Continuing the discussion of new trends in contemporary Jewish theology begun in these pages by Judd L. Teller in our March number, Jakob J. Petuchowski here examines the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading figure in the Conservative movement.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and author of numerous books and articles on the nature of Judaism, has become for many the leading Jewish theologian in this country. Yet, unlike the majority of his predecessors, Heschel does not believe that Reason can furnish us with the clue to ultimate reality. He does not assume that Reason can answer the questions posed by Faith, or even that Reason is able to ask the kind of question to which Faith has the answer. This break with the rationalist tradition in Jewish theology may account, on the one hand, for the popularity which Heschel (along with Buber and Will Herberg) is currently enjoying on the American Jewish scene. On the other hand, it also makes it more difficult for those who are accustomed to looking for theological truth along the paths of customary rational discourse to appreciate his religious thought.

As early as 1935, when he published an extremely sensitive and perceptive biography of Maimonides in German (still untranslated), Heschel’s notion of the role of reason in religion had begun to emerge. Discussing the reputation of Maimonides as the “classical representative of Rationalism,” Heschel points out that Maimonides might better be thought of as the man who, time and again, used his ratio in order to define the limits of reason. He then describes the last years of Maimonides’ life in terms of “a change from contemplation to practice, from cognition to imitatio Dei. God is no longer the object of cognition. He becomes the example to be followed. His works, the creatures of the world guided by His providence, take the place of those abstract concepts which constitute the spiritual act in the intellectual cognition of God. In place of the abstract contemplation come the observation of, and absorption in, the concrete event.” [My translation from the German original.]

“God is no longer the object of cognition.” This is the key to Heschel’s thought. Whether or not it also describes the thought of Maimonides is, of course, another question, and in 1936 Heschel shifted his argument to safer grounds with a book on prophecy (Die Prophetie), published in Cracow by the Polish Academy of Science. In that work we find him saying that “in the prophetic understanding, God is a subject of which the object is the Prophet himself. That assertion is, therefore, inapplicable which would make God the object of the Prophet’s vision. For in this act it is the Prophet who becomes the object of the vision of God.” [My translation.]

Not content with a mere description of the prophetic process, Heschel has gone on to make this prophetic understanding of God—or, as he would prefer to say, the prophetic awareness that God understands the Prophet—his very own. In five books written in English subsequent to his arrival in this country (The Earth Is the Lord’s, 1950; Man Is Not Alone, 1951; The Sabbath, 1951; Man’s Quest for God, 1954; God in Search of Man, 1956), and in numerous articles and essays (in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish), Heschel has attempted to share his faith not only with the contemporary American Jew, but also, as is evident from some of his writings, with modern man in general.

By rejecting “conceptual thinking” in favor of what he calls “situational thinking,” and “scholasticism” in favor of “depth-theology,” Heschel demonstrates his general affinity with the Existentialist and Neo-Orthodox schools of thought, but it is an affinity which must be understood with specific Jewish reservations. What Heschel demands is the “leap of action” rather than the “leap of faith” of the Existentialists. Whereas theology is usually concerned with “the content of believing,” Heschel is primarily concerned with the “act of believing.” As I have already indicated, the starting point of Heschel’s approach is his refusal to regard God as the object of human cognition. Speculation, therefore, is ruled out a priori. “Long before we attain any knowledge about God’s essence,” writes Heschel, “we possess an intuition of a divine presence.”

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But to write about intuition presents a problem in communication: only a poet can communicate his intuitions, share his awareness of a divine presence. It is fortunate, therefore, that Heschel is a poet, the master of any language he touches, be it German, Yiddish, English, or Hebrew. And yet, at the same time, one feels a certain reluctance on his part to reveal himself completely, a shying away from sharing his soul’s deepest secret. As he himself once put it: “To the extent to which a man reveals his secret, to that extent he empties and denudes himself.” [My translation from the Hebrew.] And in his Maimonides biography, he stresses Maimonides’ refusal to reveal the deepest layers of his own insights to his disciple Ibn Aknin.

