Presenter and Respondent Abstracts
Mary Boys
Roundtable Discussion -
No Religion Is an Island: Religious Pluralism and Interfaith Dialogue
The Salutary Experience of Pushing Religious Boundaries: Heschel and a Theology of Dialogue
In my contribution to the discussion, I will put Heschel’s 1965 address “No Religion Is an Island ” in conversation with contemporary writers on the theology and practice of interfaith dialogue. I shall focus especially on the writings of British scholar Michael Barnes, while also reflecting on the contribution of a “textured religious particularism” to forming pluralistic societies.
Steve Brand
Praying With My Legs: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Search for a Meaningful Existence (work-in-progress)
Upon it’s completion, Praying With My Legs will be a 2-hour documentary about the life, thought and transformative impact of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The film explores his religious thought: his attack on nihilism in expressing his deep-seated certainty of “meaning beyond the mystery;” his conception of Depth Theology -- the cultivation of that primal religious experience that comes to us even before creed, before dogma; his view of prayer as “gathering the soul into focus” in an act of self-surrender; his concept of Divine Pathos (God’s abiding concern and feeling for mankind), of Radical Amazement (the miraculous nature of what we take for granted), and his belief that God is ever in search of man even when man is acutely persuaded of God’s absence. Heschel's profoundly eloquent writings have been a beacon for those of diverse religious backgrounds who hunger for spiritual connectedness.
But Heschel was more than a religious philosopher. He was also a passionate advocate; an activist who invoked and often seemed to embody the God-laced zeal of the Prophets of Ancient Israel, those original speakers of truth to power. Heschel (often at personal and professional risk) spoke out to President and Pope alike with moral courage and spiritual audacity taking sometimes lonely stands on behalf of the weak and oppressed, whether they were Black Americans in the Deep South facing the worst abuses of discrimination; Vietnamese civilians being napalmed or massacred; or 2 millennia of Jews denigrated and demonized by the Catholic Church, culminating in the tacit permission of Auschwitz. Despite and because of his own people’s history, Heschel was a champion of interreligious dialogue. “We must choose between interfaith or internihilism,” he would say, “…no religion is an island.” At the same time, and so pertinent to the religiously troubled world we today inhabit, Heschel was fervently opposed to religious triumphalism, which he saw as a denigration of human dignity and therefore of the very image of God.
Heschel was a 20th Century tzaddik, a rebbe to a Jewish (and some would say a human) renewal movement created out of the ashes of Eastern Europe and the birth pangs of a resurrected Israel. Himself the scion of generations of Hasidic rebbes, he brought the spirit of the niggun to America and imparted it to a generation of unaffiliated Jews and Gentiles alike.
A complicated, charismatic man who enjoyed living in the tension between polarities, be they halacha and aggada, or temporality and abidingness, he leaves behind disciples on both the left and the right as well as critics of both his thought and his politics.
Phil Cunningham
Rabbi Heschel's 1965 essay, "No Religion is an Island" makes a number of important points about how different religious communities can interact with one another respectfully and appreciatively, even while preserving their respective particularities. My panel remarks will engage Rabbi Heschel's thoughts from the perspective of a Catholic theologian seeking to relate Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ as savior of all with our renewed recognition of Israel's saving covenantal life with God. These include Heschel's comments about the need for theological humility, Jews and Christians as committed to the Hebrew Bible as scripture, religions as worshipping the God of Israel without knowing it, and the nature of divine revelation.
Arnold Eisen
Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Challenge of Religious Pluralism
One of the reasons for Abraham Heschel’s broad appeal, I think, is his religious pluralism. “No Religion is an Island,” he proclaimed in a justly-famous address at Union Theological Seminary in 1965. “Is it not clear that in spite of fundamental disagreements there is a convergence of some of our commitments…On what basis do we people of different religious commitments meet one another?”
