Abraham Joshua Heschel

By Lynn Burnett

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, and received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1933. In Berlin, he studied under some of the greatest Jewish scholars of the era, and was ordained as a rabbi. In 1938, the Gestapo arrested Heschel and deported him to Poland. The Nazis soon invaded, and Heschel’s network helped him escape briefly to London, and then to New York City in 1940.

During the war Heschel organized with the Jewish American community, advocating for the U.S. to accept more Jewish refugees. Heschel was deeply dismayed by the disinterest these efforts encountered. He was unable to even relocate his own family. His mother died in a Nazi bombing, and his sisters perished in Nazi death camps. Heschel never returned to the lands where these terrors took place: “If I should go to Poland or Germany,” he said, “every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”

Like so many others, Heschel came to believe that the indifference of ordinary people was one of the greatest roots of the Holocaust. The rabbi developed a theology rooted in social action, based on the scriptural teaching that people were made in God’s image, and must be treated as such. Heschel taught the Hebrew prophets as figures who took this teaching to heart, and thus became great disrupters of indifference. In his words: “What is the essence of being a prophet? A prophet is a person who holds God and men in one thought at one time, at all times. Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God, with the bifurcation of the secular and sacred.” For Heschel, God was ever-present, including ever present in every human being. Indifference to humanity became indifference to God.

Because Heschel took seriously the teaching that all people were made in the image of God, he viewed all forms of bigotry as affronts to God. As someone who had watched racism descend into the ultimate horror of genocide against his own people, Heschel was especially passionate about racial equality. This led him into the arms of the civil rights movement. In 1963, he gave the opening address at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago, where he spoke alongside Martin Luther King. Heschel’s words were uncompromising: “Racism,” the rabbi said, “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 . . . Racism is satanism, unmitigated evil.”

During much of his speech Heschel specifically addressed White people. He urged them to take responsibility for their actions and beliefs, and to take it upon themselves to end racial inequity. “There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.”

“Daily we patronize institutions which are visible manifestations of arrogance toward those whose skin differs from ours. Daily we cooperate with people who are guilty of active discrimination. 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.”

Heschel then urged the audience to take concrete action:

“What we need is a total mobilization of heart, intelligence, and wealth for the purpose of love and justice . . . The plight of the Negro must become our most important concern . . . Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation? . . . Our concern must be expressed not symbolically, but literally; not only publicly, but also privately; not only occasionally, but regularly.”

It was at this event in 1963 that Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King became fast friends. They continued to work together throughout the remaining years of King’s life. Their most prominent moment together came when Heschel marched next to King in Selma: in the rabbi’s words, “our legs uttered songs . . . I felt my legs were praying.” When King famously spoke out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967, Heschel followed him as a speaker. In 1967, the war was still supported by most Americans, and King received significant backlash for embracing an antiwar stance. Heschel had embraced such a stance a full two years earlier, when he began organizing interfaith clergy against the war. He, too, received backlash… and became a moral model who influenced other spiritual leaders, including King, in taking the risk.

Martin Luther King described Heschel as nothing less than a “great prophet” of his times. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prophetic voice did not only speak out against all forms of injustice… it also spoke up for love, beauty, and awe. To see one another as beings in the image of God was to live a life of joy, connection, and wonder. Heschel thus had another very important message for White people: racism hurt them. It cut them off from seeing the beauty in one another. This separation from one another was a separation from God. On a stage shared with King, Heschel’s message rang out: “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.”

Additional Resources

Books

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific author. You can browse his many books here.

Shai Held: Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence.

Edward K. Kaplan: Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul.

Julian E. Zelizer: Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement.

Articles

Robert Erlewine: The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Cornel West: The Radical Heschel: Remembering the prophetic legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Wikipedia bio.

Stanford MLK Institute bio.