Heschel Text Study
To read No religion is an island
Articles in Honor of the Yohrzeit of Abraham Joshua Heschel
Holiness in Words: Contents and Study Guide
Who is Heschel?
I speak as a member of a congregation whose founder was Abraham, and the name of my rabbi is Moses.
I speak as a person who was able to leave Warsaw, the city in which I was born, just six weeks before the disaster began. My destination was New York, it would have been Treblinka. I am a brand plucked from the fire, in which my people was burned to death. I am a brand plucked from the fire of an altar of Satan on which millions of human lives were exterminated to evil's greater glory, and on which so much else was consumed: the divine image of so many human beings, many people's faith in the God of justice and compassion, and much of the secret and power of attachment to the Bible bred and cherished in the hearts of men for nearly two thousand years.
No Religion Is An Island, 1965
Piety
The pious man is possessed by his awareness of the presence and nearness of God. Everywhere and at all times he lives as in His sight, whether he remains always heedful of His proximity or not. He feels embraced by God's mercy as by a vast encircling space. Awareness of God is as close to him as the throbbing of his own heart, often deep and calm but at times overwhelming, intoxicating, setting the soul afire. The momentous reality of God stands there as peace, power and endless tranquility, as an inexhaustible source of help, as boundless compassion, as an open gate awaiting prayer. It sometimes happens that the life of a pious man becomes so involved in God that his heart overflows as though it were a cup in the hand of God. This presence of God is not like the proximity of a mountain or the vicinity of an ocean, the view of which one may relinquish by closing the eyes or removing from the place. Rather is this convergence with God unavoidable, inescapable; like air in space, it is always breathed in, even though one is not always aware of continuous respiration.
Man Is Not Alone, p. 282.
The Depths of Language
Words are more than signs, more than combinations of letters. Letters are one-dimensional and have only one function: to represent sounds. Words, on the other hand, have fullness and depth, they are multi-dimensional. It is true that we employ words to represent things or to let them carry our ideas and to convey them to others. Yet to say that words are nothing but mental beasts of burden would be the same as to see in the person who carries our luggage to the train nothing but a porter. The essence of a person is not in carrying luggage, and the essence of a word is not in its being a sign. Let us distinguish between substance and function, between the essential nature of a word and its function, the mode in which is it is used by us.
[...]
A word is a focus, a point at which meanings meet and from which meanings seem to proceed. In prayer, as in poetry, we turn to the words, not to use them as signs for things, but to see the things in light of the words. In daily speech, it is usually we who speak words, but the words ate silent. In poetry, in prayer, the words speak.
Man’s Quest for God (1954), p. 26.
Prayer of Empathy and Prayer of Expression
[The] more common type of prayer is an act of empathy. There need be no prayerful mood in us when we begin to pray. It is through our reading and feeling the words of the prayers, through the imaginative projection of our consciousness into the meaning of the words, and through empathy for the ideas with which the words are pregnant, that this type of prayer comes to pass. Here the word comes first, the feeling follows.
[...]
In the prayer of expression we often arrive at thoughts that lie beyond the power of expression. In the prayer of empathy we often arrive at words that lie beyond our power of empathy. It is in such tensions that our worship gains in strength and our knowledge in intuitive depth.
Man’s Quest for God, pp. 28-29.
Sensitivity to Evil
The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul and he is bowed and stunned at man's fierce greed. frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.
The Prophets (1962), p. 5.
Social Action
Authentic utterance derives from a moment of identification of a person and a word; its significance depends upon the urgency and magnitude of its theme. The prophet's theme is, first of all, the very life of the whole people, and his identification lasts more than a moment. He is not only with what he says; he is involved with his people in what his words foreshadow. This is the secret of the prophet's style: his life and soul are at stake in what he says and in what is going to happen to what he says. It is an involvement that echoes on. What is more, both theme and identification are seen in three dimensions. Not only the prophet and the people, but God Himself is involved in what the words convey.
The Prophets (1962), p. 6.
Radical Reverence
My heart is sick when I think of the anguish and the sighs, of the quiet tears shed in the nights in the overcrowded dwellings in the slums of our great cities, of the pangs of despair, of the cup of humiliation that is running over.
The crime of murder is tangible and punishable by law. The sin of insult is imponderable, invisible. When blood is shed, human eyes see red; when a heart is crushed, it is only God who shares the pain.
In the Hebrew language one word denotes both crimes. "Bloodshed," in Hebrew, is the word that denotes both murder and humiliation. The law demands: one should rather be killed than commit murder. Piety demands: one should rather commit suicide than offend a person publicly. It is better, the Talmud insists, to throw oneself alive into a burning furnace than to humiliate a human being publicly.
Religion and Race, The Insecurity of Freedom (1966), p. 88.
Depth Theology
I suggest that the most significant basis for meeting of men of different religious traditions is the level of fear and trembling, of humility and contrition, where our individual moments of faith are mere waves in the endless ocean of mankind's reaching out for God, where all formulations and articulations appear as understatements, where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency of answering God's commandment, while stripped of pretension and conceit we sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith.
What divides us? What unites us? We disagree in law and creed, in commitments which lie at the very heart of our religious existence. . . . What unites us? Our being accountable to God, our being objects of God's concern, precious in His eyes.
No Religion Is An Island (1965), Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996), pp. 239-40.
Political Responsibility
Has our conscience become a fossil? Is all mercy gone? If mercy, the mother of humanity, is still alive as a demand, how can we say Yes to our bringing agony to the tormented nation of Vietnam?
It is a war we can never win. For, indeed, our superior weapons may well destroy the cities and the hamlets, the fighting forces and the villagers who support them. However, what will our army have left behind? Tombs, tears, havoc, acrimony, and vast incentives to hatred and rage.
The world is not the same since Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The decisions we make, the values we teach must be pondered not only in the halls of learning but also in the presence of inmates in extermination camps, and in the sight of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.
Those who pray tremble when they realize how staggering are the debts of the religions of the West. We have mortgaged our souls and borrowed so much grace, patience, and forgiveness. We have promised charity, love, guidance, and a way of redemption, and now we are challenged to keep the promise, to honor the pledge. How shall we prevent bankruptcy in the presence of God and man?
Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (1967), p. 56.
Spiritual Radical
Religion as an establishment must remain separated from the government. Yet prayer as a voice of mercy, as a cry for justice, as a plea for gentleness, must not be kept apart. Let the spirit of prayer dominate the world. Let the spirit of prayer interfere in the affairs of man. Prayer is private, a service of the heart; but let concern and compassion, born out of prayer, dominate public life
[...].
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.
On Prayer, Conservative Judaism,(1971), pp. 5,7.