The Enduring and Challenging Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel

Shortly after Abraham Joshua Heschel’s death in December 1972, one of his students, Jacob Neusner, published an article in praise of his teacher’s scholarship. He predicted that Heschel’s scholarly work would endure while his political activism would seem to future generations as a mere footnote, a peculiarity one might say, to his distinguished career.

For a time, it seemed as if Neusner was only half-right. As the American Jewish community moved, as Neusner himself did, in a more conservative direction, and as tensions increased between Black leadership and the Jews, it seemed as if Heschel’s political legacy might be minimal and his scholarship, long underappreciated by his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary, would also be cast aside. 

Yet as Julian E. Zelizer has so vividly demonstrated in his new biography “Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement,” part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Neusner is still only half-right. Both Heschel’s scholarship and his politics have endured, and he has had a lasting impact on the American Jewish community and the world.

Unlike many of his peers who made a similar journey, Heschel remained an observant Jew, attracted by secular learning but always seeking to harmonize—despite deep tensions—tradition and modernity and using tradition to morally rebuke the vacuousness of modern life, including religious life.

Zelizer gets all the big things about Heschel so very right. The scion of distinguished Hasidic dynasties on both his mother and his father’s side, Heschel was born in Warsaw and educated with the expectation that he fulfill his ancestral destiny and become the latest in the Hasidic line of Zadikim after his namesake Avraham Yeshoshua (Abraham Joshua) Heschel of Apt (1748-1825). Yet in his teens, he did what was unexpected: he pursued a secular education, first in Vilna and later in Berlin, the city that shaped the lives of some of the greatest leaders of Jewish life in the 20th century from the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson to the Rav Joseph Dov Baer Soloveitchik to Rav Yitzhak Hutner. And unlike many of his peers who made a similar journey, Heschel remained an observant Jew, attracted by secular learning but always seeking to harmonize—despite deep tensions—tradition and modernity and using tradition to morally rebuke the vacuousness of modern life, including religious life.

Zelizer organizes his work by the cities of Heschel’s life: Warsaw, Berlin, Cincinnati and New York, where he lived, was formed and transformed; and Selma and Washington where he earned his political chops as his impact was keenly felt in the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. He became the iconic, charismatic Jew, who more than anyone represented the Jewish presence in these transformative movements in American national life. Religious leadership in those days was liberal, leaning left, and both the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement had the feeling of a crusade. Heschel not only sounded the part but with his beard and gray long wavy hair, he looked the part. He also used his status and his activist credentials to call attention to Soviet Jewry’s struggle for freedom.

Heschel loved Weimar Berlin with its intellectual excitement and spiritual ferment. Eastern European Jews coming to Berlin found the city liberating and inviting. For many, but not for all, Berlin meant embracing modernity, forsaking Judaism. Even Rav Soloveitchik called those years some of the most wonderful of his life. And when the Nazis came, Heschel struggled to survive, finishing his dissertation just in time and leaving at the very last moment. In those distressing years, Heschel took on the responsibility of adult learning and worked closely with Martin Buber, another Jewish thinker with deep engagement in Hasidism and Jewish spirituality. It was a relationship that ultimately helped save his life as Buber recommended Heschel as one of the five scholars and five rabbinical students (Alfred Wolfe of Wilshire Boulevard Synagogue was also one of the five students saved) to be offered a haven in the United States by Julius Morgenstein, President of Hebrew Union College. (Why JTS did not comport itself similarly is a question that remains to be answered.)

Heschel thus spent World War II in Cincinnati, teaching Reform Rabbinical students who were committed to a religion of reason as the world was going mad. He was forever grateful for his rescue as he understood that this invitation was a matter of life and death. He was out of place, yet his five-year sojourn in Cincinnati clearly facilitated his assimilation into the United States as his world broadened, and he had to function in English as he met more assimilated students and neighbors than he might have had in New York.

When he came to New York in 1945, he was also out of place at the Jewish Theological Seminary though in the right place in New York City. He was a Hasid in a world of mitnagdim, a mystic among rationalists. Professor Saul Lieberman, the High Priest of JTS scholars, famously introduced Gershom Scholem by saying “You all know I believe that mysticism is nonsense.” Heschel was a poet while most Seminary scholars were engaged in Wissenschaft, the scientific study of Judaism. The most externally influential of them, Mordecai Kaplan, the brilliant innovator of American Judaism from the 1910s to the 1950s, and Heschel’s rival for the affection of students, was committed to demythologizing Judaism. Heschel was committed to its spiritual revival. Yet it remained his home, where he felt at the center of the action—political, interreligious, and scholarly—from 1945 to his death in 1972.

