reputation. At the recent conference one speaker wondered where a contemporary Heschel might be found, someone prepared to take a stand against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the way Heschel did against the Vietnam War.

But those political positions are Heschel’s least compelling. In the civil-rights movement his moral stance was clear, but in discussing the Vietnam War, in which the issues were more complex, his statements, affected by the temper of the time, became less revealing, replacing evocation with hortatory proclamations modeled on the biblical prophets. “There is nothing so vile as the arrogance of the military mind,” he wrote. He used the word “evil” to allude to the “insane asylum” around him.

The result was a kind of theological politics. The prophets claim such declarations to be divine revelations, but in the earthly realm acts and consequences must be assessed, their complications untangled. No doubt political issues are sometimes so urgent they demand theological treatment. But there are risks in such a confusion of realms.

Theological politics tends to eliminate distinctions and is impatient with differences, empathy and argument. Had those kinds of views shaped Heschel’s perspective at the airport, instead of accepting the eggs from the offending woman, he might have thrown them in her face.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

"...There is a unique kind of transparence about things and events. The world is seen through, and no evil can conceal G-d completely. So the pious man is ever alert to see behind the appearance of things a trace of the divine, and thus his attitude toward life is one of expectant reverence.

Because of this attitude of reverence, the pious man is at peace with life in spite of its conflicts. He patiently acquiesces in life's vicissitudes because he glimpses spiritually their potential meaning.

Every experience opens the door into a temple of new light, although the vestibule may be dark and dismal. The pious man accepts life's ordeals and its need of anguish, because he recognizes these as belonging to the totality of life. Such acceptance does not mean complacency or fatalistic resignation. He is not insensitive. On the contrary, he is keenly sensitive to pain and suffering, to adversity and evil in his own life and in that of others; but he has the inner strength to rise above grief, and with this understanding of what these sorrows really are, grief seems to him a sort of arrogance.

We never know the ultimate meaning of things, and so a sharp distinction between what we deem good or bad in experience is unfair. It is a greater thing to love than to grieve, and with love's awareness of the far-reachedness of all that effects our lives, the pious man will never overestimate the seeming weight of momentary happenings.

The pious man does not take life for granted. The weighty business of living does not cloud for him the miracle that we live through G-d. No routine of social or economic life dulls his mindfulness of this - the ineffably wonderful in nature and history. History to him is a perpetual improvisation by the Creator, which is being continually and violently interfered with by man, and his heart is fixed on this great Mystery that is being played by G-d and man.

Thus his main asset is not some singular experience but life itself. Any exceptional experience serves only as a keyhole for the key of his belief. He does not depend on the exceptional, for to him common deeds are adventures in the domain of the spiritual, and all his normal thoughts are, as it were, sensations of the holy. He feels the hidden warmth of good in all things, and finds hints of G-d cropping up in almost every ordinary thing on which he gazes. It is for this reason that his words bring hope into a sordid and despairing world..."