That is indeed the question. Religious pluralism is preached far more than it is practiced, in large measure because its basis inside the various traditions is far from clear. Heschel too placed limits on what qualified for inclusion in broad arc of his respect – necessarily so, since otherwise his pluralism would have slid into relativism. Paul Griffiths, in a celebrated response to John Hick, arguably calls even such acceptance into question. “The incompatibility of truth claims…leaves us absolutely no good reason to believe.. that all religions are aimed at the same goal.”
What are the foundations and the limits of Heschel’s religious pluralism? What can we learn from his thought about the convictions required of a religious thinker in order to accord respect to other faiths? I hope to answer these questions through a close reading of several key passages in the Heschel corpus as well as through comparison to the writings of a Protestant religious thinker, close to Heschel personally and conceptually, who likewise espoused religious pluralism: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Peter A. Geffen
Contained within the expansive scope of the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel is an educational philosophy both profound and dynamic. Rooted in many ways in his magnificent Stanford lectures of 1963, Heschel articulates a much-needed direction for the enterprise of Jewish education in particular and American education in general. At Stamford he said: "Who is Man? The failure to identify himself, to know what is authentic human existence, leads him to assume a false identity, to pretending to be what he is unable to be or to not accepting what is at the very root of his being. Ignorance about man is not lack of knowledge, but false knowledge.” If Heschel was right (and I think he was and is) then we have an urgent need to articulate a philosophy of education that will address this tragic irony: that our schools may be teaching a misunderstanding (or worse) of the fundamental nature of the human being. The consequence of such miseducation leads to trivilaities, and as Heschel said: "religion (and for that matter, culture or civilization, pg) cannot survive as a triviality."
I have spent a significant portion of my career in Jewish eduction organizing a developmental model of the educational process drawn from Heschel's writings. I see this articulation as a "spiritual humanism" focussed as it is on the human condition and human potential. Heschel provides a powerful philosophical foundation for the educational institution and the individual educator. This foundation is sorely lacking in our contemporary educational institutions and the guidance of an educational philosophy drawn from Heschel's beautiful appreciation of God and Human offers the potential to redirect and provide focus to the major institutional structures entrusted with the future of the Jewish people and the moral and ethical compass of America as a whole.
Arthur Green
A Missing Link? From Rabbis to Prophets in Heschel's Thought
Among the most powerful parts of Heschel's theological message is the claim that God is in need of human beings and their deeds. "God in Search of Man" is a way of giving expression to this view, referred to as tsorekh gavoha (literally: “need on high”) in rabbinic sources. Heschel learned this notion from the Hasidic milieu in which he was raised, where its truth was taken for granted. He traced it back through the Kabbalists (especially Nahmanides) to the school of Rabbi Akiva in early rabbinic literature. A mostly unstated link in Heschel’s thought was the belief that
Susannah Heschel
This talk will review some of the key events in my father’s life and draw upon excerpts from his diaries and private letters to illustrate how he experienced those moments.
Moshe Idel
A.Y. Heschel: Mysticism and Hasidism
The mystical phenomena in Judaism especially interested A. Y. Heschel, and he returned to these issues in many of his writings. Prophecy, Revelation, Illumination, and even the term Mysticism recur in description of ancient and medieval Judaism. In his seminal book on prophecy in its two versions, Heschel distinguishes between prophecy and mysticism, especially the ecstatic form of this phenomenon. However, this distinction is less accentuated in his 1960 essay "The Mystical Element in Judaism", based almost entirely on the views of the book of the Zohar. The lecture will focus on this essay, while comparing its content to both other treatments of similar topics in his writings, as well as the divergences between his characterization of Jewish mysticism and that of Gershom Scholem, whose book has been mentioned explicitly in that context. At the center of this essay, as in the book on prophecy, stands the divine pathos, as the major cause of revelation, and the openness of the heart of the mystic to the inner life of God.
The main claim of my lecture will be that Heschel adopted a Hasidic reading of medieval Kabbalah, which consists in a more psychological understanding of the theosophical-sefirotic structure of the divine realm than found in the sources he quotes. This presentation of Kabbalah involves a propensity to de-hypostatization and de-sexualization, as well as a marginalization of the magical and to a certain extent, also the theurgical elements of medieval Kabbalah. Also evident in this essay is the modest role attributed to symbolism in Kabbalah, and a comparison between this approach and Heschel's other major essay "Symbolism in Jewish Faith" will be drawn. His critique of the role played by median structures, hypostatical-sefirotic or linguistic-symbolic, should be seen as a development starting already in medieval Kabbalah, and reminiscent of the way in which Martin Buber described the "de-schematization" of Kabbalah in Hasidism.