Heschel is celebrated as a spiritual founder of the new Hasidism and venerated by all who march not only for Jews but also for other people and see in their public protest a cry for justice, an echo of the prophets.

What has changed in the perception of Heschel is that we, his readers, have changed. He speaks to a new generation in North America and Israeli Jews interested in Jewish spirituality and in the possibility of a spiritually fulfilling transformative engagement with the world. Schools have been named in his honor. His books have been reprinted. His students have completed some of his unfinished work. Gordon Tucker, for example, published the English translation of what he called “Heavenly Torah,” including the third unfinished volume of Heschel’s master work “Torah M’Sinai.” Heschel is celebrated as a spiritual founder of the new Hasidism and venerated by all who march not only for Jews but also for other people and see in their public protest a cry for justice, an echo of the prophets.

While Zelizer gets the big story right and provides an inspiring portrait of Heschel as scholar and activist, some of the details are murky and others are just plain wrong. Heschel came to New York to live in 1945, as he tells us once. But twice more in the book, when tangential to the narrative, Zelizer has it taking place in 1940, which should confuse the unlearned reader. Similarly, like many in the Jewish community and certainly in the non-Jewish world, he confuses the American Jewish Committee—founded by German Jews, and where Rabbi Mark Tannenbaum worked on interreligious affairs—with the American Jewish Congress, founded during World War II by Eastern European Jews and Rabbi Stephen Wise and later, for a time, by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, one of the last rabbis of Berlin, a civil rights activist and the Jew who spoke immediately before Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech. From the 1930s through the 1960s, these organizations had very different approaches to Jewish participation in American political life and to advocating Jewish issues. The Committee survives intact: the truncated Congress was destroyed on the Bernie Madoff gravy train.

Toward the end of the book, Zelizer retells a powerful and poignant story of a meeting in the last week of Heschel’s life. It is a story told by Heschel’s friend Elie Wiesel and retold by Wiesel, Heschel and Buber biographer Maurice Friedman. Wiesel received an urgent call from Heschel and could tell by the urgency of his voice that something serious was amiss. He dropped everything, rushed up to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and entered Heschel’s office where they embraced in tears. Heschel died of a heart attack that very same Shabbat. 

What is left untold is why Heschel was in tears. His rabbinical students had circulated a petition asking that Heschel, an often indifferent teacher in the classroom but brilliant teacher in his study with a chosen few, be removed from teaching as he was missing classes due to his political activism.

Zelizer also misses the admonition that Gershon Cohen, then Chancellor of the Seminary, offered to JTS students and faculty at a gathering to mark sloshim, the 30th day of Heschel’s death, castigating his colleagues for their failure to appreciate the greatness of the man and the magnitude of his contribution as scholar and activist. That too was part of his legacy. He was finally recognized and respected by the institution that had been his base.

Zelizer, who is invariably polite and appreciative, misses one final betrayal. Shortly after Heschel’s death, Daniel Berrigan, who had worked alongside Heschel throughout the antiwar movement, spoke to the Association of Arab Americans, castigating the Jews for their failure to criticize the Vietnam War for fear of jeopardizing U.S. support for Israel. He omitted all mention of Heschel, who had stood up to Israeli and American Jewish pressure, which only fortified his anti-war activity. Furthermore, Berrigan betrayed Heschel’s central depiction of the prophetic task “to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted.” 

Had Berrigan wished to criticize the Jews, he should have spoken to a Jewish organization. To Arab Americans he should have challenged Arab perceptions of Israel, Arab attitudes toward Israel. With Heschel no longer in the picture, he comforted the comfortable. He told his audience precisely what they wanted to hear. 

Zelizer also fails to grasp the linkage between Heschel’s inner struggle and his final work of scholarship, a study of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, “A Passion for Truth,” in which the Kotzker Rebbe feels that the praise of his disciples diminished the intensity of the truth that he was to bring to the world. They demanded too little of him, they accepted as profound less than his best. Was Heschel describing himself or Menachem Mendel? Is such veneration a trap or an opportunity?

So almost a half century after his death, Heschel’s scholarship endures; so too do his efforts to confront the evils of American society. The importance of his voice has only increased over time and Zelitzer has told us many reasons why.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.