Last year marked the centenary of the birth of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), one of the best-known, and controversial, figures in modern American Jewish life. A great articulator of religious spirituality, Heschel was also an ardent social activist, bringing eloquence and energy to bear on the causes of civil rights, Soviet Jewry, and opposition to the Vietnam war. Rarely has the word “prophet” been applied so freely to someone of our era.

Yet, in reading Heschel’s voluminous writings, one is more often struck by their lofty reach than by their persuasiveness. “As a writer,” his biographer Edward K. Kaplan writes, Heschel “excelled in passages of poetic prose interspersed with philosophical assertions and striking aphorisms.” That is putting it delicately. There is something deeply unsettling about this philosopher’s prose, a pretension to universal significance that at times sails beyond what seems justified either by his evident learning or by his intermittent insight.

Is this just a problem of style? In Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, the second of two volumes (the first, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, co-authored with Samuel Dresner, was published a decade ago*), Kaplan suggests otherwise. He paints a portrait of a man driven by a will not merely to save his own religion from the stultifying rationalism that had come to dominate it but to save humanity itself from the iniquities of racism, murderousness, and greed. Yet these high aims were compromised both by a flawed philosophical approach and by personal defects too obtrusive to ignore.

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Born in Warsaw to a long line of hasidic masters, the young Heschel received a traditional yeshiva education. But in 1925, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Vilna to pursue secular studies and to prepare for entrance to the University of Berlin. There in 1932 he completed his doctoral dissertation, eventually to be published as The Prophets: An Introduction.

Heschel had already embarked on a dual career as a theologian and spiritual leader when Nazism forced him to emigrate to the United States in 1940. He quickly took up a post at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the rabbinical teaching school of Reform Judaism. He also discovered an American Jewish community beset, in his view, by ignorance, apathy, and a decisive lack of spiritual substance, its religious leaders stale and inauthentic.

Heschel’s response, over a long writing career, was to re-assert the centrality of God and the spirit over what he saw as the excessive focus of American rabbis on textual study and their social-scientific approach to Jewish life. In major works bearing such titles as Man Is Not Alone (1951), Man’s Quest for God (1954), and God in Search of Man (1955), Heschel argued that a direct relationship with the divine was the antidote to the ills not only of Judaism but of the West as a whole.

By elevating the false gods of science and reason, Heschel wrote in 1940, Western civilization had made its immoral bed. The results were playing themselves out in Europe, where a morally neutral science “cannot be prevented from creating poisonous gas or dive-bombers, and rationalism is powerless once ‘the magnificent blond beast’. . . takes arms in order to subjugate inferior races.”

Heschel’s alternative was a renewed sense of “radical amazement” at the very existence of our world, an “awe” and “wonder” that would inevitably lead, as it did for the biblical prophets, to an awareness of the “realness” of God. As he put it in God in Search of Man:

Unlike scientific thinking, understanding for the realness of God does not come about by way of syllogism, by a series of abstractions, by a thinking that proceeds from concept to concept, but by way of insights. The ultimate insight is the outcome of moments when we are stirred beyond words. . . . It is at the climax of such moments that we attain the certainty that life has meaning, that time is more than evanescence, that beyond all being there is someone who cares.

Nor could the discovery of God end in passive meditation or communion. For God Himself cared deeply about the human world, and sought righteous deeds. Side by side with awe and wonder, then, Heschel called for ethical behavior—for a “leap of action” that was his Jewish answer to the Kierkegaardian “leap of faith”:

A Jew is asked to . . . surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does. . . . Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the hereness of God. Right living is a way to right thinking.

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Heschel’s call for both inward spirituality and outward activism was, at the time, a breath of fresh air. But his scholarly career in America was impeded by a series of obstacles, placed in his path, according to his biographer, by powerful and inimical figures in the Jewish academic and publishing worlds. At Hebrew Union College, he was frustrated by his students’ ignorance and lack of interest. Next, having sought and won a position at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, the training institution for the Conservative rabbinate, he learned that there, too, he would be kept at arm’s length.

