This past Wednesday, corresponding to the eighteenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, marked the fiftieth yahrzeit – the fiftieth anniversary since the passing of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heir to a great Hasidic dynasty, Heschel lost nearly his entire family in the Holocaust, narrowly escaping to arrive in America, in his words “a brand plucked from the fire of an altar to Satan on which my people was burned to death.” Scholar, theologian, mentor to generations of rabbis, Heschel’s presence continues to loom large in Jewish life today. If you have not seen the publicity yet, please take note of the afternoon session of our upcoming Shabbaton, a session devoted to Heschel’s legacy where I will be teaching selections from what is perhaps his most famous book: The Sabbath.
What you may not know, what I did not know until it was pointed out to me, is that forty years ago this very morning – January 14, 1963 – mystically corresponding to that same eighteenth day of Tevet, Heschel delivered what was perhaps the most famous and consequential speech of his career at the opening plenary of the National Conference on Race and Religion in Chicago. The Torah reading that week, like this morning, was Sh’mot, and Heschel began as follows:
“At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to me.” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharoah is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”
The speech, delivered on the same day that George Wallace delivered his infamous “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever . . .” speech, electrified the room. Heschel did not mince words. “Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is: blasphemy. . . . To think of man in terms of white, black or yellow is more than an error. It is an eye disease, a cancer of the soul.” As Julian Zelizer explains in his mesmerizing recent biography of Heschel, it was this speech in which Heschel “brought the full force of his people’s tradition, life experiences and personal meditations on the need to stand up to racial injustice as a human imperative.” (p. 124). “We are all Pharaohs or slaves of Pharoah,” Heschel pronounced, denouncing not just the sin of racism, but the insidious evil of indifference, and stating: “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.”
“Some are guilty,” Heschel famously said, “but all are responsible.”
The speech received a five-minute standing ovation and catapulted Heschel to national prominence. Perhaps more significantly, it established a friendship between Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. whose memory our nation recalls and honors this weekend. Heschel and King met for the first time at that conference, both charismatic preachers at the height of their powers, both heirs to dynastic religious traditions, both shaped by the traumas of their youth – Heschel in Nazi Germany, King in the South – both influenced by the theologies of Niebuhr and Buber, both married to musicians, both relatively short and stocky men and perhaps, most importantly, both infused by the message of the biblical prophets. “What is the essence of being a prophet?” Heschel asked his audience that January day. “A prophet is a person who holds God and men in one thought at one time, at all times.” The two men formed a bond at the conference that would last the rest of their lives. Those familiar with King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” written just a few months later can sense there traces of Heschel’s diatribe against indifference. The photograph of the two men marching arm-in-arm in Selma has become an icon of American history. Heschel’s personal history and prophetic empathy demanded that he fight on behalf of civil rights, and so too King would advocate on behalf of Jews, blasting the Kremlin – and to this subject we will return – for “an attempt to liquidate the Jewish people in Soviet Russia.” Years later, ten days before King was assassinated, Heschel would introduce his dear friend at the Rabbinical Assembly conference, stating: “Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. His presence is the hope of America.” The assembled rabbis rose to welcome King, linking arms and chanting “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew, Anu Mitgaber. At the memorial service for Heschel, held right here at Park Avenue Synagogue, Coretta Scott King, standing in this very spot, called her late husband’s friend “One of the great men of our times.”
It is fifty years since Heschel’s passing and sixty years since Heschel’s friendship with King began. Today we pause to honor Heschel’s memory and measure ourselves according to his legacy. Who are the Heschels of today? Who are those leaders who embody the spirit of the prophets of old, who speak to the perils of the hour, the injustices of our age – even, and especially, if doing so makes them unpopular. Today Heschel is idolized. I have spent a not insignificant amount of money sending my children to a school bearing his name and ideals. In his own day, however, Heschel’s stances on civil rights, Vietnam, and Catholic-Jewish dialogue, among other topics, were deeply unpopular – across America, across the Jewish community, and at the very seminary in which he taught. This past week, a rabbinic colleague of mine took a stand on an issue of the day, in this case the new Israeli government, that has made him very unpopular in certain circles. Whether you or I agree with this or that rabbi on this or that position is secondary to the bigger question. Not just who are the Heschels of our time, but whether the soul of our community is capacious and supple enough to house those voices with whom we disagree. To honor Heschel’s memory is to honor those who would boldly speak now, who would push us beyond our comfort zone, on whom we will, in retrospect, look back with gratitude, as we do Heschel today.
Fifty years later, on this weekend, I cannot help but reflect on the sorry state of Black-Jewish relations. It is not so much that King agreed with the Jewish community on everything, Before he was assassinated, the Six-Day War had already begun to put a strain on Black-Jewish relations. But because their relationship was strong, because they embraced the humanity of the other, while their positions may have differed, people were not demonized. Prejudices were given no air to breathe, and conflicts were debated respectfully and civilly. In our age of Kanye and Kyrie, we need the voice of King. In our age of Kanye and Kyrie, we need more voices of Heschel. We – and here I mean the Jewish people as a whole and this community – need to act intentionally, lovingly, and vulnerably, at the leadership and at the grassroots level, to build and rebuild our relationships with the African American community. As a colleague of mine said to me: “Enough already with of the pictures of Heschel and King hanging on the walls of rabbis’ offices.” We need to put some new people in those picture frames, reflecting a renewed chapter of interfaith and interracial community relations.
