Table Of ContentThe Inner Life of A.J. Heschel — A Lecture by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
The University of Judaism Presents
A Lecture by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
Temple Sinai, Los Angeles, California
April 26, 1982
(This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com)
Victor Goodhill: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was no stranger to the sanctuary
which he loved. He would accompany me to Sinai on those Sabbaths when we did not
have a minion in the home which the Heschels would occupy for summer months.
Professor Heschel was an honorary member of the Sinai backbench in that row. For
many reasons, Heschel's ruach, his spirit lives on in this synagogue, among countless
others throughout the world.
Our speaker of the night is Rabbi Harold Schulweis, whom I have known and admired
for many years, long before he came to settle in California. Ordained at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, recipient of a doctorate in theology from the civic school of
religion in Berkeley, Dr. Schulweis is one of the giants in Jewish religious life. He
deeply feels the pathos about which Dr. Heschel wrote.
One of the leaders in the reconstructionist movement, a foremost interpreter of Dr.
Mordecai Kaplan, a pioneer in the reconstructionist movement, Rabbi Schulweis
approaches professor Heschel with unusual insights. His subject tonight is extremely
important, since the deals for that profound issue, the inner life of the Jew, as reflected
in the thought and life of Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's my great privilege to introduce
Rabbi Harold Schulweis.
Rabbi Schulweis: Thank you. Dr. Goodhill honors me. He is a good man, a learned
man and a pious Jew, and he happens to have an unusual specialty. His expertise is
in the field of otology, which is the field dealing with hearing and with the ear, and I
happen to be a patient of his, he is my doctor. Victor, I cannot tell you how good it is to
hear the generosity of your introduction but especially how good it is just to be able to
hear you.
I think most of us remember the first meetings we've had with people, first
introductions. I first met Abraham Joshua Heschel when he came to the Jewish
Theological Seminary as a professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism and I came from
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Yeshiva College 1945. And I remember that the first orientation meeting between my
class and Dr. Heschel and his request was that the third meal of the Sabbath.
And he was to speak to us about himself and about his field of specialty which was
medieval Jewish philosophy. We sat around the table and he did not lecture. He said,
"Would you mind if I sing a [inaudible] [00:03:55]?" And I remember it very clearly.
We were startled, just like you. But even more so, we were startled because after all,
we have come from colleges and universities and from Yeshiva and this was the
professor. We had expected him to give a shear, to give a lecture, to analyze a text,
but instead it was something else and we were disappointed.
Years later, I began to realize as I think many of my fellow seminarians did, when this
was a very, very important introduction, because we would be reading in one of his
books that concepts and words are screens which block one from another, and which
do not allow us to see the world. A word you can look up in the dictionary, but a
melody, would you look it up? Heschel was a professor. He had all the professorial
accoutrements, monographs, learned papers, articles and books, [inaudible]
[00:05:36]. But it was very clear to all of us that he was not like the others.
Despite this tremendous, vast erudition, a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, steep in
metaphysics and anesthetics and epistemology, graduates, work ethic, Heschel at the
bottom was a rabbi, a Chasidic rabbi who was translated by some mysterious process
of medium psychosis, from medzvich and Kotzk to 122nd street and Broadway.
His gob was western. He didn't wear a kapoteh and in 1945 he didn't have a beard.
But the relationship between Heschel and the rest of us was not that of a professor and
students, it was a relationship between a rabbi in search of chasidim. His lectures and
his books are not written in an analytic style. There's very little argument, very lucid
analytic logic, very little discursive thinking because Heschel's way was via evocative
thinking, to appeal to the inner sensibilities of the individuals to whom he is speaking,
to appeal to something that is not subject to argument, but to appeal to what in
Hassidic literature is called Hishticecut, yearnings, hungering, longings for something
that is deeper than this opaque, grey world in which we live, that there was something
beneath the surface of nature, beneath the surface of mitzvah, beneath the surface of
a text which has intonations of transcendence.
