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Religious experience in Abraham Joshua Heschel
Victor M. Perez Valera
On December 23, 1972, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel died in New York at the age of sixty-five. Much has been written about him already and more will be written in the future.
Heschel was a scholar, a theologian, an author; he was above all a prophet. Brought up in the profound spirit of Hasidism he lived his faith as a deep commitment to God, to his people and to all mankind. He was a thinker, involved in the events of history. Rooted in the spiritual tradition of Israel he fought for justice, peace and love in the world to bring about the kingdom of God. In anguish at the many forms of injustice in the world, Heschel kept hoping and working.
Heschel became known in the Catholic world after Vatican Council II, during which he had met with Cardinal Bea and Pope Paul VI. One of his great concerns was the relations between Christians and Jews. At critical moments he had the prophetic courage to intervene and to witness in all frankness to his deep biblical faith. Heschel was convinced that Christians and Jews have to live the mystery of divine revelation and election in collaboration and respect.
When on March 17, 1971, Rabbi and Mrs. Heschel were received by Pope Paul VI in private audience, and then came to the SIDIC Centre, they were deeply moved by the cordiality, the real friendship and interest of the Pope. With emotion Heschel told how the Holy Father had encouraged him to continue his writing, which the Pope had read and highly appreciated. Heschel's books should be read by many people, the Pope had said, because of their deep spiritual value.
With the following article, written by Rev. Victor M. Perez Valera, S.J., who is preparing a doctoral thesis on Heschel, we want to pay tribute to the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, expressing our gratitude and our hope that his memory may inspire many to commit themselves to the ideals of this prophet.
THE EDITORS
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, but spiritually his birthplace was Mezbizh, a little village of Podolia, in the Ukraine. As a child his fantasy did not take him to the moon, but to Mezbizh. There had lived for the last twenty years of his life Israel Ben Eliezer (Baal Shem Tov), the founder of the hasidic movement. Heschel's grandfather, the « Apter Ray », the last great « rebbe » of Mezbizh, was buried there next to the Baal Shem Tov. From his early childhood Heschel had heard from his father about all the wonders of Mezbizh. He had become fascinated by the stories and parables, rites and traditions of the most pure Hasidism. That distant village was for the boy Heschel a memory of glory, an empty eagles' nest.
When he was nine, Heschel learnt of Reb Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, « the Kotzker », from two of the Reb's most faithful disciples. Thus the austere and rigid hasidic chief lighted Heschel's way from his childhood like a flash of lightning. His spirituality was quite different from that of the Baal Shem Tov. It was for Heschel to make the synthesis: « my heart was in Mezbizh, my mind in Kotzk ».1
But it is not possible to keep life always in a hothouse. Western culture presented a risk and a challenge that had to be faced. When he was twenty years old Heschel left Poland and registered at Berlin University. At twenty-six he acquired a doctorate with a brilliant dissertation on the prophets. In 1937 Martin Buber chose him as his successor in the Central Jewish Organization for adult education and the Judische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt am Main. But at the end of 1938 he was sent to Poland by the Nazis.
After having taught in Warsaw for eight months he emigrated to England. Shortly afterwards, in 1940, he accepted the invitation to teach Philosophy and Rabbinic Sciences at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. In 1945 he went to New York as Professor of Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. In 1965 he was Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York.2
During his last years he was active in such fields as ecumenism, civil rights and youth problems. Clear indications of this are the important private audience that Paul VI gave him on September 13, 1964 (opening day of the third session of Vatican II), his conferences at the White House on youth problems, and his meditations and writings on the Vietnam war.
Heschel had written: « When life is an answer, death is a home-coming. 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints' (Ps. 116 )».24 He died on the Sabbath, December 23, 1972.
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCELooking through his books and articles we can discover a few of the most personal features of his religious experience.
Probably the boy of seven who speaks at the end of Heschel's article on « The Moral Outrage of Vietnam » is Heschel himself. The boy was reading the passage of Genesis that tells us about Isaac's sacrifice:
My heart began to beat even faster; it actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifted the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly, the voice of the angel was heard: « Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God. » And here I broke out in tears and wept aloud. « Why are you crying? » asked the Rabbi. « You know that Isaac was not killed. »
And I said to him, still weeping, « But, Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late? »
The Rabbi comforted me and calmed me by telling me that an angel cannot come late. « An angel cannot be late », comments Heschel with regard to the war in Vietnam, « but man, made of flesh and blood, may be. »
At twenty, the young Heschel in Berlin experienced the clash between living experience and cold religious speculation.
