The Still, Small Voice

Sixty years ago this spring, an event unfolded that gave rise to what is arguably the most iconic image of the American Jewish experience: a photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. Heschel – his long white beard and wild halo of hair unmistakable – walks beside King, along with other civil rights leaders, including a nun and John Lewis, whose skull had been fractured by Alabama state troopers just weeks earlier on Bloody Sunday, March 7, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As historian Julian Zelizer notes, the image captures not only the friendship between Heschel and King, but also the enduring connection between religion and politics; for many American Jews, it encapsulates the American Jewish experience itself. In more rabbis’ offices, synagogues, and Jewish day schools than I can count, I’ve seen that photograph hanging proudly. So many of us have heard sermons referencing Heschel’s refrain about marching that day, “I felt my legs were praying.”

Iconic as the photograph is, celebrated as the friendship between Heschel and King may be, what you may not know is that in the moment itself, Heschel’s engagement with civil rights was met with discomfort, resistance, and outright criticism. I am referring not just to the intimidating police who had orchestrated the brutality of a few weeks earlier or to the onlookers brandishing Confederate flags or chanting racist and antisemitic taunts, but the Jewish community itself. The Jews who said that Jews should be concerned only about other Jews, that it would be better not to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The memory of the Holocaust was still raw, the safety of our brothers and sisters in Israel far from assured; this was not our problem. In the years to come, Heschel would align publicly with the anti-war movement – a founder of the interfaith Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. President Johnson, as Zelizer notes, known to be vindictive against his political opponents, was perceived to be a strong ally of Israel. Many Jewish leaders were averse to alienating him or his administration, fearing that public criticism of the war could hurt Israel and hurt American Jews.

Heschel’s deep and credentialed love for the people and State of Israel was beyond reproach. “I am a brand plucked from the fire in which my people was burned to death,” he once reflected. In the wake of the 1967 war, he published Israel: An Echo of Eternity, a theological defense of Zionism and the spiritual significance of the Jewish return to the land. But despite his passionate commitment to Jewish peoplehood, many in the Jewish community, including rabbinic colleagues, were uneasy with his associations. His alliances with left-leaning Christian and secular activists made some uncomfortable. The Rabbinical Assembly publicly criticized Heschel and like-minded rabbis for what it called poor judgment in their activism. At JTS, Heschel was marginalized. A critical letter published in the New York Times bore the signatures of his rabbinic colleagues. His courses were listed under education rather than theology. He was never assigned a teaching assistant – a petty detail, perhaps, but one of many small slights that signaled the lack of institutional support. Today, Heschel’s stature is accepted by American Jews as an article of faith; his books are on our shelves, his picture on our walls. But in his day, he was often isolated and alone. In his loneliness, Heschel drew strength from within, the still, small voice of conscience that anchored him and provided him the moral clarity to navigate the turbulent terrain of his time.

It is sixty years later. America has changed, as have American Jewry, Israel, and the relationship between them. But the questions we face, the tensions with which we wrestle, the tightrope we walk – we are not the first generation to balance so much. Surrounded by ongoing external threats, Israel seeks to secure its present and future. And we, as American Jews, understand ourselves as stakeholders in that effort. American Jews bear the brunt of antisemitism coming from both sides of the political spectrum. It is not self-evident where, if anywhere, our political home lies. We journey through a fraught political landscape populated by mercurial, populist, and transactional leaders. Who are our enemies? We more or less know. Who are our friends? We hotly debate. Our trauma is fresh and ongoing. Always, and especially as Passover approaches, we recall that we were once strangers in a strange land. Be it Egypt, Eastern Europe, or Ethiopia, our own experience, as Heschel taught, prompts both concern for our Jewish selves and empathy for all who are marginalized and downtrodden. In light of the threats faced by our people, how can we not prioritize the well-being of Jews above all else? In light of the threats faced by our people, how can we not prioritize concern for the other?

And yet, despite living in a time when we do not lack for enemies from without the Jewish community, we seem to have no problem naming enemies from within. I think of Heschel’s time. I think of Heschel himself, faced with an Israel in conflict with its enemies, an America rife with division, and an American Jewry divided within – fractured by internal debates over what is and isn’t in the best interest of Jews.