Heschel didn't argue. He didn't argue because a rabbi doesn't argue. A rabbi touches
strings. He tells stories, parables, legends. He sings nigunim because his interest is
not to gain cognitive ascent but his interest is to convert the heart. At the University of
Berlin, he went there at the age of 20. Heschel was disappointed with academic
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philosophy. He said the answers of the philosophers seem indifferent to the travail of a
person and callused to catastrophy.
If philosophy etymologically means the love of wisdom, Heschel was interested in the
wisdom of love, and you will find that his critics by and large are unhappy with the fact
that he is writing, they said not philosophy but poetry, not cosmological proofs or
oncological proofs or theological proofs of the existence of God but poetry. And
Heschel would reply that the fault lies in our prosaic outlook, that we are all of us
saddled with a pedestrianism which, and this time I'm using a metaphor that comes
from Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, smears honey on the souls of our shoes.
Heschel, the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literalism. It is as difficult
as speaking to someone about Jacob's ladder to the heaven when he asks you and
how many steps on the ladder. And so you will find him, Heschel reiterated a number
of phrases over and over again, all, ineffable, mystery, surprised radical amazement.
And if you were to give this lecture tonight, I am sure that he would begin it the way he
began many of his lectures. He would say, "Ladies and gentlemen, a remarkable
event took place this evening. The sun has set." And people would teeter, they would
laugh. But it was no laughing matter because the truth of the matter is for Heschel, not
to take cognizance of the wonder of the diurnal, not to be amazed by life itself is to kill
religion, because religion for Heschel is a particular way of seeing.
If you cannot see the remarkable strangeness, marvel, awesomeness of the universe,
how in the world can you pray? How can you say for thy miracles and thy signs which
are daily with us, morning, afternoon and evening? For Heschel, the world is real. It is
not an illusion, but for Heschel, the world is an allusion, an allusion to something
deeper because things are not what they appear to be, not you, not me, not us, not it,
nothing.
Heschel was himself a tremendous surprise. I mean, you find in him so many
biographical incongruities. What for example is Heschel, a descendant of Levi on his
mother side doing at Dansbury Prison waiting for the release of Father Berrigen who is
jailed because of his protesting of the Vietnam War? What is Heschel, a descendant
of a Maged of Nezarich on his father side doing marching arm and arm with Martin
Luther King, Jr. in protection for the Black civil rights? And how many Jewish
professors by the way in Jewish seminaries do you think marched?
What is this man, the grandson and the namesake of Derap Derov, doing flying to
Rome, negotiating with cardinals and with Pope Paul VI to issue stronger statements
condemning the bloody, scandalous myth of deicide, the myth that accuses people of a
murder of God. For which, by the way he was brutally attacked by friends and foes,
because they said it was beneath his dignity to plead with the pope about the schema
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and Heschel replied as I could hear him saying, if the saving of human life takes
precedence over her Shabbat, then most assuredly, saving the life of Jews takes
precedence over my personal honor and my personal dignity, a man of many
surprises, and very difficult to talk about.
For example, how in the world do you explain a man, a theologian who sings to delight
in contrariety, whose literature is full of paradoxes and antimonies and dilemmas with
however nonetheless, nevertheless on the other hand? Here he is extolling the
primacy of the heart. What is important, he says, coding from the Gomorra Sanhedrin
is rachmonnnah leibah boy, that God wants the heart.
And then the next paragraph, a quotation from Jeremiah, the heart is deceitful above
all things and desperately wicked, who can understand it?
Here he is, giving a tremendous exposition on the system of the school of Rabbi
Ishmael who favors lucidity, who favors rationality, who favors an understanding of
God and here on the next page, a tremendous tribute to the school of Rabbi Akiba, its
hyperbole, its mystery, its ecstasy. Here, you have a man who seems to be so excited
by the Chasidic School of Nesvich of the Ba’alshemtov, laughter and love and song
and communication and the importance of Chesed, of compassion, and here he writes
a whole two volumes on Menachem Mendel of Kotzk with its dark, bruiting and biting
ways.