Reuven Kimelman
Heschel's Theology of the Rabbis
No other scholar of the twentieth century besides Abraham Joshua Heschel contributed to the theological understanding of each of the four pivotal periods of pre-modern Jewish existence: Biblical, Rabbinic, Medieval Philosophic, and Kabbalistic-Hassidic. For the Biblical period, The Prophets articulates the Divine pathos of the Most Moved Mover's involvement in the affairs of man. For the Rabbinic period, Torah Min HaShamayim BeAsplaqariah Shel HaDorot, traces the internal dialectic of Jewish theology throughout its history. This is Heschel’s magnum opus for it presents the understanding of the woof and warp of Judaism which informs his writings on contemporary theology. Heschel not only had an overarching thesis about Rabbinic Judaism, but adopted the strategy of exegeting it from within by writing it in Hebrew in categories that are native to it. In fact, many of the subsections are titled with Rabbinic quotations. This reflects his understanding of the intersect between language and thought, for as words and language inform thinking so do categories structure thought. The distinctiveness of Heschel’s contribution can be gauged by comparing his chapter headings with three other major works on Rabbinic thought: Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era:Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew], ET: The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of the Talmud.
Schechter’s work follows four basic axes: God, Israel, Torah, and issues in human nature. The structure of parts one to three of Moore’s book also basically is: Israel, God, Law, and issues in human nature. Parts four to six deal with the religious life and part seven with the future. The general outline of Urbach’s work also reflects the order of God and the heavenly realm, Man, Torah, their interrelationship, and the future. In this sense, Urbach’s work is the consummation of Schechter’s project.
A glance at the chapter headings shows how much Heschel’s agenda differs from the others. Two of the major differences are the chapters on divine pathos, i.e., the Divine reality concerned with human destiny, and the nature of revelation. In this sense, Heschel’s work on Rabbinic thought continues his work on Biblical thought. Both focus primarily on the pathos in the divine-human relationship and how revelation is the result of the interaction of the Divine and human factor. Of course, the Biblical work focuses on the prophetic understanding of the Divine while the Rabbinic work on the Rabbinic understanding of the Torah, but the dynamics surprisingly overlap.
Michael Lerner
Heschel's Legacy for the Politics of the 21st Century
A central theme running through Heschel's teachings is that there can be no real separation between serving God, spiritual life, and social transformation. Heschel was not talking about electoral politics, but about social movement politics aimed at fundamental tikkun olam work. The Prophets shows that one of Judaism's central contributions was precisely its integration of spirituality and the struggle for human liberation. But it was not only those who sought to isolate contemporary Jewish life from the task of social transformation that Heschel critiqued, but also social movements that did not understand the need to root tikkun olam in a spiritual frame and accentuate what I call ³meaning needs² and not just material needs or “rights.”
There is a huge difference between using Judaism as a source of Biblical and Talmudic quotes to bolster the already-defined agenda of the liberal/progressive world and using the insights of a spiritual consciousness to reframe politics in a much deeper way than the current leadership of the liberal and progressive world is capable. A Heschel-inspired politics would insist that in every sphere of human activity and thought we revise our concept of ³rationality, productivity or efficiency² so that they are no longer judged only by how much money or power a given path generates, but also by how much love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological behavior, and how much that path of action enhances our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and to the universe with gratitude, awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation. The Spiritual Covenant with America & The Global Marshall Plan presented to the U.S. Congress last May by the Network of Spiritual Progressives provides a way to operationalize this New Bottom Line and to make real Heschel¹s legacy.
