: A Prophetic Voice Against Racism

Rabbi Gordon Tucker, PhD

As vice chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement, Gordon Tucker focuses on enhancing Jewish life at JTS, enriching our study of with the joy and deep understanding that only lived experience can provide. A leading scholar and interpreter of , he also articulates the enduring power of JTS’s compelling approach to Jewish law and Jewish life, while strengthening JTS's religious leadership through partnerships with organizations in the Conservative Movement and beyond.

Rabbi Tucker's current role brings him back to JTS, where he served as dean of The Rabbinical School from 1984 to 1992 and as assistant professor of Jewish Thought from 1979 to 1994. He was ordained at JTS in 1975 after receiving his A.B. at Harvard College. He also earned a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University.

Rabbi Tucker served from 1994 to 2018 as senior rabbi of one of North America’s foremost Conservative congregations, Temple Center in White Plains, NY. Under his leadership, the synagogue flourished and was characterized by vibrant communal life and an exceptional devotion to Jewish learning.

Rabbi Tucker is the author of scores of articles on Jewish theology and law, and published Heavenly Torah, a translation of and commentary on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s three-volume work on rabbinic theology. An anthology of his writings was published in 2014, under the title Torah for its Intended Purpose. Most recently, his new commentary on Pirkei Avot was published by the Rabbinical Assembly in 2018. A.J. Heschel, “God’s Tears”, in The Ineffable Name of God: Man (Yiddish, 1933, English translation 2004)

God’s tears lie on the cheeks of shamed, weak people. let me wipe away His lament.

He in whose veins there whirls a quiet shudder before God, let him kiss the nails of a pauper.

To the worm crushed under-foot, God calls out “my holy martyr!”

The sins of the poor are more beautiful than the good deeds of the rich.

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A.J. Heschel, “The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement”, in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996), pp. 224-225 For many years I lived by the conviction that my destiny is to serve in the realm of privacy, to be concerned with the ultimate issues and involved in attempting to clarify them in thought and in word. Loneliness was both a burden and a blessing, and above all, indispensable for achieving a kind of stillness in which perplexities could be faced without fear.

Three events changed my attitude. One was the countless onslaughts upon my inner life, depriving me of the ability to sustain inner stillness. The second event was the discovery that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. Even the high worth of reflection in the cultivation of inner truth cannot justify remaining calm in the face of cruelties that make the hope of effectiveness of pure intellectual endeavors seem grotesque. Isolationism is frequently an unconscious pretext for carelessness, whether among statesmen or among scholars.

The third event that changed my attitude was my study of the prophets of ancient Israel, a study on which I worked for several year until its publication in 1962. From them I learned the niggardliness of our moral comprehension, the incapacity to sense the depth of misery cause by our own failures. It became quite clear to me that while our eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves, and to silence our conscience.

1 There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.

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A.J. Heschel, The Prophets (1962) pp. 9, 16, 24, 271-272 We and the prophet have no language in common. To us the moral state of society, for all its stains and spots, seems fair and trim; to the prophet it is dreadful. So many deeds of charity are done, so much decency radiates day and night; yet to the prophet satiety of the conscience is prudery and flight from responsibility. Our standards are modest; our sense of injustice tolerable, timid; our moral indignation impermanent; yet human violence is interminable, unbearable, permanent.

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption.

The prophet does not judge the people by timeless norms, but from the point of view of God. Prophecy proclaims what happened to God as well as what will happen to the people. In judging human affairs, it unfolds a divine situation. Sin is not only the violation of a law, it is as if sin were as much a loss to God as to man. God's role is not spectatorship but involvement. He and man meet mysteriously in the human deed. The prophet cannot say Man without thinking God.

Therefore the prophetic speeches are not factual pronouncements. What we hear is not objective criticism or the cold proclamation of doom. The style of legal, objective utterance is alien to the prophet. He dwells upon God's inner motive not only on His historical decisions. He discloses a divine pathos, not just a divine judgment. The pages of the prophetic writings are filled with echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation. The God of Israel is never impersonal.

The idea of the divine pathos combining absolute selflessness with supreme concern for the poor and the exploited can hardly be regarded as the attribution of human characteristics. Where is the man who is endowed with such characteristics? Nowhere in the Bible is man characterized as merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in love and truth, keeping love to the thousandth generation. Pathos is a thought that bears a resemblance to an aspect of divine reality as related to the world of man. as a theological category, it is a genuine insight into God’s relatedness to man, rather than a projection of human traits into divinity, as found for example in the god images of mythology.