The result of all this is that Heschel can only hint and allude. A reader insensitive to Heschel’s use of language might easily believe that he is throwing up a barrage of words, talking or even lulling himself into belief in God. But there is another and more sympathetic way of viewing his constant harping on the “ineffable,” his almost compulsive return to the theme of awe and wonder, his frequent disquisitions on the sublime. And that way is to recognize Heschel as a mystic. Of the mystic’s experience Evelyn Underhill has said that it “must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some sidelong way, some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader, and convey, as all poetic language does, something beyond its surface sense. Hence the large part which is played in all mystical writings . . . by that rhythmic and exalted language which induces in sensitive persons something of the languid ecstasy of dream.”

Heschel’s writings are a perfect illustration of Miss Underhill’s idea. His “approach through the ineffable” differs from the approach through speculation in that the latter proceeds from an idea of God’s essence to a belief in His existence, whereas in the former “we proceed from an intuition of His presence to an understanding of His essence.” Heschel does not set out to find God. For him, God is already there. “Religion begins with God’s question and man’s answer.” “The issue is not the formulation of a concept or the acceptance of a defininition. We Jews have no concepts; all we have is faith, faith in His willingness to listen to us. We have no information, but we sense and believe in His being near to us.” God, as it were, is lying in wait for us. He pursues us more than we pursue Him. That is why the Bible is not so much man’s theology as God’s anthropology. God, as the title of one of Heschel’s books has it, is “in search of man.” Heschel, if one may so describe it, is His Prophet, trying to open our ears to the call of God.

But if rational speculation is ruled out as an approach to God, how are we to find Him? For though it may be true that God is waiting and looking for man, it is likewise true that many men seem to lead their lives completely without God. In this connection, Heschel points to the mitzvah—usually translated “commandment,” but really, in his view, a quite untranslatable word. While other peoples have tried in vain to attain an understanding of God by way of inquiry, the Jews have taken another approach which is summed up, in Exodus 24:7, by the words: “We will do and we will hearken [or understand].”

Quoting the Rabbi of Kotzk, Heschel—who has mastered the whole of Jewish literature but who is fond of citing as his “clincher” a bon mot or parable of a Hasidic rebbe—interprets the verse in Exodus as follows: “The grasp, the understanding, comes with the deed and through the deed. When we fulfill a mitzvah and perform an acceptable deed, we grasp man’s attachment to God. If it were possible to say so, God is revealed in our deeds, in the depths of our being we perceive the divine voices.” [My translation from the original Hebrew.]

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This is what Heschel calls the “leap of action”: “To surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does. In carrying out the word of the Torah he is ushered into the presence of spiritual meaning. Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the presence of God.” Mitzvot, being the sphere where man encounters God, are therefore no mere ceremonies or symbols. Heschel is particularly severe in his condemnation of those who would regard them as such. There is a fine irony in an address he delivered before the Central Conference of American Rabbis (reprinted in Man’s Quest for God), where he turns against the current clamor for symbolism: the Reform rabbis, of all people, stand accused by implication of being too much concerned with symbols and ceremonies.

It almost seems that Heschel is closer in spirit to the protagonists of ritual-less “Prophetic Judaism” who founded the Central Conference than are its present members. Almost, but not quite. For while Heschel would agree with the early Reformers that the God of the Prophets did not demand ceremonies, he would nevertheless insist that the God of the Prophets did give mitzvot. Consequently, as long as Reform rabbis are trying out ceremonies for aesthetic effect and the like, they are in Heschel’s eyes guilty of “playing with the will of God.”

A mitzvah, as Heschel understands it, is an expression or an interpretation of the will of God. (He never really clarifies this either/or aspect of the definition, thus making it possible for his theories to be adopted by Jews of varying shades of orthodoxy on the question of Revelation.) To those who would ask whether God requires anything of man, Heschel points out that if, as is generally conceded, God requires us “to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him,” it is no more difficult to conceive of His requiring us to hallow the Sabbath. For once it is granted that God communicates His will, how can we dare set limitations on His power to make requirements?

