- 1907-1972
- Grew up in a Hasidic community in Warsaw, Poland
- Ordained at the age of 16
- Moved away from strict traditionalism and moved to Berlin
- He fled the Nazis and moved to London and eventually ended up in the United States in 1940
- Settled in Cincinnati, Ohio and served as a professor at HUC-JIR until 1945 when he moved to JTS.
This photo was taken on March 21, 1965, when about 3,200 people began a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is marching in the middle of the row. The second person from the right is Abraham Joshua Heschel, a theologian and activist who participated in the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans in the 1960s.
This demonstration was to demand voting rights for African-Americans and to protest the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young African-American man shot the previous month by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration.
Earlier in the march, as participants crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were tear- gassed and beaten by heavily armed state troopers and sheriff’s deputies in plain sight of photographers and journalists. The march was seen as one of the actions leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was passed two months later.
The following quotes provide some insight into Rabbi Heschel’s views of what it means to be an ally and an activist:
- “One hundred years ago, the emancipation was proclaimed. It is time for the white man to strive for self-emancipation, to set himself free of bigotry.”
- “The greatest sin is that of indifference.”
https://www.keshetonline.org/resources/abraham-joshua-heschel-and-the-civil-rights-movement
When Rabbi Heschel returned from Selma, he was asked by someone, ‘Did you find much time to pray, when you were in Selma?’ Rabbi Heschel responded, ‘I prayed with my feet.’ What was his point? That his marching, his protesting, his speaking out for Civil Rights was his greatest prayer of all.
https://www.centralsynagogue.org/news/pray-with-your-feet
According to Heschel, the most important function of religion and its institutions, its prayers, its texts and its rituals; is to create settings that make meaningful experiences and preserve memories. The Sabbath and prayers are tools to create "sanctuaries in time" that cause us to examine ourselves and see the world with fresh eyes.
For Heschel, Jewish survival is a spiritual act. God’s concern with man is expressed in Judaism through the idea of a covenant imposing a mutual, correlative responsiveness on man and God both, because God needs man for the attainment of his ends in the world.
- People are infatuated with things and space but do not understand the significance and sovereignty of time.
- God is made manifest through holy moments in time.
- Shabbat is a "sanctuary in time".
- Heschel understands Shabbat as God's manifestation of holiness and the world to come in our lives.
Quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel
- Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
- "The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals...a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate."
- "It is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things."
- "The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own."
"Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement... get up in the morning & look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life causally.
To be spiritual is to be amazed."
“Wonder – radical amazement – is the chief characteristic of the religious [person’s] attitude towards history and nature.”
"The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the grandeur is God."
“The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
- God is the sense of wonder and amazement at the sheer experience of being.
- Religion exists to cultivate our sense of wonder.
- It is important to keep wonder alive so that we do not take the miracle of the world around us for granted. Religion and belief in God helps us do this.