Fifty years later, and I will speak of this more at the Park Avenue Synagogue Shabbaton on January 27 and 28, I yearn to hear Heschel’s voice in the discourse of the Jewish community, specifically his attention to both the spiritual strivings of the searching Jew and the ever-present demand to create a just society. When it came to theology, to the power of mitzvot, to a life of learning, to the thirst for God, to the poetry of the Sabbath, Heschel was in league of his own. Nobody could, nor can anyone now, touch him. But Heschel’s religious commitments always extended beyond his parochial faith. Because of his personal history, because he knew that having been strangers in a strange land, we identify with the heart of the stranger, because he himself embodied the spirit of the biblical prophet – Heschel knew that for faith to be authentic, it must be filled with empathy for the other. To be religiously observant but not engaged with the issues of the day was unconscionable. Zelizer relates that in a class at JTS, Heschel asked his students if the ingredient gelatin was kosher, generating a debate. He then asked, “Nuclear weapons: kosher or treyf?” And the room went silent. Silence on the major issues of the day was for Heschel inexcusable. (p. 112) A devoutly religious man, Heschel was attentive to the spiritual strivings of the individual and the sufferings of humanity. That, together with his protest against the evils of indifference, was exactly the point, a point which we must retrieve in our present day and affirm in both word and deed.
Finally, and by extension, in studying and honoring Heschel’s legacy, it is instructive to consider the range of issues with which Heschel engaged during the last ten years of his life. Had Heschel merely continued to write theology and teach at JTS, that, as they say, would have been enough. Dayenu. That he engaged as he did in the Civil Rights Movement, in spite of the headwinds within and without the Jewish community – that too would have sufficed. But civil rights was just one sphere of Heschel’s concern. Heschel was a leader in the fight for Soviet Jewry, lamenting that “Russian Jews are an abstraction for Americans.” Given Heschel’s background, it is unsurprising that he championed the fight against antisemitism. Heschel played a critical role in Jewish-Catholic relations, engaging in secret shuttle diplomacy with the pope in hopes of addressing ancient hatreds endemic to the Catholic and western tradition. In the run-up to and aftermath of the Six-Day War, Heschel was a voice of Zion, penning a poetic volume on the place of Israel in the hearts of Jews and the Jewish people. Heschel’s Zionism, nevertheless, was a Zionism ever aware that “the God of Israel is same as God of the Arabs.” (Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, pp. 314-15) Heschel stood at the forefront of the protests against Vietnam – a controversial position to be sure, especially so in the pro-Israel community, who feared that Jewish opposition against Vietnam would prompt America to withdraw its aid from Israel. A story is told that Heschel’s dear friend Elie Wiesel was called on to ask Heschel to rein it in, and Heschel responded to Wiesel’s plea: “Listen, there are people in Vietnam who have been bombarded for years and years and years and they haven’t slept a single night. How can we simply go on and not try to help them sleep at night?” And Wiesel took Heschel’s side. (Kaplan, p. 313).
It wasn’t just that Heschel balanced a life of teaching, scholarship, and activism or even the number and range of issues in which Heschel engaged. Rather it was that Heschel understood the guiding principle of his activism to be the condition of humanity, not any one cause; in his words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” These days, for some reason, we see life as a series of binaries – you are either pro-Israel or a progressive, you are either engaged in interfaith dialogue or you are fighting antisemitism, you either advocate on behalf of migrants at the border or you seek a secure America – as if engagement with one worthy cause precludes you from another; as if the humanity of the Jew, the Palestinian, the Israeli, the African American, or the refugee is any more or less worthy in the eyes of God. Not so, said the prophet; not so, said Heschel. “Early in my life, wrote Heschel, my great love was for learning...I’ve learned from the prophets that I have to be involved in the affairs of man, in the affairs of suffering man.” (Zelizer, p. 120)
I am neither a prophet nor a son of prophet. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was not just a generational leader, he was sui generis one, the likes of which neither I nor any of us can hope to replicate. But what we can do, in our own lives and in our communal life, is to aspire toward his high ideals. A life of scholarship, of faith, of humanism, and the pursuit of justice. To bandage the wounds of a suffering humanity, to tend to the defense of our people, to grow ever daily as Jews, to never fall victim to indifference, and to know that not only are these efforts not mutually exclusive, but that they are the interdependent markings of a well-lived life.
The month following his passing, Heschel’s final interview was released posthumously – an interview with correspondent Carl Stern taped shortly before he died. At the conclusion of the interview, which covered the range of Heschel’s activism, Stern asked Heschel if had a message to the youth of America. Speaking to young people, Heschel said: “There is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts. That every word has power, and that we can, everyone, do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all the frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build life as if it were a work of art. You are not a machine. And you are young. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence.”
“Every deed counts . . . every word is power . . . build your life as if it were a work of art.” May this be our charge today and every day, and may the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Harav Avraham Yehoshua Heschel ben Harav Moshe Mordecai v’Raizel, be bound up in the bond of eternal life.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. “The Religious Basis of Equality of Opportunity – The Segregation of God,” in Race: Challenge to Religion. Ed. by Matthew Ahmann. Chicago: Henry Regency, 1963, pp. 55-71.
_____________. Final interview with NBC-TV journalist Carl Stern, February 4, 1972.
Kaplan, Edward. Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America 1940-1972. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Zelizer, Julian. Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement. (Jewish Lives) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