I came with great hunger to the University of Berlin to study philosophy. I looked for a system of thought, for the depth of the spirit, for the meaning of existence. Erudite and profound scholars gave courses in logic, epistemology, esthetics, and metaphysics .... Yet, in spite of the intellectual power and honesty which I was privileged to witness, I became increasingly •aware of the gulf that separated my views from those held at the university .... To them religion was a feeling .... God was an idea, a postulate of reason. They granted Him the status of being a logical possibility. But to assume that He had existence would have been a crime against epistemology. 4
What the young Heschel was looking for was precisely a vital conceptualization of a vital fact, that is, religious experience.
I did not come to the university because I did not know the idea of the good, but to learn why the idea of the good is valid, why and whether values had meaning. Yet I discovered that values sweet to taste proved sour in analysis; the prototypes were firm, the models flabby. Must speculation and existence remain like two infinite parallel lines that never meet? Or perhaps this impossibility of juncture is the result of the fact that our speculation suffers from what is called in astronomy a parallax, from the apparent displacement of the object, caused by the actual change of our point of observation? 5
Undoubtedly it was this realization that subsequently led Heschel to work out an experiential theology capable of uniting speculation and experience, reflection and life.
It was also about this time that he found an experiential solution to the opposition between spontaneous prayer and regulated prayer.
In those months in Berlin I went through moments of profound bitterness. I felt very much alone with my own problems and anxieties. I walked alone in the evenings through the magnificent streets of Berlin. I admired the solidity of its architecture, the overwhelming drive and power of a dynamic civilization. There were concerts, theatres, and lectures by famous scholars about the latest theories and inventions, and I was pondering whether to go to the new Max Reinhardt play or to a lecture about the theory of relativity. Suddenly I noticed the sun had gone down, evening had arrived. From what time may one recite the Shema in the evening? I had forgotten God — I had forgotten Sinai — I had forgotten that sunset is my business — that my task is « to restore the world to the kingship of the Lord ». So I began to utter the words of the evening prayer. Blessed art thou, Lord our God ... And Goethe's famous poem rang in my ear: Ueber alien Gipteln ist Ruh': O'er all the hilltops is quiet now. No, that was pagan thinking.. To the pagan eye the mystery of life is Ruh', death, oblivion. To us Jews, there is meaning beyond the mystery. We would say:
O'er all the hilltops is the word of God. The meaning of life is to do His will ...
How grateful I am to God that there is a duty to worship, a law to remind my distraught mind that it is time to think of God, time to disregard my ego for at least a moment! It is such happiness to belong to an order of the divine will.
I am not always in a mood to pray .... Indeed, there is something which is far greater than Amy desire to pray, namely, God's desire that I pray. There is something which is far greater than my will to believe, namely, God's will that I believe .... On that evening in the streets of Berlin, I was not in a mood to pray. My heart was heavy, my soul was sad. It was difficult for the lofty words of prayer to break through the dark clouds of my inner life. 6
In August 1967 Heschel was invited to the Congress on Catholic Theology held in Toronto. His lecture about the God of Israel and Christian renewal ended with the reading of a few pages of his diary that portray his religious emotion when he visited the Holy Land. The complete exposition of these experiences and reflections was later published in his book Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Here are some of its most outstanding passages:
I have discovered a new land. Israel is not the same as before. There is great astonishment in the souls ... There is a new radiance, a new awe ... I did not enter on my own the city of Jerusalem. Streams of endless craving, clinging, dreaming, flowing day and night, midnights, years, decades, centuries, millennia, streams of tears, pledging, waiting — from all over the world, from all corners of the earth — carried us of this generation to the Wall. My ancestors could only dream of you — to my people in Auschwitz you were more remote than the moon, and I can touch your stones! Am I worthy? How shall I ever repay for these moments? ...
Jerusalem! I always try to see the inner force that emanates from you, enveloping and transcending all weariness and travail ... She is the city where waiting for God was born, where the anticipation of everlasting peace came into being. Jerusalem is waiting for the prologue of redemption, for new beginning ...
How shall we live nth lerusalem? She is a queen demanding high *tandards. What does she expect of us, living in an age of spiritual obtuseness, near exhaustion? What sort of light should glow in Zion? . . .