Heschel’s long tenure at JTS was clouded, Kaplan writes, by repeated humiliations at the hands of the school’s administration, in the persons particularly of Louis Finkelstein, its chancellor, and Saul Lieberman, its top talmudic authority. One suspects there is another side to the story, however, and that Heschel’s difficulties had at least as much to do with his own limitations. For one thing, his writing lacked the scholarly infrastructure and careful annotation crucial for building academic stature. For another, as Kaplan concedes, he was a mediocre teacher, who consistently failed to inspire the most gifted students with whom he came into contact.

Moreover, although his writings proved significantly more popular outside the academy, they still did not win over the critics. Kaplan dismisses as an “overreaction” the biting remarks of Irving Kristol (then the book-review editor of Commentary) about Heschel’s magnum opus, Man Is Not Alone, and condemns Emil L. Fackenheim’s review of that book for its alleged “misinterpretation” and “misreading.” Yet this, too, is suspect. Heschel’s sympathetic editor, Solomon Grayzel, wrote to him in May 1949 that “I do not know whether because of my inability to comprehend the mystical approach or because of the lack of clarity in your writing, there are passages that I do not understand.”

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Failing to gain from teaching or writing the public acclaim he felt he deserved, Heschel turned to activism, especially by means of cooperative ventures with members of the Christian clergy. Here, Kaplan writes, he “finally found his true community” and began to emerge as a major public figure, a Jewish prophet for America.

In the early 1960’s, setting himself against the instinctive preference of the Jewish establishment for maintaining a relatively low profile in American public affairs, Heschel threw himself into the civil-rights movement, speaking, writing, and demonstrating. In a famous photograph, he appears with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Of that event, Heschel reported: “I felt my legs were praying.”

In the same years, Heschel devoted himself to raising public consciousness about the plight of Soviet Jews, which he described as “the most important emergency of our day.” Protesting the Jewish community’s apathy on this issue, he admonished a group of rabbis by appealing to the lesson of the Holocaust, saying that “We are [too] busy in 1963 just as we were [too] busy in 1943.” Over the next decade and a half, the movement on behalf of Soviet Jews would become a major force in American Jewish life and would ultimately help bring about their freedom. Elie Wiesel, who would become the movement’s most distinguished voice, cited Heschel’s impact as decisive.

In other areas of his activist career, however, Heschel’s personal flaws become more evident, to the point where even Kaplan can no longer defend him. At Vatican II, where he served as a representative of the American Jewish Committee, he had a secret audience with Pope Paul VI in which his behavior was described by one witness as “obsequious,” “tactless,” and “ludicrous.” Afterward, in a newspaper interview, Heschel gave himself lavish credit for influencing the Pope. In this interview, Kaplan writes, he “openly, and naively, displayed his vanity” and “narcissism,” belittling other Jewish interlocutors as “mere social workers and politicians” and nearly derailing the Church’s reconsideration of its historic attitude toward the Jews. When the council ended happily in 1965 with a papal declaration absolving the Jews of the charge of deicide and opening the door to a new era of Catholic-Jewish relations, the outcome was despite and not because of Heschel’s involvement.

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It may be unfair to extrapolate from a single fiasco to an entire career. But in reading Spiritual Radical, one cannot help being struck by certain continuities both of character and of mind.

“Throughout his life,” Kaplan writes, “Heschel struggled with a sense of inferiority, even as he craved respect and even adulation from others.” What is certain is that he wanted desperately to be seen as a prophet among men, and would go to extraordinary lengths to create the desired effect. This is evident in the bizarre physical transformation he underwent between the mid-1940’s and late 1950’s.

Over the course of that fifteen-year period, as is attested in photographs reproduced in Spiritual Radical, Heschel abandoned the appearance of a clean-shaven, dark-haired, German-looking scholar and remade himself into an East European-style guru, with prolific white hair and an unruly beard. Kaplan relates a 1996 exchange with the radical Presbyterian minister William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who addressed Heschel as “Father Abraham”—“because you are patriarchal and ecumenical, and because I am sure the original Abraham, father of us all, looked just like you.” Heschel responded, with a smile: “You are very quick.”