Perhaps Heschel’s most provocative statement regarding mitzvot is that, unlike “symbols” which affect no other reality than man’s own psyche, “mitzvot affect God.” The reader who comes to such passages from a background of “conceptual” rather than of “situational” thinking must remind himself that the God spoken of in this fashion is not the Aristotelian-Maimonidean God, but Heschel’s own very personal God, whose presence is intuitively sensed. Nevertheless, the power of the mitzvah to affect God is a notion which must sound strange even to non-philosophical Jews. That God has no need of human observances, that the mitzvot were given for the sole purpose of human self-discipline and self-ennoblement, is a pretty consistent theme of Rabbinic literature. It is only in Judah Halevi that we get a conception of mitzvot which comes close to the Christian notion of sacrament, while it was left to Cabbalism to invest ritual observance with cosmic significance. But it is, after all, out of a Cabbalistic frame of mind that Heschel is addressing us.

For all his stress on the mitzvah, Heschel is not blind to certain abuses to which the regimen of mitzvot lends itself. “Religious Behaviorism” is what he calls that school of thought for which loyalty to the past, the mere routine observance of traditional law without inner conviction, is the be-all and end-all of Judaism. This “Religious Behaviorism” amounts to a Judaism that is all Halachah, and no Aggadah, all law and no faith. Heschel rejects it just as emphatically as he does the other extreme—a creedal Judaism without mitzvot. The choice is not between Halachah and Aggadah. The task, in Heschel’s view, is to strike a balance between the two.

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It is in the realm of prayer that the respective claims of Halachah and Aggadah assume the apparently contradictory demands of both keva (fixed times and fixed liturgy) and kavvanah (inwardness and spontaneity). Here, too, Heschel is firm in his affirmation of both principles. The fixed times of prayer, he says, are part of “the order of the divine will.” They are an immeasurable aid to us when we are in no mood to pray, and by thus forcing oneself to pray, one may be saved from the danger of losing the ability to pray altogether. Again, the fixed liturgy may admittedly be nothing more than makeshift arrangement. Ideally, perhaps, man should pray in his own words, and the liturgical formulae were fixed only when, because of the Exile, men had lost the art of spontaneous prayer. But that is only part of the story. If reciting the words of the liturgy is a “prayer of empathy” (man deriving inspiration from the words on the page before him), and is thus contrasted with the prayer of “self-expression,” we ought to remember that even in the latter man is making use of words, and words are by nature external. Why not, then, use the words whose efficacy has been proved by millennial use?

Prayer and mitzvot thus provide the bridge between man and God; indeed, they are even a means by which man can find God in the first place. But mitzvah in Heschel’s thought also figures in another context. Mitzvah is the antidote to sin. This is important, for Heschel’s view of sin is open to misunderstanding. In the second volume of The Library of Living Theology, devoted to “Reinhold Niebuhr, His Religious, Social, and Political Thought,” there are two contributions by Jewish writers. One is by Heschel, entitled “A Hebrew Evaluation of Reinhold Niebuhr”; the other, “Niebuhr, Scripture, and Normative Judaism,” is by Rabbi Alexander J. Burnstein. While Burnstein is at pains to emphasize the difference between Niebuhr’s Christian concept of man and of sin and the ideas of what Burnstein calls “normative Judaism,” Heschel’s contribution amounts to a buttressing of Niebuhr’s views of evil and the nature of man with appropriate supporting quotations from Jewish literature. Does this mean that Heschel agrees with Niebuhr on these matters? Niebuhr certainly seems to think so. In his “Reply to Interpretation and Criticism,” Niebuhr writes: “If Dr. Heschel had not contributed his paper, I should have been inclined to question Rabbi Burnstein on his interpretation of the Psalms and the Prophets, but not to challenge him on the interpretation of human nature in Judaism; however, Dr. Heschel has in my opinion refuted his position and has piled up a great deal of evidence which has been very instructive to me on the similarities between Christianity and Judaism on this issue, even in the post-Biblical period.”