What is the mystery of Jerusalem? A promise: peace and God's presence . . . . Jerusalem is a recalling, an insisting and a waiting for the answer to God's hope. 7
These traits of Heschel's religious experience are only an indication of what lies in the background of all his work. One could say that it is a question of an experiential theology that is the result of a theological method and an experiential anthropology.
THEOLOGICAL METHODIt is easy, says Heschel, to blame atheistic philosophy and subversive movements for the eclipse of religion in our society. It would be more honest to recognize that religion became annoying and irrelevant because of our lack of sensibility and creativity, or at least, because we often divorce theology from life.8
Faith, says Heschel time and again, has its roots in a pretheological situation: the total situation of man and his attitude towards life and the world. The theological elaboration which follows from this should not disincarnate faith, but rather vitalize it. This is precisely the objective of Heschel's « depth theology ».
« Depth theology seeks to meet the person in moments in which the whole person is involved, in moments which are affected by all a person thinks, feels, and acts. It draws upon that which happens to man in moments of confrontation with ultimate reality. It is in such moments that decisive insights are born. »
Too often these intuitions cannot be adequately expressed. This affirmation repeated in different forms in many of his works has been the origin of not a few prejudices. There are those who accuse him of existentialist subjectivism, of being an enemy of reason.10
In fact Heschel avoids both dangers, rationalism and fideism. He is well aware that without intellectual discipline faith tends to be vague and subjective, and that without spontaneity doctrine gets stiff and inflexible.
Heschel works at three levels: empirical, phenomenological and philosophical. It is obvious that the first two belong completely to the field of religious experience.11
The empirical data come from two main sources — Jewish classical literature (Bible, Talmud, hasidic stories) and real life, with the addition of short, evocative descriptions of happenings and religious experiences that help the reader's own vital experience.
One could describe the phenomenological method briefly as the attempt to attain things such as they are (Zu den Sachen selbst!), their reality in all its purity. This means reading and describing the world of life (Lebenswelt) as far as it manifests itself. An explicit mention of this method appears only in the introduction to The Prophets, but I think we can agree with Rothschild in saying that it is somehow present in all his work.
After the phenomenological approach we have the philosophical level that tries to express in clear concepts the experience won on the previous levels.
The books of Heschel, without ever descending to a saccharine style, have a brilliant and persuasive beauty. Arthur A. Cohen 12 calls Heschel's theology « The Rhetoric of Faith ». He remarks, however, that we are dealing with rhetoric in its most pure classical sense, that is to say, as an art. « He may employ his art correctly, in which case he not only is a passive servant of truth and justice but enables others to actively pursue them. » This is far removed, therefore, from the false sophistic rhetoric that disguises truth, or from the cheap rhetoric of the commercials and other types of propaganda.
In a recent essay Heschel says that theology must be like a palimpsest often erased so that something new may be written on it, always under the influence of reflection and prayer.13
THEOLOGICO-EXISTENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGYHeschel tries to offer the existentialist answer of Judaism to the existentialist questions of modern man. The focuses of his theological thought are the divine preoccupation with man and the ability of man to transcend his own interests so as to answer with devotion and love to the divine demand.
The primary topic, then, of Biblical Thinking is not man's knowledge of God but rather man's being known by God, man's being an object of Divine knowledge and concern. This is why the great puzzle was: Why should God, The Creator of heaven and earth, be concerned with man? ... God takes man seriously. He enters a direct relationship with man, namely a Covenant, to which not only man but also God is committed. . . . God is now in need of man, because He freely made him a partner in His enterprise, « a partner in the work of creation » . . . . Man's relationship to God is not one of passive reliance upon His Omnipotence but one of active assistance. « The impious rely on their gods . . . the righteous are the support of God » (Genesis Rabba, Ch. 69, 3).14
The numberless favorable reviews that Heschel's books have received from Catholics and Jews often make reference to the experiential aspects.
Thus, for instance, Ernest Fraenkel: « Heschel dedicates several chapters to introducing us into the world of the Sabbath whose essence cannot be explained by reason alone. It is necessary to exploit all the resources of intuition and imagination. To know indeed what the Sabbath means one must live the experience. » 15
The Sabbath comes like a caress, wiping away fear, sorrow and somber memories. It is already night when joy begins, when beautifying surplus of soul visits our mortal bones and lingers on.16
Referring to Man's Quest for God, Edward A. Synan writes: « If words reveal anything about the one who speaks them, Heschel has not merely thought about prayer; he is a man of prayer. » 17
PRAYERThe brevity of this essay obliges me to say only a few words about Man's Quest for God, that extraordinary little book of Heschel on prayer and symbolism. From the beginning Heschel talks about the ontological need of prayer. The transcendental dimension is the most important dimension in man.