Not solely the result of character, Heschel’s miscues also seem, to some degree, to flow from his philosophical ideas. A desire for simplicity led him to an impatience with the unwieldy variety of human life and a programmatic insistence on cosmic and human oneness—a not uncommon failing in religious thinkers of a mystical bent. The good, Heschel wrote in Man Is Not Alone, “is convergence, togetherness, union. . . . Evil is division, contest, lack of unity.”

As it happens, this simplistic formulation goes against the thrust of the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, both of which affirm the distinctiveness of nations and individuals to a degree greater, probably, than in any other major religious system. The Israelites are set aside as a “holy nation” that is commanded to follow its own distinctive path. The patriarchs, kings, and prophets are each of a different sort, and even when they speak in God’s name, their words are tinged with the unique flavor of their individualized experience. As for the rabbis, they had a keen appreciation of what Jonathan Sacks has called “the dignity of difference”—itself a reflection, for them, of God’s majesty.

Heschel’s disdain for diversity became all the more problematic when linked to his view of human action. Emphasizing the purity of thought and “the ecstasy of deeds” as the greatest expression of religious life, he consistently underplayed their often refractory real-life results. “Every act of man,” he writes in God in Search of Man, “hinges and rests on the intention and hidden sentiments of the heart.”

These views are difficult to reconcile with effective worldly action, which presumes an appreciation of both the multifariousness of the human heart and the often gritty consequences of policy. It is thus not surprising that Heschel wound up advancing naïve or even harmful public positions, frequently echoing the most worn clichés of the universalist Left.

One example concerns his inveterate suspicion of well-earned wealth, a suspicion ungrounded in Jewish sources. Once, in a classroom discussion about whether a disused synagogue in New York City should be sold to a church or to a bank, he said: “If it is sold to a bank then it will become a temple of capitalism; if sold to a church, it will continue to be a temple of God.” Thus did Heschel dismiss the one institution that had probably done more than any other to preserve Jewish economic life through centuries of persecution and deprivation—in favor of an institution whose record with regard to his people was, to say the least, more complicated.

A similar problem plagued his views on military affairs, where he voiced an aversion to conflict uncharacteristic of the biblical prophets about whom he wrote. The aversion even colored his feelings about the state of Israel, whose need to bear arms he regarded, rather peculiarly, as a continuation of the mindset of galut, or Jewish exile—a practice that “crie[d] out tragically that redemption has not come.” Never mind the fact that in pre-exilic ancient Israel, Jews regularly bore arms, or that without the force of arms the modern Jewish state would never have come into being or stayed alive.

Heschel’s strident opposition to America’s intervention in Vietnam appears, at least in Kaplan’s account, to have been of a piece with his facile revulsion toward war and his solidarity with the favored causes of religious and secular “progressives.” Like many other activists, Heschel reductively saw the worldwide conflict between the U.S. and the USSR not as a multifaceted struggle that had to be conducted wisely but as a moral catastrophe and a looming apocalypse. Regarding the Johnson administration’s decision to expand the war in Vietnam, he wrote in 1966 that “it is weird to wake up one morning and find that we have been placed in an insane asylum while asleep at night.” On the issue of nuclear weapons, his rhetoric was no less extreme. “Is it not true,” he wrote, “that God and nuclear stockpiles cannot dwell together in one world?”

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In adopting the slate of fashionable opinions of his time, Heschel missed an opportunity to articulate an original and truly Jewish take on worldly affairs—the job, one might think, of an actual prophet of Judaism. Instead, we are left with the stereotypical impression of a populist figure who assumes the answers to difficult questions are self-evident and that what is needed is only to articulate them with passion and express moral outrage at any who do not agree. Little wonder, then, that Heschel’s most fervent acolytes today, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are to be found among the gestural proponents of the “politics of meaning” and their universalist fellow-travelers.

This is a great pity. Despite his manifold flaws, brought out in such relief in Spiritual Radical, it is Heschel who, more than any other 20th-century thinker in America, attempted to restore God to the center of Judaism and of Jewish consciousness. In that basic sense, he really did give a kind of expression to the voice of the biblical prophets. What he proceeded to make of that voice was often distorting and unsatisfying. But his religious instinct was a laudable one, and the task at which he failed still cries out to be fulfilled.

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