Now, it would not be fair to hold Heschel responsible for what Niebuhr thinks Heschel said, though Niebuhr’s conclusion is at least suggestive. Why, after all, did Heschel see fit to support Niebuhr’s views from the sources of Judaism? Heschel joins Niebuhr in condemning the “utopianism and deductive thinking of the modern mentality,” in recognizing “the evil within the good,” and in believing that “even the supreme human efforts must fail in redeeming the world” (why else should Messianism be necessary?). But by way of contrast to all this, Heschel also stresses the centrality of the mitzvah in Judaism, and thereby he brings to the fore a dissimilarity between Judaism and Christianity that Niebuhr has apparently failed to notice. (And this in spite of the fact that Heschel says, and in so many words: “It is, therefore, difficult from the point of view of Biblical theology to sustain Niebuhr’s view, plausible and profound as it is.”)

Life, says Heschel, revolves around the right and the wrong deed, but we have been trained to be more mitzvah-conscious than averah– or sin-conscious. (This theme, outlined in Heschel’s contribution to the Niebuhr volume, is more fully developed in God in Search of Man.) In this respect the Jewish scheme is the reverse of the Christian; for Christianity never took over the concept of mitzvah, and gave to “sin” a meaning which the Hebrew term averah never had. Without underestimating the sinful capacities of man, Heschel nevertheless points out that the word averah denotes “wasting” or “expending to no purpose,” so that even the “sin” of Adam may be represented as the “loss” of a mitzvah. Since “the central issue is not the sinfulness but the obligations of man,” the mere fact of such obligations, of such mitzvot, shows us that “man is endowed with the ability to fulfill what God demands, at least to some degree.” Seen from the perspective of the mitzvah, man’s sinfulness becomes a matter of “actual failures” rather than an “essential inability to do the good.”

Once we understand this function of the mitzvah, we see the road which leads, in Heschel’s thought, from the mystical experience of God to the realm of ethical conduct. Piety for Heschel is an attitude toward reality in its entirety, and therefore it must be “alert to the dignity of every human being, and to those bearings upon the spiritual value which even inanimate things inalienably possess.” In this context it is interesting to notice Heschel’s analysis and condemnation of that “marketing orientation” of modern man which, starting from quite different premises, Erich Fromm was likewise to diagnose as one of the major ills of our time.

The root of our trouble, according to Heschel, is our preoccupation with things in space. The accumulation of wealth, for example, or the progress of technical civilization are concerned with space. Over against this conquest of space, Heschel sets the problem of time: the spiritual, he says, is to be found in time rather than in space. An old Jewish tradition regards the World-to-Come as a “day that is wholly Sabbath.” Heschel’s book, The Sabbath, develops the theme that “the meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. . . . It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.” A fine spirituality pervades the pages of this book, which contains a novel interpretation of its subject. But may not the idea of the Sabbath as “holiness in time” be a little too contrived? The same facts, after all, easily lend themselves to completely different interpretations. In the very same year in which Heschel published his book, Erich Fromm, in The Forgotten Language, also dealt with the Sabbath, and reached the following conclusion: “By stopping interference with nature for one day you eliminate time; where there is no change, no work, no human interference there is no time. . . . The Biblical Sabbath symbolizes man’s victory over time.”

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Intimations of God, the life “replete with mitzvot,” piety, and Sabbath observance—all these are not merely things which Heschel recommends for our future acceptance. Such a life existed concretely in the vanished world of East European Jewry, which Heschel describes in The Earth Is the Lord’s. The East European, rather than the Spanish, era is for him the golden age of Jewish history. In Spain, Jewish life was aristocratic, for despite the outstanding literary productions of individuals, “knowledge of Jewish lore does not seem to have been widespread among Spanish Jews.” In East Europe, on the other hand, Jewish knowledge and Jewish piety were spread through the total population. Where else—Heschel exclaims—but in a place like Berditshev could a book be found bearing the stamp of “The Society of Wood-Choppers for the Study of Mishnah”?

Heschel’s love for East European Jewry knows no bounds. Thus he both defends the arid hair-splitting of pilpulistic Talmud study, and praises the Hasidim who revolted against it. Even the rebellious young Jews “who left the sacred books or the universities to till the ground and dry the swamps of Palestine” get an almost affectionate pat on the shoulder—though in a later book, Heschel expresses disfavor at the fact that these very same young people called themselves Bilu (an abbreviation of Isaiah 2:5, “O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk”), when “the essence of the verse, in the light of the Lord, was omitted.”

