by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg 

December 2022 brought the 50th Yahrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He stands among the greatest Jewish leaders of the twentieth century. Time and again I find myself resorting to his works for inspiration, spiritual and moral. The title of the volume of his essays edited by his daughter Susannah Heschel, herself an eminent scholar of Jewish Thought, says it all: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity.

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s life spanned many worlds. Born in 1907, he grew up in the intense Hasidic milieu of Warsaw where he was raised, a scion of the dynasty of Apter Rebbes going back to the Ohev Yisrael, and where he received semichah, ordination, in his teens. Against the wishes of many of his pietistic family, he moved to Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, where the rich artistic life around the poets of Yung-vilne (few of whose leaders would survive the Shoah) inspired his remarkable Yiddish collection The Ineffable Name of God: Man

Transmissions flow from your heart to Mine,
Trading, twining my pain with yours.
Am I not – you? Are you not - I?   (Ich un Du – I and You)

His studies took him next to Berlin, which he hated, where he obtained a further ordination, surprisingly from the liberal Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, and where he was awarded his doctorate on the prophets of Israel, whose deep love of their people combined with the courage to tell truth to power were later to characterise his own mission.(Martin Luther King was to call him ‘a great prophet.’)

Rescued from Europe just in time, he found refuge in the United States of America, where he taught first at Hebrew Union College then as a member of the faculty of the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary. But he was too great a figure to fit readily into any institution. With a soul formed by his Hasidic heritage, he experienced the America of the 1950’s as a spiritual desert, countering this with his impassioned teachings that God and Man were in constant search and urgent need of each other. Writing in aphoristic sentences, he became a transmitter and interpreter of Jewish mystical insight from its murdered heartland in Eastern Europe to the English-speaking world. At a conference in 1963 on race and religion he met and quickly became the close friend and ally of Dr Martin Luther King; the future of America, he famously said, depends on this man. At King’s personal request he marched next to him in the front line in the great civil rights protest march from Selma to Montgomery. When challenged as to what he was doing there, he famously said that his ‘legs were praying.’ As King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Heschel too believed that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

Heschel died on 23rd December 1972, but his spiritual and moral legacy has only grown since then and his voice is needed now more than ever. Three great qualities animated Heschel’s soul: reverent wonder at the magnificence of the world, a searching and challenging spirituality, and, in the latter part of his life, a passionate, activist moral commitment.

Heschel should be read more like poetry than prose. His books are not the place to look for sustained theological argument, but rather striking and sometimes critical insights linked together by theme and feeling rather than logical sequence. Of all his works, my favourite is Quest for God. Subtitled Studies in Prayer, it is a series of insights on kavvanah, inwardness, and spiritual connection:

Prayer is an answer to God: “Here am I. And this is the record of my days. Look into my heart, into my hopes and my regrets.”
Awakening in the presence of God, we strive not to acquire objective knowledge, but to deepen the allegiance of God and man.

Looking back on his life, he reflected on how that allegiance changed him from a man who believed his ‘destiny was to serve in the realm of privacy’ into an outspoken activist. ‘The countless onslaughts’ of the cruelties of the world made him feel that nothing could justify remaining calm in the face of so much wrong. ‘Indifference to evil,’ he wrote, ‘is worse than evil itself’:

There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty. (The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement)

Three years ago, during the Trump administration, I asked his daughter Professor Susannah Heschel what her father would have been doing had he still been alive: pacing the room, she replied, horrified that such hatred should once again stalk the world, stoked by the highest offices in the land. Trump’s presidency is over (hopefully forever) but the world is no better. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s fiftieth Yahrzeit is a prompt not just to remember and reread his works, but a goad to follow his teaching and example.