So, who is Heschel, which one shall I talk about? What's his theology and whose side
is he, is he amnestic, is he an existentialist? Is he a liberal? Is he an orthodox? I want
to suggest to you a key for the understanding of the man and his writings, and the key
will come from a - fittingly it seems to me, from a rabbi of the 19th century Naftali Zvi
Horowitz of Ropshitz, who said that before he was born, an angel appeared and
showed him tablets divided into two columns. On the right side, from the Gomorra
Tanit it said, "The learned man should be a fiery flame." On the left side, from
Sanhedrin, "The meek and the lowly shall inherit the world to come."
On the right side from Brachus, "A man should be wise in his fear of God." On the left
side from the Yalkut, "You shall be simple-hearted before the Lord." On the right side,
from Tanit, "Be satisfied with the minimum." On the left side from Tanit, "He who
pledges himself not to drink wine and afflict the body is called a sinner." So, the
Ropchitzer the obvious contradictions, until he heard a voice of the angel said, "You
are now to be born." And then he dissolved in his heart to follow the rules of both
columns no matter the contradictions.
Heschel writes and thinks with both columns. Dualities permeate all of his writings
without exception. This, on the other hand, this, to the contrary, perhaps the reverse is
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the proper understanding, the constant kind of dialectic. Instead of a question of style,
it's a question of basic philosophy because Heschel writes, "Polarity lies at the heart of
Judaism." It is only when you look at the world superficially that you begin to see the
world in terms of its oppositions, good and bad.
If only when you look at the world the way the cabalists refer to it is, the world of
separation that you find, two separate domains, light and darkness, a bifurcated world
split up with hard disjunctions either or.
But if you are able to penetrate that world and to understand it with Jewish wisdom,
you will see that underlying the divisions is an ultimate unity. Judaism is not a monism
which can be traced to a single element or to a single idea, whether it's spiritual or
material. Judaism is not a dualism of extreme opposing primordial forces but a
monotheism. Judaism is a dialectic of movement which we celebrate at the Havdalah
time. If we understand what we are doing, we are celebrating the differentiation
between light and darkness, the holy, the profane, the Sabbath, the weekday, Israel,
the nations of the world, all of them differentiated, none of them separated because the
world is so inter-dependent.
It is this polarity, these polarities which are held together in the sound of that prolonged
last word, Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echoooood. It is to be incorporated,
held together, all of these so-called contradictories which appear not to be contrary at
all, heaven and earth, anger and mercy, law and love, profit and priest, Halacha and
Hagaddah, all of them interdependent, all of them complementary, all of them in
harmony.
Consider if you will, an imagery of Judaism as a pendulum, a pendulum that swings
from one side to the other, and the arc that that pendulum describes is Judaism. And if
you say this is Judaism, its high point or this, its center point or this as the other point,
you have it wrong. And what you have to do if you want the vitality of Judaism to
continue is to see to it that people and ideologies and movements and denominations
do not pounce upon that pendulum and say, "This is it," where it points to, "This is the
essence of Judaism and all else is heresy, all else is deviation, all else is ridiculous."
The pendulum, if it gets stuck caters to idolatry. What is idolatry? The sages who are
in Rome are asked, "If your God doesn't like idolatry, why in the world doesn't he
destroy it?" And they answer, "If they worship something of which the world have no
need, he would destroy it. But they worship the stars and the moon and the sand and
the sun and the mountains. Should God destroy his world because of fools? Is the sun
evil? Is the moon evil? And what is idolatry? Is idolatry the worship of evil? No.
Idolatry is the worship of good, only it is the worship of a part of the world as if it were
the whole of the world. It is a deification of the segment. And anything that's good,
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anything that's holy, once you say, "This is exclusively the essence, this is it," there you
have idolatry whether it's the intellect or whether it's piety or whether it's the law or
whether it's feeling, said the Kotzker Rebbeh, even a mitzvah can become a Avodah
Zarah.