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God’s unconditional concern for justice is not an anthropomorphism. Rather, man’s concern for justice is a theomorphism. Human reason, a feeble reflection, reminder, and intimation of the infinite wisdom deciphered in God’s creation, is not the form after which our concept of God’s wisdom is modeled.

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A.J. Heschel, “Religion and Race” (1963) Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach?

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.

What is an idol? Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.

Faith in God is not simply an afterlife insurance policy. Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is: satanism, blasphemy.

There is a form of oppression which is more painful and more scathing than physical injury or economic privation. It is public humiliation. What afflicts my conscience is that my face, whose skin happens not to be dark, instead of radiating the likeness of God, has come to be taken as an image of haughty assumption and overbearance. Whether justified or not, I, the white man, have become in the eyes of others a symbol of arrogance and pretension, giving offense to other human beings, hurting their pride, even without intending it. My very presence inflicting insult!

How long will I continue to be tolerant of, even a participant in, acts of embarrassing and humiliating human beings, in restaurants, hotels, buses, or parks, employment agencies, public schools and universities? One ought rather be shamed than put others to shame. By negligence and silence, we have all become accessory before the God of mercy to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation. Our derelictions are many. We have failed to demand, to insist, to challenge, to chastise.

3 In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

[Jefferson’s fuller quote: God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever]

To some Americans the situation of the Negro, for all its stains and spots, seems fair and trim. So many revolutionary changes have taken place in the field of civil rights, so many deeds of charity are being done; so much decency radiates day and night. Our standards are modest; our sense of injustice tolerable, timid; our moral indignation impermanent; yet human violence is interminable, unbearable, permanent. The conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort. Yet those who are hurt, and He who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep. The prophets ’great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.

The universe is done. The greater masterpiece still undone, still in the process of being created, is history. For accomplishing His grand design, God needs the help of man. Man is and has the instrument of God, which he may or may not use in consonance with the grand design. Life is clay, and righteousness the mold in which God wants history to be shaped. But human beings, instead of fashioning the clay, deform the shape. God needs mercy, righteousness; His needs cannot be satisfied in space, by sitting in pews, by visiting temples, but in history, in time. It is within the realm of history that man is charged with God’s mission.

Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation?

Let there be a grain of prophet in every man.

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A.J. Heschel, “The White Man on Trial” (1964) The Negroes of America behave just like the children of Israel. Only in 1963 they experienced the miracle of having turned the tide of history, the joy of finding millions of Americans involved in the struggle for civil rights, the exaltation of fellowship, the March to Washington. Now only a few months later they have the audacity to murmur: “What shall we drink? We want adequate education, decent housing, proper employment.” How ordinary, how unpoetic, how annoying!

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Life could be so pleasant. The Beatles have just paid us a visit. The AT&T is about to split its stock. Dividends are higher than ever. Castro is quiet and well-mannered. Russia is purchasing grain from us. Only the Negroes continue to disturb us: “What shall we drink”?…..that prosaic demand for housing without vermin, for adequate schools, for adequate employment — right here in the vicinity of Park Avenue in New York City — sounds so trite, so drab, so banal, so devoid of magnificence.

The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life.

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A.J. Heschel, Heavenly Torah (Hebrew 1990, English translation 2005), pp. 782-783 “A Scoundrel Within The Bounds Of The Torah”

The Halakhah is the lens through which, seeing human life, one distinguishes between the forbidden and the permitted, the suitable and the unsuitable, the liable and the exempt. Its mode of thought is that of rules, justice, legislation. But this raises several questions. Does the Torah contain but one mode of thought, the legal mode? Is there no room for the mode of mercy, that which commands action beyond the legal boundary? Moreover: does the Torah give us no life-values other than those of "kosher" and "unkosher"? Do we not need to take account of the values of pleasantness and righteousness? If, according to Nahmanides, a person may be a "scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah", it is implied that there is another path, beyond the line of the Halakhah.

