The Inner Life of A.J. Heschel — a Lecture by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis

The Inner Life of A.J. Heschel — A Lecture by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis The University of Judaism Presents A Lecture by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Temple Sinai, Los Angeles, California April 26, 1982 (This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com) Victor Goodhill: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was no stranger to the sanctuary which he loved. He would accompany me to Sinai on those Sabbaths when we did not have a minion in the home which the Heschels would occupy for summer months. Professor Heschel was an honorary member of the Sinai backbench in that row. For many reasons, Heschel's ruach, his spirit lives on in this synagogue, among countless others throughout the world. Our speaker of the night is Rabbi Harold Schulweis, whom I have known and admired for many years, long before he came to settle in California. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, recipient of a doctorate in theology from the civic school of religion in Berkeley, Dr. Schulweis is one of the giants in Jewish religious life. He deeply feels the pathos about which Dr. Heschel wrote. One of the leaders in the reconstructionist movement, a foremost interpreter of Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, a pioneer in the reconstructionist movement, Rabbi Schulweis approaches professor Heschel with unusual insights. His subject tonight is extremely important, since the deals for that profound issue, the inner life of the Jew, as reflected in the thought and life of Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's my great privilege to introduce Rabbi Harold Schulweis. Rabbi Schulweis: Thank you. Dr. Goodhill honors me. He is a good man, a learned man and a pious Jew, and he happens to have an unusual specialty. His expertise is in the field of otology, which is the field dealing with hearing and with the ear, and I happen to be a patient of his, he is my doctor. Victor, I cannot tell you how good it is to hear the generosity of your introduction but especially how good it is just to be able to hear you. I think most of us remember the first meetings we've had with people, first introductions. I first met Abraham Joshua Heschel when he came to the Jewish Theological Seminary as a professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism and I came from Temple Valley Beth © 2013 Page 1 Yeshiva College 1945. And I remember that the first orientation meeting between my class and Dr. Heschel and his request was that the third meal of the Sabbath. And he was to speak to us about himself and about his field of specialty which was medieval Jewish philosophy. We sat around the table and he did not lecture. He said, "Would you mind if I sing a [inaudible] [00:03:55]?" And I remember it very clearly. We were startled, just like you. But even more so, we were startled because after all, we have come from colleges and universities and from Yeshiva and this was the professor. We had expected him to give a shear, to give a lecture, to analyze a text, but instead it was something else and we were disappointed. Years later, I began to realize as I think many of my fellow seminarians did, when this was a very, very important introduction, because we would be reading in one of his books that concepts and words are screens which block one from another, and which do not allow us to see the world. A word you can look up in the dictionary, but a melody, would you look it up? Heschel was a professor. He had all the professorial accoutrements, monographs, learned papers, articles and books, [inaudible] [00:05:36]. But it was very clear to all of us that he was not like the others. Despite this tremendous, vast erudition, a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, steep in metaphysics and anesthetics and epistemology, graduates, work ethic, Heschel at the bottom was a rabbi, a Chasidic rabbi who was translated by some mysterious process of medium psychosis, from medzvich and Kotzk to 122nd street and Broadway. His gob was western. He didn't wear a kapoteh and in 1945 he didn't have a beard. But the relationship between Heschel and the rest of us was not that of a professor and students, it was a relationship between a rabbi in search of chasidim. His lectures and his books are not written in an analytic style. There's very little argument, very lucid analytic logic, very little discursive thinking because Heschel's way was via evocative thinking, to appeal to the inner sensibilities of the individuals to whom he is speaking, to appeal to something that is not subject to argument, but to appeal to what in Hassidic literature is called Hishticecut, yearnings, hungering, longings for something that is deeper than this opaque, grey world in which we live, that there was something beneath the surface of nature, beneath the surface of mitzvah, beneath the surface of a text which has intonations of transcendence. Heschel didn't argue. He didn't argue because a rabbi doesn't argue. A rabbi touches strings. He tells stories, parables, legends. He sings nigunim because his interest is not to gain cognitive ascent but his interest is to convert the heart. At the University of Berlin, he went there at the age of 20. Heschel was disappointed with academic Temple Valley Beth © 2013 Page 2 philosophy. He said the answers of the philosophers seem indifferent to the travail of a person and callused to catastrophy. If philosophy etymologically means the love of wisdom, Heschel was interested in the wisdom of love, and you will find that his critics by and large are unhappy with the fact that he is writing, they said not philosophy but poetry, not cosmological proofs or oncological proofs or theological proofs of the existence of God but poetry. And Heschel would reply that the fault lies in our prosaic outlook, that we are all of us saddled with a pedestrianism which, and this time I'm using a metaphor that comes from Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, smears honey on the souls of our shoes. Heschel, the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literalism. It is as difficult as speaking to someone about Jacob's ladder to the heaven when he asks you and how many steps on the ladder. And so you will find him, Heschel reiterated a number of phrases over and over again, all, ineffable, mystery, surprised radical amazement. And if you were to give this lecture tonight, I am sure that he would begin it the way he began many of his lectures. He would say, "Ladies and gentlemen, a remarkable event took place this evening. The sun has set." And people would teeter, they would laugh. But it was no laughing matter because the truth of the matter is for Heschel, not to take cognizance of the wonder of the diurnal, not to be amazed by life itself is to kill religion, because religion for Heschel is a particular way of seeing. If you cannot see the remarkable strangeness, marvel, awesomeness of the universe, how in the world can you pray? How can you say for thy miracles and thy signs which are daily with us, morning, afternoon and evening? For Heschel, the world is real. It is not an illusion, but for Heschel, the world is an allusion, an allusion to something deeper because things are not what they appear to be, not you, not me, not us, not it, nothing. Heschel was himself a tremendous surprise. I mean, you find in him so many biographical incongruities. What for example is Heschel, a descendant of Levi on his mother side doing at Dansbury Prison waiting for the release of Father Berrigen who is jailed because of his protesting of the Vietnam War? What is Heschel, a descendant of a Maged of Nezarich on his father side doing marching arm and arm with Martin Luther King, Jr. in protection for the Black civil rights? And how many Jewish professors by the way in Jewish seminaries do you think marched? What is this man, the grandson and the namesake of Derap Derov, doing flying to Rome, negotiating with cardinals and with Pope Paul VI to issue stronger statements condemning the bloody, scandalous myth of deicide, the myth that accuses people of a murder of God. For which, by the way he was brutally attacked by friends and foes, because they said it was beneath his dignity to plead with the pope about the schema Temple Valley Beth © 2013 Page 3 and Heschel replied as I could hear him saying, if the saving of human life takes precedence over her Shabbat, then most assuredly, saving the life of Jews takes precedence over my personal honor and my personal dignity, a man of many surprises, and very difficult to talk about. For example, how in the world do you explain a man, a theologian who sings to delight in contrariety, whose literature is full of paradoxes and antimonies and dilemmas with however nonetheless, nevertheless on the other hand? Here he is extolling the primacy of the heart. What is important, he says, coding from the Gomorra Sanhedrin is rachmonnnah leibah boy, that God wants the heart. And then the next paragraph, a quotation from Jeremiah, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can understand it? Here he is, giving a tremendous exposition on the system of the school of Rabbi Ishmael who favors lucidity, who favors rationality, who favors an understanding of God and here on the next page, a tremendous tribute to the school of Rabbi Akiba, its hyperbole, its mystery, its ecstasy.

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