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In search of Abraham Joshua Heschel's legacy
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BY: BEN HARRIS, JTA
They are forever joined in an iconic image of the rabbi and the preacher, marching arm-in-arm for civil rights, but Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. are this year linked in commemoration, as well.
As Americans pause to mark King's memory Jan. 15, the Jewish community is gearing up to honor the legacy of one of the 20th century's great Jewish thinkers on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
In March, Brandeis University will host a two-day symposium on Heschel, who was born Jan. 11, 1907, and who over the next 65 years became one of America's most prominent rabbis, renowned for his political activism and his innovative writings on theology and the Jewish prophets. Other events are scheduled at the Manhattan school that bears Heschel's name, at a spiritual retreat center in Connecticut, and in cities as far as London, Berlin, Milan and Krakow.
King's birthday has become a national holiday and an occasion to reflect on America's interracial relations. But at The Jewish Theological Seminary, the institution where Heschel taught for the last 27 years of his life, no public memorials are planned.
Heschel's relationship with JTS is said to have been fraught with tension. However, the seminary's incoming chancellor, Arnold Eisen, says a two-hour meeting he had with Heschel in his book-laden office around 1970 was personally transformative.
“It overwhelmed me,” said Eisen, adding that he considers Heschel the most important Jewish thinker of the 20th century.
Eisen's predecessors, however, didn't always hold Heschel in such high esteem, seeing him as something of an outsider - a mystic and a political activist in an institution renowned for neither.
Some point to Heschel's outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, which ran afoul of conservative figures at the seminary. And, of course, there was his activism - a common avocation in the ferment of the 1960s, perhaps, but hardly typical of bookish rabbis and academics who were his colleagues.
Nevertheless, Heschel's legacy has aged well. Heschel is the most frequently cited rabbinic source on issues of social justice and perhaps is most widely remembered for the arresting photo of him marching beside leaders of the civil-rights movement in Selma, Ala., in 1965.
His influence is felt everywhere from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where thousands of Jews of all denominations gathered last summer to protest the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, to the slums of the Third World, where American Jews now volunteer through groups like the American Jewish World Service, an organization whose leader was influenced by her childhood encounters with Heschel.
“He was very much a person who enjoyed his Judaism and his scholarship and made a huge effort to apply it to the times in which he lived,” AJWS president Ruth Messinger said. “And that had a real impact on young and not-so-young Jews at that time. And that's something we at AJWS continue to do.”
While it was unusual in Heschel's era to see bearded rabbis marching with black leaders, Jewish leaders are now routinely active on the most pressing issues of the day, a change many lay squarely at the feet of the soft-spoken professor with thick black glasses and an unruly, Einstein-esque shock of white hair.
Heschel was ahead of his time in other ways, too. He was among the first rabbis to energetically reach out to leaders of other faiths, meeting with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1964 and becoming, in 1965, the first rabbi appointed to the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, a liberal Christian institution.
Along with Martin Buber, Heschel is the most widely read 20th-century Jewish thinker at Christian seminaries and Bible colleges. “More than any other single Jewish author, his works have been absolutely life-changing,” said Marvin Wilson, a professor of Bible and theology who teaches a seminar on Heschel at Gordon College, a Christian college in Wenham, Mass. Wilson says that next to the Bible, Heschel's God in Search of Man is the most influential work he has ever read.
While some argue over what Heschel's greatest achievement was, it was his legacy of political activism and, in particular, his friendship with King that made him an icon in the Jewish community and beyond. “They were kindred spirits,” said Heschel's daughter Susannah, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College.
After Heschel's death in 1972, the family was visited every Friday afternoon for years by the rabbi of a small Chasidic synagogue in Manhattan where Heschel occasionally had prayed. Susannah Heschel says her father felt at home there, as it reminded him of his childhood in Poland. It was that kind of compassion, she says, that inspired him to leave the comforts of the academy to pursue his social-justice work.
