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 (parts one and two can be found here and here).
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Dear Rabbi Held,
You ended your second round answer with an intriguing reference to Mordechai Kaplan. From what I understand, you basically agree with your unnamed friend about how “American Jews are all Kaplanians who are enamored of Heschel” and believe that while Kaplan is closer to their beliefs, Heschel represents a kind of traditionalist limit which challenges them. Curiously, you claim that this makes Kaplan “a hard sell.” I’d like to ask you more about this interesting idea.
We recently had an exchange with Kaplan scholar Mel Scult, the third part of which focused on Kaplan’s relationship with Heschel. Professor Scult wrote about how, despite their many differences, the two thinkers “were not that far apart” in many aspects, including in their basic attitude to religion as a transformation of the individual. The most central matter that separated between the two was, according to Scult, revelation. As he puts it, “For Heschel, the fact of revelation is not symbolic or metaphorical but real. God is not only concerned with man but communicates directly. For Kaplan, revelation is not only impossible but a scandal.”
I have two questions:
1) How do you view the main difference between being a Kaplanian and being a Heschelian?
2) Isn't the Rabbi whose theological beliefs are not shared by the general public, the one who believes in revelation, supposed to be 'the harder sell'? Why is the Rabbi who doesn't share your beliefs the more appealing one?
Thanks again for the book and for participating in this exchange.
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
Thanks for your questions and for the broader exchange, which I have really enjoyed.
As far as what separates Heschel and Kaplan, I agree with Professor Scult that revelation is a major dividing line: For Kaplan, revelation is really just another way of describing human discovery, while for Heschel it refers to an initiative God takes, a divine act of reaching out toward the human. But I would push the distinction one step further, because I think the contrast in approaches to revelation is really just a manifestation of a much more fundamental divide over the nature of God. Kaplan was a naturalist through and through; he found the notion of a supernatural God dated at best and incoherent at worst. Heschel was a committed supernaturalist: he believed in a God who brought the world into being, cared deeply for human beings, and sought relationship with them. I suspect that Heschel would have said this starkly: “I believe in the God of the Bible, and Kaplan does not.” The question of what revelation is – of what it could possibly be – is derivative of this more foundational disagreement: what do Jews mean (and what ought they to mean) when they say “God”?
The theological chasm that divides Heschel and Kaplan is fascinating. Kaplan likely thought Heschel's ideas about God were vestigial of another era; Heschel probably thought Kaplan came perilously close to atheism. We can perhaps gain some conceptual clarity about what is at stake here by considering what we mean by “theism” and “atheism.” The philosopher Merold Westphal says something helpful in this regard: “‘Atheism’ could be defined in terms of negative answers to either of the following quite different questions. (1) Is there anything corresponding to the theistic notion of a personal creator? (2) Is there anything that deserves to be called God?” If the first question is determinative, then Kaplan is clearly an atheist; if the second, then he is obviously very far from an atheist. Heschel would likely have argued that for Jewish theology what truly matters is the first question – whether or not one affirms the reality of the God of the Bible; Kaplan would have strongly demurred and insisted on the legitimacy (and necessity) of placing the second question at the center.
In light of this, another way to understand the gap between Heschel and Kaplan is to ask the question of what, precisely, deserves to be called God; what is worthy of worship? Heschel insisted that many of the liberal alternatives to the transcendent, personal God of the Bible were ultimately vapid and uninteresting, for at least two reasons: first, many liberal theologians (Kaplan among them) posited a God who had less will and consciousness than we human beings do. This meant, according to Heschel, that the god they purported to worship was in fact “inferior to us in the order of being.” (By the way, Maimonides’ transcendent, impersonal God was problematic to Heschel in part for the same reason: a being who cannot love and does not care is also “inferior to us in the order of being.”) Second, Heschel believed that a God devoid of will and consciousness could not really command or make a claim on us. Heschel was withering in his assessment of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who spoke of God as the ground of being: “God is the ground of being. So everybody is ready to accept it. Why not? Ground of being causes me no harm. Let there be a ground of being, doesn’t cause me any harm, and I’m ready to accept it. It’s meaningless. Isn’t there a God who is above the ground? Maybe God is the source of qualms and of disturbing my conscience. Maybe God is a God of demands. Yes, this is God, not the ground of being.” I think Heschel would have reacted similarly to Kaplan’s notion that God is a process in the universe. Fairly or not, he’d have thought that a “process” makes no claims on me, issues no demands, is in no meaningful way a Metzaveh (a Commander), and is therefore religiously otiose and irrelevant.
