fbpx

The Heschel Exchange, part 2: On the rabbi’s provocative rhetoric

[additional-authors]
October 13, 2014

Rabbi Shai Held is Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar. Before that, he served for six years as Scholar-in-Residence at Kehilat Hadar in New York City, and taught both theology and Halakha at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as Director of Education at Harvard Hillel. A renowned lecturer and educator, Shai is a 2011 recipient of the Covenant Award for excellence in Jewish education. He has taught for institutions such as Drisha, Me'ah, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Rabbinic Training Institute, and currently serves on the faculty of the Wexner Heritage program. Shai has a PhD in religion from Harvard; his main academic interests are in modern Jewish and Christian thought and in the history of Zionism.

This exchange is dedicated to Rabbi Held’s book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (part one can be found right here).

***

Dear Rabbi Held,

First of all, thank you for your interesting and detailed round one response. I’d like to devote round two to some of the “serious problems in Heschel’s philosophy” that you mentioned earlier.

While your book begins with quite a sympathetic take on Heschel’s insights and beautifully written remarks on wonder, it’s clear from the onset that you are not afraid of criticizing some of his basic metaphysical pretentions and the harsh rhetoric they lead him to.

You paint a picture of a very intense man who refuses to accept the possibility that his deep, intuitive sense of the presence of God is not shared by all of humanity. This sometimes leads him to some dismissive and rather offensive remarks concerning people who don’t share his intense level of belief. This is especially true when it comes to atheists and people with religious doubt. As you put it, “his insistence that atheists and deniers are arrogant, dishonest and just plain foolish is jarring, to say the least.”

Heschel, as you describe him, is a thinker who “is not content to have his intuitions immune to refutation, but wants to establish their superiority – morally and spiritually – over less theistic, more secular intuitions,” one who, “taking a posture of humility,” doesn’t have any qualms about “lambasting the non-believer who doesn’t share his religious perceptions.” As Heschel’s religious perceptions seem to be very intense and metaphysical in nature, there are also clearly quite a few believers who would view the conclusiveness with which he presents them as overwhelming.

My question: do you think that the appeal of Heschel’s thought relies on his readers sharing his sense of divine presence and revelation? What, in your opinion, could less pious individuals learn from his writings?

Yours,

Shmuel

***

Dear Shmuel,

Rabbi Heschel was without a doubt one of the greatest religious writers of the twentieth century.  When it comes to describing what faith looks like from the inside, what it is like to encounter the world with eyes of wonder and to respond to God with a heart ready to serve, Heschel’s gifts for expression and evocation are simply astounding. As I travel, I continue to be amazed at the number of people I meet—Jews and Christians from every conceivable denomination– who tell me how reading Heschel for the first time changed their life, opened new possibilities for them, gave them language for deeply-held but only stammeringly-articulated intuitions. In the midst of secular America, Heschel continues to open the door to faith and piety for a remarkable number of people.  (When you consider that he learned English as an adult, his eloquence becomes simply mind-boggling.)

A few thoughts about what you refer to as R. Heschel’s “harsh rhetoric.” For many years, I found some of Heschel’s most strident formulations alienating and off-putting, but over time I came to find them simply puzzling. How is it, I wondered, that a man who laments the fact that we are living through a “blackout of God” can also declare that “no one can be a witness to the non-existence of God without laying a perjury upon his soul”? How can someone who harbors a great deal of anger at God (one of the arguments I make in my book is that Heschel is in fact far angrier in the wake of the Shoah than most of his interpreters have seen) at the same time insist that there can be no good faith atheism? And then I came to realize that what someone says in a rhetorical mode is not necessarily identical with what he would say in a more discursive one.  In other words, what someone says in an attempt to jolt his readers may well be different from what he would say during a quiet exchange at Starbucks. 

I’ll try to explain. At one point, Heschel writes “there can be no honest denial of the existence of God.  There can only be faith or the honest confession of inability to believe—or arrogance.” At another, he opines that “what is called in the English language an atheist, the language of the Bible calls a fool.” To many (most?) modern readers, these are obviously disturbing formulations; they strike us as unnecessarily shrill and dogmatic. But I suspect that in passages such as these Heschel is self-consciously speaking hyperbolically. A hyperbole is intended to be an extreme or extravagant statement; it is not meant to be taken literally. Why does Heschel choose to speak in this way? He thinks that modern men and women are in deep crisis and that, as he puts is, “life in our time has become a nightmare for many of us.” In modern times we have become enslaved to a culture of expediency wherein the only operative question is how things can serve us and further our own selfish ends. Moreover, he worries that we have closed ourselves off from the possibility of anything (or anyone) outside us making a claim on us. For Heschel—and obviously there is room to debate the merits of this assumption—we need religion more than ever because God and God alone can shake us out of our complacency, can challenge us to overcome our selfishness and develop deep and abiding concern for the well-being of others. But Heschel feels stuck: he thinks that we desperately need the transcendent God of the Hebrew Bible—the God, he insists, who tears our selfishness to shreds—but we are totally closed to the call and command of that God. As he poignantly puts it, the Bible is answer, but the question has gone out of the world.