Even a good holy deed can become idolatrous when, if you make any mitzvah,
whatever it is, kashrut, Shabbos, learning if you make it the Ecarrah Ecarim, the most
essential, the root of all principles, then you have idolatry. Everything can be
contaminated by idolatry, even piety. Remember that the rabbis say, there is such a
phenomenon, a typology of Chosid Shoteh, a foolish pious person, foolish piety, and
they give the illustration of the man who is a cry of a woman who is drowning in the
lake and he turns away because he will not allow himself to see her nakedness. That
is Chosid Shoteh. That is stupid piety.
Zoha therefore says, "Woe to the man who would identify God with any single
attribute." I tell you this for the following reason, because you will not understand
Heschel as a systematic theologian with one position, because the task of theology as
Heschel understands it is correction, it is the function to see to it that the pendulum is
not stuck anywhere and therefore, Heschel will say different things to different
audiences at different times to overcome the conceits of orthodoxy, any orthodoxy,
reformed orthodoxy, conservative orthodoxy, reconstructionist orthodoxy, orthodox
orthodoxies, secular orthodoxies because all of these arrest the pendulum and when
that pendulum is arrested, then the whole dynamic and the movement and the vitality
and the richness of Jewish life is stunted. That's why he used the word paradox and
uses paradox so often because paradox is the opposite side of orthodox.
Now, Heschel did not catch a ride on that pendulum. He didn't swing whichever way
the pendulum happen to be directed. He had to push it, to shove, to correct it, to free it
from its locked-in qualities, from its obsessions. If I were to single out however one
major concern, one major corrective that is distinctively Heschelian, he would be
Heschel's defense of the individual, the inner spiritual life of the individual, Adahm
Shebe Yehudi, the individual in the Jew.
And here, he is now doing something of an unusually courageous character. He is
struggling against religious, secular, ideologies, institutions because he is saying, "Pay
attention to the individual." The community always says to the individual, “Do not
separate yourself from the community.” Heschel says to the community, “Do not
separate yourself from the individual.” There is such a left-sidedness, a one-sidedness
that is concerned only with the group, only with the community, only with the people
that you are absolutely insensitive to the cries and the concerns of the individual.
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And this is a remarkably sweeping statement but the more I think you think about it, the
more you will see how unusually important it is for Heschel to make this correction of
the left-sided groupism in the thinking, what he calls the sociological thinking of
Judaism.
Think for example Heinrich Graetz, a great Jewish historian. Now, Heinrich Graetz
characterizes Judaism not as a religion for the individual, but for the community, and
the promises and rewards attached to the fulfillment of commandments do not refer to
the individuals but are rather apparently intended for the entire people. Mordecai
Kaplan, whom we spoke last year, represents in fact the other side of the polarity. His
is the theology of the peoplehood and his spiritual mentor Ahad Ha’am who says that
the genius of Judaism is its turning away from the individual to the group, says the
problem of life is not the problem of the individual, but the problem of community.
And Heschel says, "Hold on. Hold on. You are so concerned with the preservation of
the institution, with the preservation of the people." We are forever speaking of the
duties and the obligations of the individual to tradition, but what are the rights of the
individual? We are forever saying to the individual, "You support the synagogue, you
support the institution, you uphold the mitzvahs, you support Judaism but what do we
say of the community? How do the mitzvahs support the individual? How does prayer
speak to the individual? How do the institutions address the individual, I mean the
individual with his fears and his crises and his private holocausts. I mean, the
individual in his alienation and his aloneness, I mean this individual, this solitary man
and woman who is not simply a member of the audience, who is not a cipher of the
great roster of an organization, who is not simply a body count in the minion, who is not
simply a financial contributor to a global cause but I mean the individual who has
ultimate questions and deeply concerned.
I mean, you and me, I mean myself when I'm not with you, when I'm not in an
organization, when I'm all by myself. Pay attention to me, or you want to dismiss me
as one of the me generation, narcissistic and materialistic, nonsense says Heschel, the
individual cries with ultimate questions, for what do I live? To what do I offer
testimony? What do I stand for? Will the world lose anything in my absence?