“That moment when Rabbi Cywiak came to the door was a reminder of who my father really was,” she said. “And, in a sense, that was the moment of his inner being, of his heart and his soul. And it was out of that he went to march in Selma.”
As Americans pause to mark King's memory Jan. 15, the Jewish community is gearing up to honor the legacy of one of the 20th century's great Jewish thinkers on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
In March, Brandeis University will host a two-day symposium on Heschel, who was born Jan. 11, 1907, and who over the next 65 years became one of America's most prominent rabbis, renowned for his political activism and his innovative writings on theology and the Jewish prophets. Other events are scheduled at the Manhattan school that bears Heschel's name, at a spiritual retreat center in Connecticut, and in cities as far as London, Berlin, Milan and Krakow.
King's birthday has become a national holiday and an occasion to reflect on America's interracial relations. But at The Jewish Theological Seminary, the institution where Heschel taught for the last 27 years of his life, no public memorials are planned.
Heschel's relationship with JTS is said to have been fraught with tension. However, the seminary's incoming chancellor, Arnold Eisen, says a two-hour meeting he had with Heschel in his book-laden office around 1970 was personally transformative.
“It overwhelmed me,” said Eisen, adding that he considers Heschel the most important Jewish thinker of the 20th century.
Eisen's predecessors, however, didn't always hold Heschel in such high esteem, seeing him as something of an outsider - a mystic and a political activist in an institution renowned for neither.
Some point to Heschel's outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, which ran afoul of conservative figures at the seminary. And, of course, there was his activism - a common avocation in the ferment of the 1960s, perhaps, but hardly typical of bookish rabbis and academics who were his colleagues.
Nevertheless, Heschel's legacy has aged well. Heschel is the most frequently cited rabbinic source on issues of social justice and perhaps is most widely remembered for the arresting photo of him marching beside leaders of the civil-rights movement in Selma, Ala., in 1965.
His influence is felt everywhere from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where thousands of Jews of all denominations gathered last summer to protest the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, to the slums of the Third World, where American Jews now volunteer through groups like the American Jewish World Service, an organization whose leader was influenced by her childhood encounters with Heschel.
“He was very much a person who enjoyed his Judaism and his scholarship and made a huge effort to apply it to the times in which he lived,” AJWS president Ruth Messinger said. “And that had a real impact on young and not-so-young Jews at that time. And that's something we at AJWS continue to do.”
While it was unusual in Heschel's era to see bearded rabbis marching with black leaders, Jewish leaders are now routinely active on the most pressing issues of the day, a change many lay squarely at the feet of the soft-spoken professor with thick black glasses and an unruly, Einstein-esque shock of white hair.
Heschel was ahead of his time in other ways, too. He was among the first rabbis to energetically reach out to leaders of other faiths, meeting with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1964 and becoming, in 1965, the first rabbi appointed to the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, a liberal Christian institution.
Along with Martin Buber, Heschel is the most widely read 20th-century Jewish thinker at Christian seminaries and Bible colleges. “More than any other single Jewish author, his works have been absolutely life-changing,” said Marvin Wilson, a professor of Bible and theology who teaches a seminar on Heschel at Gordon College, a Christian college in Wenham, Mass. Wilson says that next to the Bible, Heschel's God in Search of Man is the most influential work he has ever read.
While some argue over what Heschel's greatest achievement was, it was his legacy of political activism and, in particular, his friendship with King that made him an icon in the Jewish community and beyond. “They were kindred spirits,” said Heschel's daughter Susannah, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College.
After Heschel's death in 1972, the family was visited every Friday afternoon for years by the rabbi of a small Chasidic synagogue in Manhattan where Heschel occasionally had prayed. Susannah Heschel says her father felt at home there, as it reminded him of his childhood in Poland. It was that kind of compassion, she says, that inspired him to leave the comforts of the academy to pursue his social-justice work.
“That moment when Rabbi Cywiak came to the door was a reminder of who my father really was,” she said. “And, in a sense, that was the moment of his inner being, of his heart and his soul. And it was out of that he went to march in Selma.”
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