Abraham Joshua Heschel--Philosopher of Wonder

Our Thirty-Year Friendship and Dialogue

Friedman

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894872
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Most studies of Abraham Joshua Heschel approach him as a theologian, whereas this book peers behind the theologian and honors Heschel as the original philosopher that he was. So it unearths Heschel's epistemology, his aesthetic, and his social philosophy, all reinforced by the thirty years of friendship and dialogue that Maurice Friedman shared with him.This book raises significantly critical questions concerning Heschel's philosophy of Judaism while remaining greatly appreciative of the sweep and command of his philosophy that Friedman believes were not sufficiently worked through.

Part One

Heschel the Person

1

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Meeting Heschel

In July 1945 I transferred from the Philadelphia Institute for the Feeble Minded (thirty miles from Philadelphia) to a Civilian Public Service Camp in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It had been arranged that at Smokemont, North Carolina, a spike camp of Gatlinburg, a number of us conscientious objectors who had met at weekend retreats off and on during the past year and a half intended to establish a more permanent retreat where silent meditation and mystical devotion could be practiced more fully while we worked during the days. I was only the second member of our retreat to arrive, which was fatal for my mysticism because the first person to arrive tried to convert me to his high-church Anglicanism so I could join with him in taking life-vows by Easter at an Anglican monastery. He had no regard at all for my concern for silent meditation. I have told this story at length in my memoir-novel The Group Dance.

Meanwhile I had changed my primary devotion and loyalty from the non-dualistic Vedanta of Ramakrishna and Vivekenanda to Hasidism. What is more, my participation in a number of amateur psychodramas in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during furloughs and weekends off, had brought me to a state in which I was no longer capable of meditating, as I had been doing the past year and half, nor was I any longer able to live up to my own goal of celibacy. None of this meant, however, that I had turned entirely away from mysticism, which has remained a personal and academic interest of mine throughout my life, including books and courses in comparative mysticism. When l was doing my doctoral work at the University of Chicago, my great teacher Joachim Wach complained to my young friend Arthur A. Cohen (years later a famous author and editor, but only 19 years old at the time) that I wore my mysticism on my sleeve!

My stint at Chapel Hill ended with my defying the leader of our psychodrama group and marrying Susan Lindsay, daughter of the famous American poet Vachel Lindsay, and taking off for Philadelphia. While there, I took Susan to meet Rabbi Simon Greenberg with whom I had met a number of times while stationed at the Institute near Philadelphia. Rabbi Greenberg proposed that we should go to New York City to meet Abraham Joshua Heschel, sending along with us a very nice note saying that one rarely meets young people like Susan and me these days. Heschel, who had only a few years before been rescued from certain death in Poland when the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati brought him to teach there (“I was a brand plucked from the flame,” he was later to write), was now a young Professor of Jewish Mysticism and Ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, the institution that trained conservative rabbis just as the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, from which Heschel had only just transferred, trained Reform Rabbis. At that time, Professor Heschel did not yet have a beard (I was sorry when he later grew one since it made him seem more distant to me).

When Susan and I came to see Dr. Heschel, he was warm and cordial. It was winter time, and he commented on how remarkable it was that one could turn on a radiator and get heat—an example of the abiding wonder that was the basis of his philosophy of religion.1 Heschel called the wonder that overcame him in his meeting with everyday things and events “awareness of the ineffable.” When I wrote an essay on Heschel for a Hebrew book to which I contributed a number of years later, I dubbed him “the philosopher of wonder,” which is also the subtitle of this book.

Meanwhile my wife of two months left me for my Harvard roommate and friend John Conrad Russell, son of the great British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. When I came to see Heschel again, I was anything but happy. “The Hasidim live by joy,” Heschel, who was himself the direct descendant of a long line of Hasidic zaddikim (the leaders of the Hasidic community) reaching all the way back to Dov Baer, the great Maggid of Mezritch, who succeeded the Baal Shem Tov and organized and through his disciples spread Hasidism throughout Eastern Europe after the death of the Besht. “If you cannot find joy in six weeks, do not come and see me again!” Heschel said to me. Later Heschel explained to me that the joy of the Hasidim came precisely through suffering and not through the absence of suffering.

Still under the spell of the amateur psychodrama that Susan and I took part in at Chapel Hill, I made a disparaging remark to Heschel about my mother. Heschel, whose mother and sister had been murdered by the Nazis only a few years before, cried out, “If I could find my mother, to tie her shoe laces, I would be the happiest man on earth!”

Largely ignorant of Hasidism and still more American Hasidism, I wanted to give my life to reviving Hasidism in America. Even though my background in Hebrew and Judaism was pitifully thin, Heschel sensed the genuineness of my love for Hasidism and was ready to help me. What I really would have liked at that point was a Jewish yoga that gave directions in meditation and prayer. Heschel would not give it to me, holding that Hasidism was an integral part of Judaism. It was only many years later that I discovered that there was indeed a book that gave the instructions that I longed for (a book by Arye Cohen, I believe). By then, however, it was no longer a live option for me. So synchronicity also works in a negative fashion!

Heschel once stressed that I was better off, from his point of view, to have had a thin background in Judaism in Tulsa yet remained Jewish than Franz Rosenzweig’s great friend Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who came of a Jewish background but converted to Christianity. I think he was right, yet I often felt that Heschel could not really understand that my total lack of practical background in Halakhah—the Jewish law—was more of an obstacle to my joining him in the practice of Jewish law than any choice against it based on principle!