But the establishment is so absorbed and so concerned with the public agenda, with
public persona, with public piety that we are not concerned with the individual. I quote
to you in Hebrew only because he said this in Hebrew and because I don't want you to
think that I'm saying it because many of you I know are very suspicious people. And
I'm quoting it to you because some of the stuff is radical. I had to read it myself several
times. The sages of the Jewish people neglected the individual in the Jew. Here now,
Heschel fires a tremendous broadside against sociological thinking and he has in mind
Kaplan as much as anybody else, but not only Kaplan, everybody else.
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Of course, belonging is important, of course joining is important. Of course synagogue
attendance is important. Of course contribution is important but we have turned Jews
into inverted Muranos, bankrupt. "When you go home from here, when you are not
with other people, who are you to yourself," says Heschel in a remarkably audacious
line, "Unless a person knows how to pray alone, he is incapable of praying with the
congregation." This is the theology of the individual and its roots are profound and I
often quote him, I myself must admit to you that when I was a younger person, as a
seminarian I could not understand Heschel law. I couldn't understand the law, this
notion of the individual sounded to me strange but it has deep Kabbalistic and Chasidc
roots, important ones.
I want to quote to you form the B’alshemtov, a very radical notion. Before you can pray
for the salvation and the redemption of the whole collective group, you have to pray for
your own redemption. And here, what I'm suggesting is a new turn, a new turn. You
may have heard it once and twice before, maybe in a pachuda of the 12th century, but
you haven't heard it in the last centuries. The turn is towards knimiut, internality,
interiority. Here, there is born a new relationship, a new exegeses, because you and I
are raised in the tradition that divides relationship between two, between man and God
which usually amounts to ritual, Shabbat, Kashtrut T’fillin interpersonal relationship
between man and his fellow human being.
The Chasidic exegeses which so influenced Buber and Heschel together introduced a
third relationship, between man and himself, says simchah bunim, you shall not
deceive your fellowman but Chosid says in addition, you shall not deceive yourself.
Here, you have something that is radical in its implication, radical in its movement. Of
course you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, but know also that you
shall not bear false witness against yourself. Shnei Azam is arrested in Petersburg
and the jailer says to him, "You Jews speak about the wisdom of God and his all
knowing qualities. But I see in the bible in the book of Genesis that when Adam sinned
and hides himself, God says, 'Where are you? Where art thou?' What does that
show? That God is not wise, doesn't he know?"
Shnei Azam says to the jailer, "Do you believe in the eternity of God? The eternity of
the scriptures? Do you believe that scripture speak to you individually?" And the jailer
says, "I do." "Then I ask of you my son, you are already 41 years of age, where are
you? How far have you come along in this world?" And the jailer is astonished.
What has happened is an intellectual question, dealing with the nature of the omissions
of God has now been transformed into a personal interior question, the question is not
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about God, the question is about me. The question has to do not with outer wisdom, it
has to do with Hachochmah Hatzmoonah, the hidden wisdom of the self.
This leads Heschel into an extremely important relationship to law, to Halakhah.
Halakhah as you know is the God term of many, many people. Halakhah means law,
and here is Heschel addressing the rabbinical assembly, my rabbinic body, in 1958, a
stunning address in which he says among other things, "As a Jew committed to
Halakhah, I say to you rabbis that Halakhah is not the central issue of this generation."
In another talk in Jerusalem he writes, he speaks these, the contraction of Judaism into
the domain of law is not one of the proud products of a Diaspora for which we can give
blessings that it is good and benefits.
Have you got it? What have you here? You mean to tell me that Heschel is an
antinomian, that he is an opposition to Halakhah? That he is a rebellious individual?
That cannot be because we have read so much of Heschel. No other philosopher in
contemporary times has justified with greater passion, with greater force the
importance of the deed, the importance of the act, the importance of the performance
than Heschel himself.