In assessing some aspects of Heschel’s contribution to modern Jewish thought (and it should be stressed that there are many areas not covered in the present essay), we may conveniently begin with this description of East European Jewish life. The book was published in 1950, and one has no right to expect an exercise of the critical faculty by a writer whose suffering in the loss of the culture of his childhood must be beyond measure. It would be unfair, then, to quarrel with Heschel for not bringing to the fore some of the less attractive qualities of East European Jewish life. But if the picture he has drawn for us is meant to inspire, and to engrave itself on our minds as a Jewish golden age to be emulated, we do have a right to inquire just how accurate a picture it really is.

Heschel himself speaks of the “spiritual confusion of the last hundred years,” when the impact of the modern world upon the ghettos of the East wrought havoc with the Tradition. “We compared our fathers and grandfathers, our scholars and rabbis, with Russian or German intellectuals. We preached in the name of the twentieth century, measured the merits of Berditshev and Ger with the standards of Paris and Heidelberg. Dazzled by the lights of the metropolis, we lost at times the inner sight.” Now, the very people thus affected—not to speak of those who, coming from the “Lord’s earth,” banned synagogues from their settlements in Palestine and staged Yom Kippur balls in New York on Kol Nidre night—were presumably brought up in the regimen of Jewish law and mitzvot, men and women who had not been exposed to the travesties of the modern American synagogue service which Heschel so much deplores. They were people who, if Heschel is right, should have had intimations of God in their performance of mitzvot, people who actually lived that which is now being held out as an ideal to us.

It would seem, therefore, that the East European golden age, in contrast to the Spanish golden age, was antagonistic to the broader horizons of Western civilization and could maintain itself only within the limitations imposed from outside. Was the God whom the mitzvot-observer in Berditshev encountered in his pious deeds really so weak that the dazzling lights of Paris and Heidelberg could put Him to flight? Or is it simply that the results of mitzvah-observance which Heschel promises us cannot be guaranteed outside a specific, protected environment?

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This is a question to ponder before taking the recommended “leap of action.” Factors of culture, environment, and education are not negligible, and what had even begun to become problematical in Berditshev can hardly be a pat solution in Chicago. Nevertheless, what Heschel has to say on the subject of the mitzvah must be taken with the utmost seriousness by the modern American Jew. There is even something in the American pragmatic tradition that makes the “leap of action” rather less dubious than it would have appeared to an earlier generation reared on Teutonic logic. Try and see if it works! Buy a lulav, and shake it on the feast of Succoth, and perhaps the performance of this mitzvah will awaken spiritual potentialities within you! If it works, fine; if it fails, no harm done!

But this is a caricature of what Heschel wants to say. In the first place, by appropriating a mitzvah in that frame of mind, the chances are that we will be influenced by aesthetic considerations. Thus, though the mitzvah of lulav may appeal to us, the mitzvah of spitting in front of the man who refuses to marry his deceased brother’s widow (Deuteronomy 25:9) may very well not. In other words, we are introducing into our consideration of mitzvah the very criteria which, according to Heschel, would deprive a mitzvah of its essential character and reduce it to the level of customs, ceremonies, and symbols. Then we would be back where we started; and it is hard to disagree with Heschel’s condemnation of the current cult of “symbolism.”

The fact is, of course, that Heschel’s phrase “leap of action” is a sophism. He may make a distinction between the “leap of faith” (or, as he calls it, the “leap of thought”) and the “leap of action,” but his “leap of action” actually presupposes a “leap of faith.” It presupposes my belief that there is a God, my faith that the performance of a mitzvah will vouchsafe me an encounter with Him. That is to say, my “leap of action” is not a leap from nothing into something, but a leap from my already acquired faith in God into an awareness that the Divine is revealed in the mitzvah. What is more, the kind of God I believe in must be the kind of whom a priori I do not deny the possibility of this form of revelation. Once I believe in such a God, the “leap” is no longer such an athletic feat, and may even be unnecessary. But if I do not believe, then the “leap of action” becomes nothing more and nothing less than a form of experimentation with ceremonies.