Shaul Magid
A Missing Link: Heschel, Maximalist Religion, and the Secular
Much of the work on the theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel has focused on his reading of Jewish sources in conjunction with a theological agenda gleaned from liberal Protestant theology. Heschel was part of a larger religious liberal project invoking the prophetic voice of Judaism to counter segregation, inequality, parochialism, injustice, and apathy. In many ways he was a Cold War theologian; the enemy was communism and godlessness, the solution was God and religion. He did not live to see the rise of evangelicalism in America, radical Islam in the Middle East, or the ascendancy of Gush Emunim in Israel. He largely occupied a theological universe that was optimistic, some would say naïve, that feeling God’s presence would result in moral behavior.
Much has changed. The radical secularism of communism is gone. The liberal Protestant project in America has largely succumbed to a more vociferous evangelical Christianity. The secular Zionism of Heschel’s day has been replaced by a radical, even militant, Zionism that has little use for Heschel’s prophetic humanism. And Islam has exploded with anger, violence, and rebellion in the name of God.
The central issue that lies at the root of this paper is to argue that there is a gaping hole in Heschel’s theology; the absence of any serious discussion of the secular as a productive, constructive, and necessary category for contemporary religious thought. I will suggest that Heschel can continue to serve as a relevant spiritual voice in our time only if we can transform his Cold War definition of the secular to something more nuanced that can confront religious radicalism head-on.
I will offer a reading of the secular in Heschel using recent studies by Charles Taylor, Bruce Lincoln, and Talal Assad and others to argue that Heschel’s anti-secularism is situational and in need of serious critique and reform.
I will use various texts from his theological writings including The Prophets, Man is not Alone, God in Search of Man, and What is Man?
Aisha Y. Musa
Sharing the Legacy of Abraham
In "No Religion is an Island," Heschel stresses the importance of reverence for the God of Abraham and recognition of the importance of the Torah. The Quran also stress these same points. My discussion will examine how strongly many of Heschel's arguments in "No Religion is an Island" reflect Quranic teachings to demonstrate some of the ways in which Jews and Muslims can and should recognize and respect each other as inheritors of the legacy of Abraham.
David Novak
Holiness and Moral Integrity in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel
My late revered teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, is probably best known for his political activism during the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Whenever newsreels taken during that time are shown, one will inevitably see Heschel along side Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march to Selma, Alabama, or one will inevitably see Heschel marching in front of the White House protesting the Viet Nam War. Yet there is little in Heschel’s earlier work, written or oral, that intimates he would move into this kind of public role in the last years of his life. Although never arcane, dispassionate scholarship, Heschel’s earlier work is still theoretically engaged in the great, perennial theological question of the relationship between God and humans. In this work, his mastery of the classical Jewish texts, plus his skillful use of phenomenological method, enabled him to make theology a living discipline for committed Jewish thinkers following his example.
Was Heschel’s political activism, when he dealt with moral questions having political immediacy, merely a tangent in relation to his theoretical work? Or, was it, as some of Heschel’s detractors saw it, a way for Heschel to catapult himself into the public eye and out of his relative obscurity theretofore? This lecture rejects both of these explanations of Heschel’s political activism, especially in the area of civil rights. It argues that Heschel’s was already laying the groundwork (whether he knew it or not at the time) for his political activism in his theological reflections on divine pathos and humans as the imago Dei. Furthermore, this also shows Heschel’s insistence that practical theology (halakhah) cannot deal with great moral questions without an affirmation of its theological presuppositions (aggadah).
This lecture’s central text will be Heschel’s 1963 address, “Religion and Race,” published in his book The Insecurity of Freedom (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), pp. 85-100.
Joseph Reimer
Heschel as Jewish Educator: Inventing a new idiom for the Sabbath
In a remarkably short time after coming to the United States, Abraham Joshua Heschel emerged as a powerful voice in American Jewish letters. In 1951 he published The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. This unusual volume -which is hard to characterize in terms of genre- is an outstanding example of Heschel’s writing as educator. While this volume is not easily viewed as a work of history or philosophy, it works remarkably well as a modern Midrash intended to educate modern American readers on how to approach the often-misunderstood traditional Sabbath.