« The possession of knowledge, wealth, or skill does not compose the dignity of man . . . Our reverence for man is aroused by something in him beyond his own and our reach, something that no one can deprive him of. It is his right to pray, his ability to worship, to utter the cry that can reach God . . . » 18
Prayer is the answer to God's appeal, it is the way back from our being to the Being. It is also our answer to the mystery of being and is concerned with the mystery of being. Through our prayer creation finds a voice to praise and to thank its Creator for its being. « Prayer is not a need, but an ontological necessity, an act that constitutes the very essence of man. It is this gift which should be a part of the definition of man. » 19
Prayer is an event whose two poles are God and man, but « neither the lips nor the brain are the limits of the scene in which prayer takes place ».20 Through prayer man opens up to a presence that he cannot avoid, but that alone he cannot accede to either. The focus of prayer should not be the ego; it is not a question of introspection, but rather of opening to the Highest.
With regard to the antinomy prayer-action, Heschel points toward a « contemplativus in actione ». Prayer, he says, is not a substitute for action. Prayer must lead into action, but without prayer any activity would be rotten fruit.
This union of prayer and life is wonderfully described by Heschel with a quotation from the Zohar in a long article about the mystical elements in Judaism. There the commandments are understood as a living source of inspiration.
The Torah lets out a word and emerges for a little from her sheath, then hides herself again. But she does this only for those who understand and obey her. She is like unto a beautiful and stately damsel, who is hidden in a secluded chamber of a palace and who has a lover of whom no one knows but she. Out of his love for her he constantly passes by her gate, turning his eyes toward all sides to find her. Knowing that he is always haunting the palace, what does she do? She opens a little door in her hidden palace, discloses for a moment her face to her lover, then swiftly hides it again. None but he notices it; but his heart and soul, and all that is in him are drawn to her, knowing as he does that she has revealed herself to him for a moment because she loves him. It is the same with the Torah, which reveals her hidden secrets only to those who love her.21
These fleeting revelations of love to those who love the Torah seek to keep always alive in them a refreshing love of mankind and of God.
NOTESEditor's' note:
Readers are referred to the special issue of America (March 10, 1973) entitled « Contemporary Jewish Religious Life and Thought » and dedicated to Abraham J. Heschel.
1. « Heschel's Last Words », Jerusalem Post Magazine (Dec. 29, 1972), p. 13.
2. For biographical details see especially: « Abraham Joshua Heschel », Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 8 (Jerusalem, 1971), •and Thomas E. Bird, ed., Modern Theologians: Christians and Jews (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 169-82.
2a. Man is not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), pp. 295-6.
3. Robert McAfee Brown, et al., Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 51-2.
4. Man's Quest for God (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 94.
5. Ibid., p. 95.
6. Ibid., pp. 96-7.
7. Israel: An Echo of Eternity (New York: Noonday Press, 1969), pp. 5-8, 32-3.
8. God in Search of Man (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1966), p. 3.
9. The Insecurity of Freedom (New York: Noonday Press, 1967), p. 119.
10. See Jakob J. Petuchowski, « Faith •as the Leap of Action: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel », Commentary, Vol. 25, No. 5 (May, 1958), pp. 390-7.
11. Fritz A. Rothschild, « The Religious Thought of Abraham Heschel », Conservative Judaism, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1968), p. 21.
12. The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), pp. 234-59.
13. « On Prayer », Conservative Judaism, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1970), p. 2.
14. Abraham Joshua Heschel, « The Concept of Man in Jewish Thought », The Concept of Man: A Study in Comparative Philosophy, ed. by S. Radhakrishnan and P.T. Raju (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 122, 124.
15. Table Ronde, No. 123 (Mars 1958), pp. 160-2.
16. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth is the Lord's and The Sabbath (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 68.
17. « Abraham Heschel and Prayer », The Bridge, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), p. 263.
18. Man's Quest for God, p. 18.
19. Ibid., p. 78.
20. Ibid., p. 13.
21. « The Mystical Element in Judaism », The Jews: Their Religion and Culture, Vol. II, Fourth Edition, ed. by Louis Finkelstein (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 166.