Heschel wanted me to go to the Jewish Theological Seminary, saying that there would be time enough when I graduated for me to find my way forward as rabbi, writer, journalist, or what have you. Simon Greenberg offered me $500 from his Har Zion temple fund to study Hebrew. Dr. Heschel and Rabbi Greenberg told me not to worry about the fact that I could not yet make the affirmation of the Jewish law that is a prerequisite for entering the Jewish Theological Seminary. It would come of itself in due time. Maybe they were right; yet it seemed to me less than honest to assume that such belief would come when I had no trace of it now. I was also troubled at the time, as I would not have been later, by the exclusiveness that I felt would result from my going to the seminary and becoming a rabbi.

Martin Buber wrote that it had sometimes been suggested to him that he should liberate Hasidism from its confessional limitations and make of it a universal religion of mankind. “To do so would be pure arbitrariness on my part,” Buber responded. “Besides which I do not need to leave the doorway of my ancestral house. The word that is spoken there can be heard on the street.” I learned this as I learned that the way to reality is not through some universal but through the particular—the very particular in which one finds oneself in any given time and situation.

So I did not accept what I saw as a very kind and generous offer on Rabbi Greenberg’s part—I did not enter the Seminary and settled for teaching Judaism but not practicing it in the Orthodox sense or ever becoming a rabbi. In the summer of 1967 I was the scholar-in-residence at Oconomowoc—a Reform Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin. Since all the other adults at the camp were rabbis, when someone interviewed me for the camp paper, they asked me why I was not a rabbi. “In Tulsa, when I grew up, being a rabbi was not even a live option for me,” I replied.

I took two courses in biblical Hebrew at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago when I was working on my doctorate.

In the late 1950s I was Chairman of the American Friends of Ihud. IHUD, which means unity, was the Israeli association for Jewish–Arab rapprochement run by Martin Buber and Ernst Simon. One of our active members was Murray (later Moshe) Klebanoff, who stayed in New York City until his mother died, his apartment building was vacated, and his own apartment overrun by rats! At this point he moved to Israel. When my wife Eugenia, our two children David and Dvora, and I were in Jerusalem for seven months in 1966 while I was doing research on what became my three-volume Martin Buber’s Life and Work, I saw the now highly Orthodox Moshe Klebanoff several times. He told me how he divided his life between study at the Hebrew University and living with the Bratzlaver Hasidim in the Me’a Shearim, or the Hundred Gates—the super, super-orthodox section of Jerusalem—with the result that the Bratzlaver young men would go in his room and burn his university books! When Buber died, said Moshe, they used the Hebrew words customary for the death of an animal! As Buber himself once said, he brought Hasidism to the West against the will of the Hasidim, who did not care about the West and could not forgive Buber for popularizing Hasidism without being orthodox like themselves!

I told Moshe that in the fall of 1966 I would be the first non-Catholic to be professor of philosophy and religion at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in the 140 years of their existence. I also told him that I would be teaching a course on Judaism there. “You should explain to your students that your Judaism is not the real thing,” Moshe said to me. “I could do that, Moshe,” I said, “but students will always be more influenced by the living presence of the teacher than by any such disclaimers on his part.”

Despite my decision not to take up Rabbi Greenberg’s generous offer to subsidize my study of Hebrew, for years Dr. Heschel called me up every Sunday morning without fail to ask how my study of Hebrew was coming. Although I studied conversational Hebrew before we went to Israel in 1960 and also at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I never mastered Hebrew the way Heschel hoped I would.

1. I cannot help thinking of the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review of my 1987 book Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: “You Are My Witnesses” who heaped scorn on me for mentioning in my book that when Heschel and I walked from the Jewish Theological Seminary to his apartment on Riverside Drive, Heschel made a point of our stopping to get orange juice!

2

Man’s Quest for Meaning

Heschel and His Disciples

Heschel shared with me his remarkable essay on “Prayer,” as he later shared with me everything he wrote in English. He was originally from Poland and wrote a fluent Polish and German before he learned to write English more beautifully and poetically than most persons for whom English was native! Heschel’s essay on “Prayer” had a profound impact on me. I remember particularly his story about two towns both of which had clocks but neither of which had a person who repaired clocks. The one town let their clocks run down, as a result of which all their clocks rusted. The other town kept their clocks running, even though they knew that they did not have the right time. At long last a man who repaired clocks showed up in both towns. He was able to repair the clocks of the town that had kept their clocks running but not of the town that had let theirs become inactive and rusted!

Heschel also shared with me what the Sabbath meant to him. “If it were not for the Sabbath,” Heschel said to me, “I do not know how I could get through each week.” The sense of joy that Heschel found in the Sabbath and in observing the mitzvoth was my first introduction to what Heschel later called the “holy dimension” of Jewish deeds. It gave content to what otherwise might have seemed entirely foreign to me.

It was also during this period that I began to come into contact with Heschel’s disciples among the rabbinical students at the seminary—Montford Harris, who struck me as a young mystic in his own right, and Hershel Matt, who, under the influence of Heschel and Will Herberg, made the journey from Reconstructionism to an altogether different kind of theology and piety. Today Hershel’s son Daniel has become a leading expert on the Kabbala and has received a remarkable grant to translate the Zohar, the central text of medieval Jewish mysticism.

Later, when I was studying for my doctorate as a Fellow of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago, Heschel regularly sent to see me those of his disciples who lived or studied there—Samuel Dresner and Seymour Siegel in particular. Sam was not so gentle with me on the subject of Halakhah as Heschel was. Though the Jewish law remained a constant question and tension between Heschel and me, he emphatically re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part 1: Heschel the Person
• Part 2: Heschel and Hasidism
• Part 3: Our Dialogue
• Part 4: Prophecy, Social Action, and Existentialism
• Part 5: God Follows Me Everywhere
• Bibliography