Writing as a second generation of American Jews is leaving behind the old immigrant Jewish neighborhoods for the promise of suburbia, Heschel realizes that this generation lacks all reference for understanding the traditional Sabbath. This first generation of Jews to enjoy the benefits of the American week end is hardly open to hearing about the restrictions that the traditional Sabbath imposes. Yet, they do at times crave the “holiness” that is quickly evaporating from their lives. Heschel is inventing a new language that addresses their new condition and is inviting their participation in what he calls ‘a palace in time.’
At the moment this generation is investing in the expanded spaces that suburbia offers, Heschel is pointing to the limitations of space as vehicle of redemption. As they are investing increasing time in traveling to and from work, Heschel is calling their attention to the preciousness of time. In this newly invented language, the Sabbath has all the trappings of a traditional Jewish practice, but also the allure of escaping the numbness of post-war American life. In this volume Heschel begins to develop his counter-cultural stance and, in retrospect, can be seen as belonging to a generation of American Jewish authors -like David Reisman, Paul Goodman and Philip Roth- who are calling into question the emerging American dream.
But what makes Heschel different is his seemingly traditional Jewish voice. Heschel is a traditional Eastern European rebbe who has learned to write in a new American idiom. What this paper will explore is how Heschel employs traditional Jewish terms to make a fresh case to this generation of American Jews. Heschel, the educator, creates a new idiom that seems to take his reader back into traditional Jewish sources only to deliver a contemporary message. The power of this idiom has continued to resonate for readers for the past half-century.
Leonard Saxe
Abraham Joshua Heschel, through his words and deeds, epitomizes what it is to be a Jewish American. We have many models of religious thinkers who have enabled us to understand our tradition. And, here at Brandeis University, we cannot forget the way which our namesake modeled the on-going struggle for social justice. But unlike other religious thinkers and secular leaders, Heschel connected tradition to our response to life in the American Diaspora. The presentation will consider some elements of what Heschel’s life and work teach us about how to understand and respond to the contemporary condition, where increasing technological control of the world is accompanied by new threats of war and terrorism.
Barry Shrage
Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Jewish Renaissance
In 1965, two years before the Six-Day War and four years before the student takeover of the 1969 General Assembly in Boston, Heschel challenged the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds meeting in Montreal: “In this emergency we call upon the Federation: Help us! Let us create an atmosphere of learning, a climate of reverence . . .We need a revolution in Jewish life.” The current debate over the shape and the future of all of our Jewish institutions, including synagogues, Federations, defense agencies, and JCCs reminds us again that fundraising; surveys and sociologists and market researchers and strategic planners, helpful as they can be, cannot fill the void that is left when a community loses its memory and forgets its sacred vision. Heschel consistently reminded us of the importance of belief in God in shaping a meaningful Jewish existence in modernity. Within Heschel’s conception of the world, we can, I believe, find the possibility of Jewish renewal and renaissance in our time.
In a way, Heschel’s 1965 speech represents a kind of turning point. Before the speech, assimilation was the unquestioned norm among most American Jews who assumed that the path of assimilation was the path of America, the path of progress and the inevitable path of the Jewish people. After Heschel’s speech, doubts began to arise, doubts that Heschel himself captured and transmitted to a generation of students like Hillel Levine, Arnie Eisen and Art Green who became the teachers of a new generation of Jewish leaders through new institutions and programs who are now teaching another generation that will continue the great struggle that Heschel anticipated in the early sixties.
Gordon Tucker
This presentation will be an exploration of the perennial issues of faith, knowledge, and certainty as they appear in various of Heschel’s writings throughout his career. From his early work on the prophets and the philosophy of Saadia, through Man is Not Alone, Torah Min Hashamayim, and his work on Kotzk, Heschel went through the paces of every serious religious thinker, sorting out what we can know, how we can know, how important it is to know, and how certitude can both bolster and kill the religious spirit. Attention will be paid to how Heschel’s own voice speaks through his interpretations of other thinkers, and to some other modern and contemporary thinkers on the broad subject, such as James, Dewey and Berger.