So what is a thinker who finds himself in this situation to do? The world, Heschel thinks, has become “an inferno”; he feels he has an important part of the solution; and yet the whole discourse of biblical religion is a non-starter for those who need it most.  Nietzsche wonderfully says that “it is useful to exaggerate in describing emergencies.” Heschel philosophizes with a hammer because he feels that at a certain point, that is all he has available to him. Heschel’s general mode is the evocative—he wants to elicit a sense of wonder from his readers, and through that, an intuition of transcendence.  But when all else fails, he tries something else: to shake his readers, to shock them and jolt them awake, and thus to pierce their defenses. Perhaps then, he thinks, they will arrive at a faint glimmer of the transcendent.

We can debate about whether this mode is effective for Heschel (I suspect that sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t, and that it strikes different readers very differently), but I think it’s important to try and understand both what he’s actually doing and why he’s doing it.

Now, at long last, to your actual question: I think there is a tremendous amount readers who do not share all of Heschel’s intuitions and assumptions can learn from reading him. A few thoughts in that regard:

Heschel’s critique of modernity is as powerful as it is simple: instead of asking how we can serve, we incessantly ask how things (and people) can serve us.   “Man has… become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is not a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs… In our technological age, man could not conceive of this world as anything but material for his own fulfillment.” Does Heschel paint with overly broad strokes? Is his story about modernity too simple?  Of course it is, but that is, I think, at least in part by design.  When the Psalmist erects a wall between “the way of the righteous,” on the one hand, and “the way of the wicked,” on the other, does he not know that many of us—arguably, most of us—lie somewhere in between? Of course he does, but the stark dichotomy is nevertheless salutary because we are being asked to choose a direction, an orientation for our lives. Whether we are believers or not, we each face the blunt choice between “the way of wonder” and “the way of expediency,” between self-assertion and self-transcendence—and few people articulate that choice as clearly, as eloquently, and as demandingly as Heschel does.

More, for those of us who take religion seriously (or strive to), Heschel implicitly challenges us to ask whether religion too has become just another tool to serve our own ends. This can take subtle forms, as when we ask how religion can serve us or talk about hiring religion to do certain work for us (such talk is common in our day and age); in our culture, venerable religious traditions are often reduced to “gifts we give ourselves.” (Many of the people who speak this way undoubtedly mean well, but their mode of talking unwittingly entrenches our spiritual problems instead of helping us overcome them.) It can also take much more insidious forms: religion can serve to buttress our self-satisfaction instead of inspiring or goading us to self-transcendence. God can all too easily be turned into an idol, used to confirm all of our worst prejudices, to justify our callousness and small-mindedness. Heschel has no patience for any of this: “The essence of religion,” he writes, “does not lie in the satisfaction of a human need. As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God whom he serves but his own self.” It is imperative that modern men and women be exposed to this kind of religious talking and yearning—it exposes the staggering superficiality both of (many of) religion’s most ferocious detractors and of (many of) its most impassioned defenders.

Permit me to close with one additional thought. A friend recently asked me how it is, as he put it, that “American Jews are all Kaplanians who are enamored of Heschel.” Why, he wondered, do so many Jews who find so much of Heschel’s worldview so foreign nevertheless find him so utterly compelling. This is a fascinating question, and I have to confess that it caught me off guard. And yet I suspect that the answer is implicit in his question.  American Jews are drawn to Heschel at least in part because his worldview is so aspirational for them, because it constitutes such a stretch and a challenge for them (for us). Part of what makes Mordecai Kaplan a hard sell is precisely that what most American Jews don’t believe, Kaplan doesn’t believe either. There is comfort in reading Kaplan, but perhaps it is just not aspirational enough. 

Speaking personally, even after years of reading and teaching his thought, after deconstructing and reconstructing every corner of his theology, I can still pick up Heschel and find his writing arresting, compelling, challenging, daunting, devastating, inspiring, invigorating. Despite all of the limitations that I have alluded to here and closely examined in my book, there is a power there, and a fire, that are truly stunning.

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

Print Issue: Got College? | Mar 29, 2024

With the alarming rise in antisemitism across many college campuses, choosing where to apply has become more complicated for Jewish high school seniors. Some are even looking at Israel.

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.