Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 By Edward K. Kaplan Yale University Press, New Haven 2007, $40, pp. 530

A Prophet in the New World

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s books were only half of his inspired legacy. His private life was the other half. A dual weave of written text and oral tradition characterizes Judaism from ancient times to our own day. As the 5th-century Babylonian Rabbi Ashi committed the oral traditions of his time to writing the Talmud, so the oral traditions that came out of Heschel’s personality and life have found their distinguished scribe in Edward Kaplan, who began his labor of love with Prophetic Witness in 1998 and now completes his account of Heschel’s life with Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America 1940-1972.

To those who have so far relied on Heschel’s own books, having this “text” of his “Torah,” or divine instruction, illuminates Heschel’s work and thought on another level, and spurs further study with new perspective and insight.

A “Hasidic prince” to the core of his being, Heschel was not one to meekly follow the Enlightenment’s injunction to be “a mensch in public and a Jew in private.” Rather, he was fully a Jew and fully a mensch in all endeavors, in every waking and sleeping minute of his life. He could appreciate a Goethe ode on the setting sun and yet take it as a cue to recite the evening prayers—praising the Creator of Nature. Heschel was mensch enough to be counted among the closest friends of noted Protestant theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr and to represent the public face of Jewry both in the councils of the Vatican and among black protest marchers in Selma, Alabama, where his “feet were praying,” as he would later recall. In so doing, Heschel raised some critics’ suspicion that the mensch had eclipsed the Jew, or that he was even a crypto-Christian, falling short of some alleged standard of “authentically Jewish.” Thanks to Kaplan’s meticulously documented record, however there should no longer be any doubt of the fundamental continuity of Heschel’s values, from his traditional upbringing through every phase of his public career.

Heschel learned ethical commitment, compassion and his penchant for what he called the “leap of action” from his father, Rabbi Moshe Mordecai Heschel, who never kept money in his house overnight, but gave what he had left to the poor and was made sick at the report that one of his congregants ate ham. The young Heschel adopted this integration of ethical values and traditional observance throughout his life.

However, the Hasidic Warsaw enclave where he grew up was unavoidably exposed to the incursions of modernity. After his father’s early death, an enlightened tutor, hired at the suggestion of his mother, introduced Heschel to the secular vistas of European literature and thought. After studying at a progressive gymnasium in Vilna, a center of modern Yiddish literature and the radical politics of the Bund (the liberal socialist party), Heschel went on to a university education in Berlin, like many of his contemporaries. His traditional leanings were expressed in his choice of dissertation topic: a phenomenological study of the Biblical prophets, seeking to prove through an in-depth analysis of their experience that they had really been addressed by God. Against tremendous odds in Hitler’s Germany, Heschel was barely able to get his doctorate and dissertation published before expulsion to Poland. He hurriedly left for England in 1939 just before the German invasion, then came to the United States in 1940 at the invitation of Julian Morgenstern, the president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.

Spiritual Radical begins with Heschel’s arrival in America. Though he formed important personal connections in Cincinnati (where he met his future wife), he felt ill at ease in its Reform environment, in which religious services were conducted bareheaded and the cafeteria food was not kosher. Aghast at European racism, Heschel was likewise put off by Cincinnati’s keeping with “Southern culture” and the college’s practice of having African Americans in uniform wait on its students. By 1945, Heschel had found his permanent spiritual home at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.

Prophecy was the central theme of Heschel’s intellectual and spiritual pursuits since his Berlin days. Ethically, prophets were committed to uncompromising witness and service to absolute justice and compassion for the downtrodden. Theologically, this was rooted in the strong affirmation that the prophet had communication with the “divine pathos,” through which God communicated His concern for humanity and His will for human beings to act out in history. In his public career, Heschel acted out the prophetic calling most prominently on four issues: the spiritual revival of American Jewry; the struggle for civil rights; the Catholic Ecumenical Council of the early 1960’s; and the Vietnam War.

Kaplan traces the tensions raised by Heschel between his prophetic role and his desire for public acceptance and popularity. In the early 1950s, Heschel’s rebukes raised the hackles of both Conservative and Reform rabbis, by calling on the former for deeper spirituality and the latter for greater appreciation of halacha or Jewish religious law. At the same time, critics decried his rhetorical tendency to black-and-white argument. Heschel learned from such objections and moved toward a more nuanced declaration of “polarity,” in which some truth could be found on both sides: “of regularity and spontaneity, of uniformity and individuality…of love and fear, of understanding and obedience, of joy and discipline…of man’s quest for God and God in search of man...”

This complex expression of his radical stance marked Heschel’s maturity as a thinker and teacher. In his book Heavenly Torah he delved into the debates of second century rabbis in the Land of Israel, contrasting the ecstatic, maximalist Rabbi Akiva with the sober, down-to-earth Rabbi Ishmael. More subtly, the book strove to legitimate the role of human initiative in moderating the stringent demands of Jewish religious law and shaping its tradition, with the more flexible spirit expressed in the rabbinic ethical sayings or parables (agada).

This dialectic of polarity may have pointed the way to reconciliation in Heschel’s view, but the real-world conflicts in the social and political sphere proved more stubborn. Many rabbis distanced themselves from Heschel for various reasons. The Orthodox, led by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik of Boston, felt that he soft-pedaled the demands of Jewish law in favor of an amorphous spirituality; they were also skeptical of his ecumenical outreach efforts. Soloveitchik and others in the Litvak tradition preferred intellectual clarity over Heschel’s Hasidic infatuation with mystery. The liberal, rationalist Reconstructionists had little patience for Heschel’s supernaturalism, while his later political positions (especially against the Vietnam war) were unpopular even among some of his favorite disciples, such as Rabbi Seymour Siegel, an early neoconservative who spoke at President Richard Nixon’s second inauguration.

Driven by his prophetic zeal, fueled by a passionate sense of what was right, Heschel overworked himself in his final years. He spoke out relentlessly on behalf of ecumenism and Israel to Christian audiences, on spirituality to Jews, and on behalf of peace to everyone. All the while he continued to write books and articles. In August, 1969 he suffered a massive heart attack flying back to New York from a Catholic liturgical conference in Milwaukee. Even after recovering, he resumed his travels and speaking engagements while continuing to teach and writing his final books, in English and Yiddish, on the Hasidic heritage that had nurtured him. In the month before his death in December 1972, at age 65, he managed to take part in a television interview on his life and views and a political demonstration for anti-war Catholic clergymen (the Berrigan brothers) and complete his last book.

Heschel left a rich and varied legacy. Many of the perplexing issues facing Jews today can be debated on the basis of the arguments he raised. Among them: How may we reconcile our loyalty to Israel with absolute devotion to justice and peace? How may we reconcile our certainty that God speaks to us through Torah with a historical-critical sense of Jewish tradition’s evolution at human hands? How may we rest content with our human achievements when we have become deaf to God’s presence among us, amid the din and hubbub of today’s technocratic existence?

Leonard Levin is the co-translator of Heschel’s Heavenly Torah and teaches philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York.

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