You ask what it means to be a Heschelian as opposed to a Kaplanian. One of Professor Scult's remarks about Kaplan is helpful in this regard: he writes that “Though Kaplan is a naturalist, he would certainly sense the commandingness of the moral imperative, though for him it comes from within and not from on high.” For Heschel, commandedness is inextricably bound up with a sense of being obligated to someone else, of being indebted to the Source of life, without whom nothing would exist. The sense of obligation that underlies Judaism, for him, is not attentiveness to an inner voice but responsiveness to the transcendent God of covenant. God’s voice sometimes speaks from within, but the commanding voice ultimately issues from without (what Scult refers to as “on high”). Moreover, for Heschel it is not just the moral imperative that commands us; there is also a realm of mitzvot bein adam la-Makom, of commandments that are not primarily about ethics but about worship. And they too are obligatory. You can see how the question of God and the question of revelation are thoroughly intertwined, both for Heschel and for Kaplan. The issue of the status of mitzvot is entwined with questions about God and revelation because without a Commanding God, mitzvot become mere custom or what Kaplan called folkways. For Heschel, commandedness was too fundamental a religious category to be vitiated in this way. As he puts it at one point, “I am commanded—therefore I am.”
Of course, Kaplan might have responded that at the end of the day, he just did not find Heschel’s god metaphysically believable. Some of his disciples would no doubt have chimed in: a God who has will, and consciousness, and power, and who nevertheless allows human beings to suffer in the unimaginably horrific ways they do is not worthy of worship either (Harold Kushner, author of the best-seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, was a student of Kaplan’s). My point here is not to try to adjudicate this debate so much as to understand its contours and to point to the depth of the disagreement (the fault line, really) between Heschel and Kaplan, and to explain some of why I think it mattered so much to Heschel.
On another note, I found it interesting that in your exchange with Professor Scult, you asked about whether Kaplan worried about being associated too closely with Christian ideas. I had not really thought of it before, but there is potentially an important line of connection here between Heschel and Kaplan. Heschel went to great lengths to argue that the God of Judaism is moved by human affairs, that God cares deeply for the oppressed and downtrodden; this is what he describes as the “divine pathos.” Hearing Heschel talk about a God who suffers, some people accused him of sounding Christian. Heschel's work on the prophets was subject to vehement attack from some quarters along these lines. But Heschel did not back down, and the reason is critical: the fact that Christianity inherited (and sometimes radicalized) some of Judaism’s foundational ideas does not make those ideas the sole possession of Christianity. It cannot be, Heschel insisted, that Jews will let go of one of the most revolutionary claims of the Bible – that God cares about human life and history – just because Christians have adopted that idea too. There is a great deal to be said about just how and why so many American Jews came to fear sounding “too Christian,” but the result has often been the falsification of Jewish theology itself. This has trickled as far down as elementary Jewish education. Think of how many American Jewish children have been taught some version of this: “Judaism has no notion of an afterlife; Christianity is focused on the afterlife, but Judaism is totally this-worldly.” Or, God help us, consider how many Jews have internalized the canard that Judaism is about law rather than love; Judaism is at least in part a religion about law as a manifestation of love. Jews traditionally thank God twice a day for the fact that God’s love was manifest in the giving of Torah, which includes but it is not exhausted by law. Judaism is not, and has never been, a religion exclusively focused on law. (One of Heschel’s deepest commitments was his struggle to restore aggada, theology and narrative, to their proper place in Jewish religious life.) In different ways, perhaps Heschel and Kaplan both refused to be cowed by the fear of being labeled “too Christian.”
Thank you for pushing me to clarify my counter-intuitive remark about how Heschel is popular in part because his thought is aspirational for American Jews. I am not sure that I am right about this, but let me nevertheless try and explain what I mean. On one level, of course, you are right: “the rabbi whose theological beliefs are not shared by the general public” would seem to be “the harder sell.” And yet I wonder: so much of what religion is about is the attempt to reach beyond ourselves, to strive to be the person we could be, to refuse to be limited and defined by the person we currently are. I wonder whether theology is like that, too: sometimes we are drawn to the things we already believe, to thinkers who express more clearly and articulately than we can what we already believe and why. But sometimes we are drawn to something else– to thinkers who believe things we yearn to – even if we do not (yet). Another way of getting at this: in a culture dominated by starkly (and often reductively) naturalistic assumptions, many people long – often in an inchoate way – for a re-enchantment of the world, for a re-connection to the transcendent, to the mysterious, to God. For many, I suspect, Heschel provides that longed-for window on another way of seeing, experiencing, and responding to reality. He gives voice to the sense that reductive naturalism is ultimately impoverished, that it is wholly inadequate to the task of describing the human condition, let alone of offering a compelling vision of the good. I do not mean to suggest that the only two alternatives available to modern people are reductive naturalism and Biblical theology – surely there are options besides Richard Dawkins and Abraham Joshua Heschel. But I do think that Heschel provides a forceful, unabashed, and – crucially – lyrical alternative to our disenchanted way of perceiving the world.
One final word about Heschel’s appeal: More beautifully than any other modern Jewish writer, Heschel lays bare the bankruptcy of dividing between “social justice Jews” and “mitzvah-observance-Jews.” Heschel shows so powerfully how fundamental to Judaism is the marriage between Avodat Hashem (the service of God) and caring for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. In Heschel, deep piety and moral passion are totally intertwined. As we try to heal the breaches in American Jewish life, his is a voice we would all do well to heed.
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