Nobody has argued against the sentimentality, against the romanticism that forever is
waiting for a moment of ecstasy until I can doubt him, just one moment in which God
can move me and who remain forever waiting paralyzed, immobilized, never lifting a
cup for the Kiddush, never raising one's hand to bless a candle. Nobody more than
Heschel has criticized Judaism as a way of thinking, Judaism as a meta language.
Heschel after all is the man who says, "Jews are called upon to make a leap of action,
even without faith, even without belief, even without Kavonnah, let him do and let him
act and let him perform”. “Because it is through the experience of doing that we begin
to learn, that we begin to feel, we begin to believe because more people believe what
they do than do what they believe.
More people feel what they do than do what they feel. That's right. That means that
Halakhah is important, of course it is. Will he not quote this remarkable exegeses from
Menachem Mendel himself? You shall place these words - what does it say? Al
levavechah, Al Levavechem, you shall place them on your hearts, why not in your
hearts? Why only on your hearts, because not always do you feel open to some
passion, to some conviction, at least if you have it on your heart. When you are
moved, there will be something that will be able to penetrate your heart. So, what does
he want? What he wants is critique is based upon the fact that Heschel is offended.
He is offended by the trivialization of Judaism that is reduced to petty legalism.
He has studied well, Spinoza’s Tractatus theological politicas, in which Spinoza in the
17th century describes Judaism and the bible as not concerned with ethics, not
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concerned with eternal truths, but concerned only that people become compliant,
obedient, that the reason that there are lightning and thunders at Sinai is to break the
stubborn heartedness, the stubborn headedness, the obduracy of the Jews so that
they shall learn to obey the agents of the theocratic polity. And he has seen how this
Spinozistic caricaturing of Judaism as a legalism enters into the philosophical world of
Kant and of Hegel.
He has moreover seen how Moses Mendelssohn has accepted that parody and has
reduced Judaism to, divine legislation, divine law and how the 19th century Samson
Rafael Hirsch now describes Judaism saying. It is law and not faith. It is legislation
and not belief that is the watch word of Judaism.
That is the demeanment. That is the vulgarization of Judaism which becomes nothing
but a ritual behaviorism. Here I see this Jew stop by another Jew, last showed with the
leather pair of T’fillin wrapped around his arm as if he is saddling an ass without any
conception as to what's being done, why is it said, as if the sheer external act itself is
going to perform something magical, and if indeed, the most important thing in Judaism
is doing, the most important thing is orthopraxy, then of course it is clear that there
should be people in the promised land who will be willing to force other Jews, to
observe relationships between man and God on the basis of political legislation,
because this has nothing to do with Hovot Halavovot. It has nothing to do with duties
of the heart, only with Hovot Havarim, only to do with the duties of the limb.
Heschel asks, and that is why he is so radical, I mean radical in the profoundest sense
of coming down to the roots of the tradition, what is the purpose of the mitzvah? Is it
an opus operatum? Is it simply an act which is done? The purpose of the mitzvah is
not the ceremony which is performed, but the person who is transformed. Mitzvah is
for the sake of character. Mitzvah is for the sake of cultivating your sensibilities and
your sensitivities. If not, mitzvah becomes laughed at. Halakhah becomes nothing but
a life always scrutinizing the contents on the label of a can, pots and pantheism and
nothing more.
This is not Halachah. You have Heschel remove the sole, the n’shammah of
Halachah. You now have, what Isaiah called ritual, thy wrote, prayer, instead of being
a spiritual exercise becomes a Chov,an obligation, a duty, a Chova is Byalik what
called it, obligation without love. You simply pray off your debt, you pray it off. You
have pagination piety. The rabbi says, "Please turn to page 4. If page 4 is missing,
please read page 2 twice."
This is what Menachem Mendel of Kotzk so inspired Heschel calls Moyel Melocheh,
wonderful word, Moyel Malachah mouth work. Vileh g’fruntite means cheap piety, and
with that mechanization of ritual, there comes something else that a Chasidic
personality like Heschel would understand, mainly coldness, perfunctory coldness
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Description:Victor Goodhill: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was no stranger to the . Heschel, the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literalism.