The Sages knew that one could be a "scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah", that is, within the bounds of the Halakhah, and they therefore declared: "Jerusalem was destroyed only because.....they judged solely by the Torah's law, and did not act beyond the line of the law.” (Bava Metzia 30b)

What is the distinction between those things that are on the line of the law and those that lie beyond the line of the law? We can enforce the line of the law, but not what lies beyond the line of the law. The law is manifest, fixed, and constant, while that which lies beyond the line of the law is not explicit, but rather subjective and given to discretion. Here is an example: the secret of the persistence of the Jewish people throughout the generations lies in its willingness to sacrifice its very existence. But the question must be asked: what is important enough to sacrifice one's life for? Should one treat every commandment as inviolable to the point of death? The masters of Halakhah gave the fixed points: "In the case of all commandments in the Torah, should a person be told to transgress them or be killed, he should transgress and not be killed, with the exception of idolatry,

5 incest/adultery, and murder." Such is the line of the law. But an aggadic text added this statement: "Better for a person to jump into a fiery furnace than to embarrass another person publicly. Whence do we learn this? From the story of Tamar.”

[In the story told in Genesis 38, Tamar, Judah's daughter-in-law, was being taken to a gruesome death by fire on suspicion of adultery, and only her demonstration that it was Judah who was her consort could have saved her life. But although she had the proof, she did not publicly implicate Judah, but rather left it to him to deduce the truth and to make admission himself. In other words, this Canaanite woman preferred death by fire to the public humiliation of another human being. How much more so, reasoned the , should a Jew have the same revulsion to public humiliation.]

This situation was not included in the list of commandments about which they decreed "be killed and do not transgress", and it was not fixed in law. Notice that this statement was not formulated in legislative language, but rather in suggestive language, as if "the text is giving us sound advice": the language is "Better for a person.....".

The aggadic element of Halakhah brings about a widening of one's field of vision and an expansion of horizons. For halakhic masters are not usually attentive to the depths of life, that is to the life that plays out within a person's soul, and against those who complain about the tradition's shackles, there is no one to explicate its grand vision. Where are those who would broaden the base and thus raise the edifice even higher?

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A.J. Heschel, “A Prayer for Peace” (1971), in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996) Here is the experience of a child of seven who was reading in school the chapter which tells of the sacrifice of Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah with his father. “He lay on the altar, bound, waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even faster; it actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifted the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly the voice of the angel was heard: ‘Abraham, lay not your hand upon the lad, for now I know that you fear God.’ And here I broke out in tears and wept aloud. ‘Why are you crying?’ Asked the rabbi. ‘You know that Isaac was not killed.’ And I said to him, still weeping, ‘But, Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?’ The rabbi comforted me and calmed me by telling me that an angel cannot come late.”

An angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, may be.

6 א.י. השל מאפטא, ״אוהב ישראל״, פרשת כי-תצא התוה"ק הזהירה אותנו על ד' זכירות. היינו שנזכור תמיד אלו הד' דברים אשר הם עיקרי ושרשי הדת. א' לזכור תמיד בכל עת מעמד הנבחר אצל הר סיני שכל איש ישראל צ"ל בעיניו תמיד בכל עת ורגע כאלו הוא עומד בהר סיני לקבל את התורה; דבאדם שייך עבר ועתיד, אבל אצל הש"י אינו שייך זה. ובכל יום ויום הוא נותן התורה לעמו ישראל. וע"כ כשאדם פותח איזה ספר ללמוד צריך אז לזכור מעמד הר סיני וכאלו הוא קיבל את התורה מפי הגבורה ואז בא עי"ז לידי אימה ויראה כמו שניתנה התורה ברתת ובזיעה. שנא' ויחרד כל העם אשר במחנה.

Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt, “Ohev Yisrael”, commentary on Ki Tetze

The holy Torah exhorted us concerning four remembrances, that is, that we should always remember those four things, which are the very source and root of our religion. The first of these is to remember always how the chosen people stood alongside Mount Sinai. Every Jew must always see himself, at every moment, as if he is standing at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. For humans are subject to past and future, but God is not, and each and every day God gives the Torah to the people Israel. Therefore, when a person opens any book in order to learn, he should remember at that time the standing at Sinai, as if he received the Torah directly from on high. Thus he will be brought to a state of awe and reverence, just as it was when the Torah was given amidst trembling and agitation, as it is said, “all the people who were in the camp trembled.”

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