(ו) יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה וְנִתַּאי הָאַרְבֵּלִי קִבְּלוּ מֵהֶם. יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה אוֹמֵר, עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת:
(6) Yehoshua ben Perachiah and Nitai of Arbel received from them. Yehoshua ben Perachia says, "Make for yourself a mentor, acquire for yourself a friend and judge every person as meritorious."
And that was precisely the sort of person my father was: filled with concern, at times trembling over the atrocities that filled the twentieth century, empathic to the worries of his family, students, and friends. He had a gift for listening and understanding, lifting the burdens from other people's hearts.
Susannah Heschel, Intro to Essential Writings
Each decade of his life represented a significant metamorphosis.
- At the age of ten, he was a Hasidic prodigy in Warsaw;
- at twenty, a modernist Yiddish poet leaving Vilna.
- The thirty-year-old Heschel was part of the spiritual resistance movement of Jewish intellectuals in Nazi Germany.
- Heschel at forty had recently arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, after spending most of the war years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
- Heschel at fifty was the author of a string of theological works – The Sabbath, Man Is Not Alone, Man's Question for God, and God in Search of Man – that place him in the first rank of American Jewish thinkers.
- At the age of sixty, Heschel was penning a theological response to the events of the Six Day War. At that stage of his life, he was one of the leading voices of conscience, interreligious dialogue, and spiritual awakening in American society, having also published two volumes of a monumental study of rabbinic theology, reworked his Berlin dissertation into The Prophets, and published a collection of his more popular articles entitled The Insecurity of Freedom.
- Five years later, having recently completed a study of Menahem Mendl of Kotzk, whose spirit had presided over his earliest years, Heschel died.
Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder, Michael Marmur
The greatness of that Selma march continues to reverberate because it was not simply a political event, but an extraordinary moral and religious event as well. For my father, the march was a deeply spiritual occasion. When he came home, he said, "I felt my legs were praying." His only regret, he later wrote, was that "Jewish religious institutions have again missed a great opportunity, namely, to interpret a Civil Rights movement in terms of Judaism. The vast number of Jews participating actively in it are totally unaware of what the movement means in terms of the prophetic traditions."
Susannah Heschel, Intro to The Prophets
A journalist once asked my father why he had come to a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. “I am here because I cannot pray," my father told him. Confused and a bit annoyed, the journalist asked him, "What do you mean, you can't pray so you come to a demonstration against the war?" And my father replied, "Whenever I open the prayerbook, I see before me images of children burning from napalm." Indeed, we forfeit the right to pray, my father said, if we are silent about the cruelties committed in our name by our government. In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible. How dare we come before God with our prayers when we commit atrocities against the one image we have of the divine: human beings.
Susannah Heschel, Intro to Essential Writings
In Heschel, theology and spirituality are always interwoven; to attempt to
separate them is, inevitably, to flatten and falsify his thought...
Heschel's work is animated by a passion for self-transcendence, for moving
beyond an exclusive focus on the ego and its needs and desires. Self-transcendence is both the dominant theme of Heschel's theology—God is, he argues, perfectly self-transcendent—and the paramount aspiration of his spirituality—to become truly human, he insists, is to progress from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. Heschel will try to convince us, but he will also attempt to move us, stir us, and reorient us in fundamental ways so that our conventional, egoistic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting can be replaced with something radically different—an approach to the world in which God is the hub and the radial point of our lives.
Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, Shai Held
Remember, there is a meaning beyond absurdity, let [young people] be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, that we can do everyone our share to redeem the world. Despite of all absurdity and all the frustration and all disappointment. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build life as if it were a work of art.