Yet perhaps such experimentation is not to be despised. It may well be that what is, to begin with, a mere “ceremony” with which I experiment turns into a mitzvah if and when I hear myself addressed by God through it. Such, it would seem, was the approach of Franz Rosenzweig who, himself traveling the long road of experimentation from nothing to something, may have been somewhat more aware of, and sympathetic to, the difficulties besetting the path of the modern Jewish ba-al t’shuvah (“home-comer”).

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But whether we acquire our mitzvot along the path mapped out by Rosenzweig, or whether we take the “leap” recommended by Heschel, the basic problem remains: can we believe in a God who reveals Himself in mitzvot? I have suggested elsewhere¹ that there are at least three aspects of God which the Jewish belief in Unity is meant to unify. There is the “God of the Philosophers,” the “God of Israel,” and the Shechinah, the God of personal religious experience. While it may be difficult to regard the “God of the Philosophers” as revealing Torah, no such difficulty arises in conceiving of the “God of Israel” in this capacity. And the God of personal experience, the Shechinah, would vouch for the reality of the “God of Israel,” whom critics might simply call a “reported God.” The problem of our time is to reestablish that Unity.

Heschel has dealt at length with the God of personal religious experience. He has spoken in a sensitive manner of the “God of Israel.” But he has done all this at the expense of the “God of the Philosophers.” He has actually told us that “the moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable.” He has warned us that the ideas of Judaism “become caricatures when transported into categories of pedestrian thinking.” He has spoken of the “presymbolic, preconceptual level of thinking” on which the ultimate insight takes place. Instead of striving for that higher unity of rational thought and mystical insight, he has almost declared war on the former, and has practically branded the philosophical quest for God as idolatry.

But can the “God of the Philosophers” be so cavalierly dismissed from the mind of the 20th-century Jew? How, indeed, can Heschel hope to communicate his insights to those of us who are benighted enough to tarry in the realms of “conceptual thinking” if he shuns conceptual thought altogether? For it is eminently clear that Heschel wants to communicate. His voluminous writings are not directed to initiates alone, to those who have already joined him on the via mystica. As the subtitles of his two major works indicate, he wants to present “A Philosophy of Religion” and “A Philosophy of Judaism.” What emerges, however, is not a “system,” not a ready-made philosophy of religion or of Judaism, but a feeling, a mood, powerful enough to carry us with it and heighten our religious sensitivity. The constantly repeated assertion that God is not an object of our thinking, but we the object of His thought; the attempt to communicate—and yet to withhold—the intimations and allusions of the Divine; the emphasis on the “leap of action” and the life of piety; the paean to the Sabbath and the rapture over Eastern Europe; the insistence on the almost magical quality of the mitzvah and the simultaneous praise of both the institutionalism and the spontaneity of prayer—all this serves to stir up the feeling, to induce the mood.

There is a Hasidic story, which Heschel quotes somewhere in his writings, about one Hasid asking another what he had learned from his rebbe. The unexpected reply was: “How he laces his shoes.” This, too, in the Hasidic way of thinking, is Torah. To the outsider it may seem the indication of a mood rather than actual Torah, and it is the same kind of mood which confronts the reader of Heschel’s books.

There is danger in wallowing in the irrational. Moods are in need of the corrective of Reason, and Judaism in the 20th century, as the late Erich Unger made so abundantly clear,² cannot survive if it by-passes, and permits itself to be by-passed by, the constant development of cognitive thought. Perhaps one day Heschel will see his way clear to extending the concept of Divine Unity to include the “God of the Philosophers.” Meanwhile, however, he has at least done justice to the “God of Israel” and the Shechinah, who have fared rather poorly at the hands of previous Jewish theologians, and he has performed the infinitely valuable service of stressing the need for a sense of awe and reverence. Modern man has to relearn what to do “with his ultimate wonder, with the moments of awe, with the sense of mystery,” whether or not he intends to erect his whole theological structure on wonder, awe, and mystery. And he could do worse than go to Heschel for guidance.

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¹ “Problems of Reform Halakhah,” Judaism, Fall 1955.

² “Modern Judaism's Need for Philosophy,” COMMENTARY, May 1957.