Rabbi Abraham Heschel
Teacher and Prophet (1907-1972)

"I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And You gave it to me."

Abraham Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907. Descended from a long line of Hasidic rabbis, it was his destiny to take his place among them. Nevertheless, he resisted the will of his family when he chose to leave his enclosed community to explore the wisdom of the outside world. He studied philosophy in Warsaw and then at the University of Berlin, where he received a doctorate in 1933. Though he was never again at home in the Jewish ghetto, he did not dispense with his Orthodox faith. Rather, he believed it was his special vocation to connect two worlds: the mystical world of Hasidic Judaism and the modern world of "man in search of meaning."

Heschel succeeded Martin Buber in his chair at Frankfurt. But in 1938, as a foreign Jew, he was expelled from Germany and forced to return to Warsaw. He was fortunate to escape the city just weeks before the Nazi invasion in 1939. He made his way to London and eventually to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, teaching in a series of Jewish as well as Christian seminaries. Though he wrote relatively little about the Holocaust, his writing was deeply affected by his brush with this modern manifestation of evil. As he wrote, "I am a brand plucked from the fire, in which my people was burned to death."

Through a series of books published in the 1950s Heschel emerged as one of the significant religious voices of his time. His writings contributed greatly to the spiritual renewal of Judaism. "A Jew," he wrote, "is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his deeds, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does." But Heschel exerted an almost equal influence on Christians, so much that he was called another "apostle to the gentiles." His writings recalled Christians to their Jewish roots and their common faith in the God of Israel.

Heschel was a passionate champion of interfaith dialogue and cooperation. "No religion," he wrote, "is an island. We are all involved with one another." And "God is greater than religion." Heschel was particularly influential in challenging the Catholic church to overcome the harmful legacy of anti-Semitism. He met with Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and was an official observer at the Second Vatican Council. There his influence was felt in the council's historic statement on the church's kinship with Judaism.

With his bushy beard and aura of holiness, Heschel gave the vivid appearance of a biblical prophet. Indeed, his study The Prophets is a modern classic. He emphasized in that work that the prophet was not a fortuneteller but someone who identified with and communicated the pathos of God. In the 1960s Heschel's vocation as a prophet was tested against the challenges of war and social justice. He was a close friend of *Martin Luther King, Jr., and took a prominent place in the protest against racism. He was also an early critic of the Vietnam War, noting, "To speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous." Explaining his engagement in political issues, he referred to the lessons he had learned from the prophets: "that, morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."

Faithful to his Hasidic roots, Heschel managed to communicate to a largely secular world a sense of "the holy dimension of all existence." He had a poetic knack for communicating whole volumes in a single phrase: "To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions." Heschel's religion did not represent an escape to another world but a deep sense of responsibility to this world and its questions and needs. "We are not asked to abandon life and to say farewell to this world, but to keep the spark within aflame, and to suffer His light to reflect in our face."

He had written of the prophets that because they are ultimately motivated by love, their message often begins with denunciation but concludes with hope. This too characterized Heschel's message. Shortly before his death he taped a television interview, which he concluded with some words for young people: "Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power. . . . Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art."

Heschel died on December 23, 1972.

• See:
  Abraham Heschel, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, ed. Samuel H. Dresner (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Franklin Sherman, The Promise of Heschel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970).
• See:
  Abraham Heschel E-Seminary

[Reprinted with permission from "All Saints" by Robert Ellsberg (New York: Crossroad, 1998)  Photograph of Abraham Heschel by Joel Orent]