Abraham Joshua Heschel: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual
Audacity
Sermon, February 2, 2007
Rabbi Bruce Kadden
In a telegram which he sent to President John F. Kennedy in
June, 1963 concerning an upcoming meeting with religious leaders concerning what
he calls “Negro problem,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “We forfeit the
right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes. Church
synagogues have failed. They must repent…. I propose that you Mr. President
declare state of moral emergency…. The hour calls for high moral grandeur and
spiritual audacity.”
Heschel’s daughter, Professor Susannah Heschel suggests
that the phrases “moral grandeur and spiritual audacity” aptly characterize her
father’s life work. Last month marked both his Yahrtzeit, 35 years since his
untimely death, and the 100th anniversary of his birth, offering the
appropriate opportunity to reflect on his teachings and his life. His untimely
death prevented me from having the opportunity to hear him speak, as he had been
invited to Stanford to lecture in the fall of 1972, my freshman year. Instead,
a panel of professors introduced me to the teachings of this remarkable man.
Throughout February, my sermons will focus on his words and deeds which offer a
lasting legacy to one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th
century.
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907;
his parents were descended from famous Chasidic rebbes and he was raised in that
community, characterized by “intense piety and religious observance.” Although
he would leave behind the Chasidic world, much of what he learned and
experienced, particularly the spiritual fervor, would be reflected in his later
life and writings.
His father died when he was just nine, perhaps in part
opening the door beyond the Chasidic world. Even as a teenager, Heschel showed
a propensity for writing; Hebrew essays about the Talmud were printed in the
early 1920s in a Warsaw rabbinical publication. He also began supplementing his
traditional studies with reading secular books, opening a whole new world to
him. His intellectual curiosity led him to study at the Mathematical-Natural
Science Gymnasium in Vilna, from which he graduated in 1927 and then on to
Berlin, which was the great center of European intellectual and cultural life.
He studied both secular subjects including Latin, German language literature and
history, and philosophy, and Jewish subjects including Hebrew, Bible, Talmud,
liturgy, philosophy of religion and literature; he even became an instructor of
Talmud and was ordained a rabbi in 1934 by the liberal Jewish seminary, although
he also studied at the Orthodox seminary down the street.
He had already completed his doctoral studies at the
University of Berlin, writing a dissertation that would be the basis for his
book The Prophets. In order to receive his doctorate, however, his dissertation
had to be published, but with Hitler having come to power it was increasingly
difficult for a Jew to be published in Germany. His dissertation was eventually
published by the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow to very favorable reviews.
His daughter points out how remarkable the reception to
this book about the Hebrew prophets was in light of “the growing calls by many
Protestants in the third Reich for eradicating the Old Testament from the
Christian canon.” I will speak more about Heschel’s understanding of the
prophets next week.
Heschel continued to live and teach in Berlin, despite the
ascendancy of Hitler and the rising anti-Semitism, which caused most of his
Christian colleagues to abandon him. Recognizing that he had no future in
Germany, he began seeking an academic position elsewhere. A position came upon
in England at a Quaker school, but he was unable to obtain a visa; he also
pursued the possibility of teaching at a new rabbinical seminary in Prague, but
the country’s political crisis curtailed that endeavor.
Suddenly, in October, 1938, Heschel, along with other
Polish Jews, were deported; many of the Jews remained at the border for months
because they were denied entry into Poland, but Heschel’s family secured his
release. He began teaching and lecturing, but continued to pursue opportunities
to leave Europe.
His perseverance paid off, thanks to the heroic efforts of
Dr. Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been trying
for a number of years to obtain visas from the State Department to rescue Jewish
scholars. Morgenstern finally received five visas and offered one of the spots
to Heschel; even with this firm offer, the process was complicated, and involved
returning to Germany to complete paperwork and then making his way to England,
where his brother lived, before finally arriving in the United States in March
of 1940. All of his family who remained in Poland was killed, including his
sister, Ester, his mother, his sister, Gittel, and his sister, Devorah. Heschel
never returned to Germany or Poland.
Heschel’s years in Cincinnati –at the time the only campus
of HUC, were lonely and challenging. He tried in vain to get his mother and
sister, as well as other relatives and friends out of Europe, as well as to try
to call attention to the horrible situation of the Jews in Europe, to little
response. The students at HUC were quite poorly prepared for their studies
compared to the students he had taught in Europe. However, he did meet Sylvia
Straus, a concert pianist, who would become his wife.
Meanwhile, Heschel was lured away to teach at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement’s rabbinic school in New York,
where he would spend the remainder of his career, leaving a lasting impression
on almost two generations of Conservative rabbis. He would also write
prolifically, publishing incredible books on religious thought and the
philosophy of religion including Man is Not Alone and God in Search of
Man, as well as his masterpiece The Sabbath, which I will speak about
in two weeks.
What runs through all of Heschel’s writings, and what
separates his works from those of other Jewish writers of the time, is an effort
to translate the essence of what he experienced growing up in a Chassidic
community to the modern, secular world. He often harshly criticized modern
religiosity, which he found dry and mundane. He was one of the first to write
of the failure of modernity. “Modern man,” he wrote, “fell into the trap of
believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair
which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.”
But he did not blame science or contemporary philosophy for
the growing irrelevance of religion. Rather, he argued that “Religion declined
because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is
completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit…its message
becomes meaningless.”
Heschel insisted that religion must speak to the issues of
the day. Revising his work on the prophets for publication in English served as
the impetus for his involvement in the great social movements of the 1960s. He
met Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963 at a conference on religion and race,
and immediately became involved in the civil rights movement. He was invited to
lead the historic march on Selma in 1965 along with King, Ralph Bunche and Ralph
Abernathy. Reflecting on Selma, Heschel uttered his famous saying, “I felt my
feet were praying.” King would have been a guest at Heschel’s Passover Seder
had he not been assassinated just prior to the holiday in 1968.
King also helped found Clergy and Laymen Concerned about
Vietnam, which would become the leading voice in the anti-war movement of the
1960s. Although many rabbis would eventually participate in this effort,
Heschel was among the first, and the most passionate. His daughter writes, “The
anguish my father felt over the war in Vietnam was relentless; I often found him
in the middle of the night, unable to sleep.”
The involvement in these social issues brought him in close
contact, often leading to deep friendship, with many Christian leaders who
deeply respected his theological insights which often applied as much to
Christianity as they did to Judaism. Among his close friends were William Sloan
Coffin, chaplain at Yale, and Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the greatest Protestant
theologian of the 20th century. Heschel delivered the eulogy at
Niebuhr’s funeral.
Heschel’s involvement in interfaith activities led to his
being invited to be an observer at the Second Vatican Council, where he became
friendly with Cardinal Bea, who oversaw the development of Nostra Aetate
(In Our Time), the section dealing with the relationship between the Catholic
Church and other religions. No doubt Heschel had an influence on the historic
paragraphs pertaining to Judaism, paragraphs which categorically rejected
anti-Semitism and forged a new, positive relationship between the Catholic
Church and the Jewish people.
In summing up his writings and his life, his daughter
notes, “The soil of Jewish piety in which he was bred was destroyed, but through
him that world did not vanish. Like the Baal Shem Tov, he brought heaven down
to earth, and in his writings we have a revelation of the holiness of Jewish
life.” By reflecting on his life and writings this month, I hope not only to
share some of his most important teachings and lessons, but also, through him,
recapture some of that lost world.
Zecher Tzadik l’vracha. May the memory of the
righteous be for a blessing.
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