Abraham Joshua Heschel

Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-72), one of the foremost Jewish savants of our time, was internationally known as scholar, author, activist, and theologian. In his lifetime Heschel spoke and published widely. Arriving in the United States in flight from the brutalities of Nazi Germany, he never forgot that the search for the divine and for human spirituality is inseparable from the search for a just society. As a revered and beloved teacher, he impressed on his students, first at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and then during his many years as Professor of Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the spiritual imperatives of prayer, of ecumenism, of social decency. This first collection of Dr. Heschel's essays is arranged in five groups: "Existence and Celebration," "No Time for Neutrality," "Toward a Just Society," "No Religion Is an Island" (on ecumenism), and "The Holy Dimension." The essays include a tribute to Reinhold Niebuhr and a discussion of Father Bernard Haring, the moral theologian. The appendix contains Carl Stern's famous television interview with Dr. Heschel, recorded shortly before his death. The book also includes an introduction to Dr. Heschel's life and thought by the editor, his daughter, Susannah Heschel, who holds the Abba Hillel Silver chair in Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She is also the editor of the landmark collection On Being a Jewish Feminist.

In his lifetime, the late Abraham Joshua Heschel was celebrated as a profound religious thinker, an eloquent writer on Hasidism, a modern prophet who led civil rights marches. All of these eclipsed his reputation as a first-rate scholar of Jewish thought; since his death his work has gradually emerged from behind his fame. Central among his interests was the nature of the direct experience of God, either mystically or prophetically. While his work on the ancient Israelite prophets is well known, his studies of prophetic inspiration among Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages is not, in part because it exists in article form and in part because these articles were written in Hebrew. The standard Jewish view is that prophecy ended with the ancient prophets, somewhere early in the Second Temple era. Heschel demonstrated that this view is not altogether accurate. Belief in the possibility of continued prophetic inspiration, and in its actual occurrence - appear throughout much of the medieval period, and even in modern times.

Heschel attempts to understand the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of each of the prophets, presenting the reader with a sense of their very being. He effectively achieves a balance between the objective supernatural and the subjective human situation, and presents a discussion of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk and their particular challenges and journeys. In the second part of the book, Heschel addresses such subjects as pathos, wrath, sympathy, ecstasy, psychosis, and prophetic and poetic inspiration, and in so doing offers a contribution to the philosophy of religion.