This morning, I am going to leave aside Israel’s internal debates: how Israel should best prosecute its war against Hamas, secure the release the hostages, and plan for the day after. We covered much in last night’s conversation with Ambassador Oren, available on PAS Connect. Let’s focus on America and American Jewry. We are all well aware of the intolerable situation on college campuses. As a parent of four college students, I know about it directly and have spoken of the threats repeatedly. Encampments, masked protestors, intimidation on the campus quad, online, in the library, in the classroom, divestment campaigns, the list goes on. We are all horrified by what happened at McGill the other night. I, for one, will welcome the return of anti-masking laws to name but one of many overdue and much-needed legislative measures. What I also know is that there is a cascade of consequences to the present overreach. This week I received a phone call from a parent whose child was admitted to college on the promise of a scholarship, a scholarship that has been redirected due to budget cuts. Did I know of alternate sources of funding, the parent asked. This week I spoke to a young woman on the hunt for a post-college research job, positions that have dried up due to funding cuts. I have a rabbinic colleague in DC whose community is hemorrhaging his now unemployed congregants. I have another colleague who works at HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), forty percent of its staff furloughed due to cuts. I could take a deep dive into subjects like civil liberties, due process, the importance of cancer research, and, for that matter, the dangers of making the Jewish community a political pawn, but I don’t need to. Our community is already feeling the effects in real time, impacting our members and communal institutions.

And despite the abundance of external challenges we face, as in the past we seem to have no trouble taking aim at our own. This past week, at a certain college campus with which I have deep ties and abiding loyalty, at which the DEI program is currently being dismantled, the students at Hillel decided to release an anodyne statement supporting those facing defunding and affirming the value of diversity and Tikkun Olam. A Jewish parent group responded with the insistent demand that the students recant and publish a full retraction and that the Hillel issue a public apology. A similar dynamic is happening on campus after campus and now at the top level of Hillel International. The parents’ response is problematic not just because they are publicly directing their ire at the very institution devoted to the welfare of Jewish students, not just in their failure to recognize that just about the dumbest thing one can say to a Jewish twenty year old is that their expressions of moral conscience are outside the bounds of Jewish communal discourse – a response that will have them walking away from Hillel and Judaism altogether – but problematic for its failure to recognize that the complexity of the hour not only allows for but insists upon a judicious and textured response. Problematic as DEI has been for Jewish students, essential as it is to prioritize the welfare of Jewish students and Jewish identity over all else, the values of diversity, inclusion, and dialogue are values that are not only OK to champion, not only important to support, but, dare I say, it is Jewish to do so. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes the best reaction is no reaction at all. To keep calm and carry on. At all times, common sense dictates that one Jew not attack, stifle, or squash an impressionable Jewish soul and certainly not publicly. Nuance is hard. Holding – and expressing – two truths is hard. But hard isn't bad; hard is just hard. We should embrace nuance and model the ability to hold multiple truths – for its own sake, and for the sake of encouraging others to do the same.

In the midst of the whirlwind, as we are buffeted by forces beyond us and, often, within us, we need, as Heschel did, to attune ourselves to the still, small voice within, the voice of our moral conscience. We have entered, by many accounts, a post-liberal world order, where policies and alliances are being shaped by self-interest, power, and instrumentality, not by morality. Our allies are allies for what they provide us, not for the values that we share. It is hard, in such a world, to stay true to that voice of conscience within: to stand for what is right, not because it is popular or useful, but because it is right. Our Torah reading and this third book of the Bible begins with the word va-yikra, [God] called out. In the Torah scroll, the final letter of the word, aleph, is written much smaller than all the other letters. While rabbinic explanations abound for this orthographic curiosity, for me the most compelling reason is that it reminds us that the call from God – and to God – often comes from the small aleph of conscience embedded in our souls. Just as, the rabbis explain, the divine voice of Sinai began with the aleph of anokhi hashem elohekha, I am the Lord your God, so too this aleph in the wilderness.

As Elijah would discover generations later on that self-same mountain, God’s voice sits not in the wind, the fury, or the fire. God’s voice – the voice of conscience – is to be found in the kol demama daka, the still small voice within. There is a silence that signals indifference to evil; there is a silence that indicates a betrayal – nobody knew that better than Heschel and his generation. But there is also the steady silent sound of one’s own conscience, a quiet that anchored Heschel in his day, that steadies us as we journey through this time of tumult. As Heschel wrote, in a work published posthumously, “The human predicament is a state of constant and irresolvable tension between mighty opposites. Piety and prudence, Truth and self-interest are irreconcilable. Tension and conflict can no more be eliminated from thought than from life.”

Passover is but days away – our people’s annual festival of freedom. Freedom is defined in so many ways: personal, national, physical, spiritual. This year we will again all have the hoped-for freedom of the hostages on our mind. As we do each year, we will rise from our seats and welcome Elijah into our homes and hearts. Perhaps this year, it is not Elijah, but the still small voice he represents which we need most. To pass through the narrow straits of our time, to walk the edge of this precipice, following our conscience and guided by our core Jewish values – with the shared prayer that we all cross into freedom together.

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. A Passion for Truth. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973. (Also available in reprint editions.)

Zelizer, Julian. Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement. Jewish Lives Series of the Yale University Press, 2021.