The Rush of the Passing Stillness

Abraham Joshua Heschel (b. 1907 – d. 1972)

"We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore."

God in Search of Man. The Insecurity of Freedom. Who Is Man?  These are but three book titles in the inimitable tenor of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel, who prays asking,"How to life the life that I am?" Abraham Heschel has captured my fascination since I first came across him among civil rights heroes of the American sixties. A prolific writer, speaker, teacher, rabbi, theologian, activist, and mystic the more I immerse myself in his work, the more a rich and variegated world has opened to me.

"Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, . . . to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe."

Let me start with a few facts, which, like puzzle pieces you can hold and turn in different directions to start to give you a sense of the shape of this great man and mystic.

In 1936, Abraham Joshua Heschel occupied a distinguished directorship of Jewish studies in Frankfurt, succeeding one of Judaism's most illustrious philosophers Martin Buber, who personally asked the 30-year old Heschel to take the post. In 1938, like all Polish Jews living in Germany, Heschel was arrested and deported. Six short weeks before the German invasion of Poland, he finally secured safe exit and left Warsaw for London. The orchestrated destruction that followed took the lives of his mother, much of his family, and most of his religious and academic colleagues and friends.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1907, young Abraham came into this world from a long line of Hassidic Rabbis on both his mother's and father's side of the family. His daughter, a Dartmouth professor and historian, says, with no hyperbole, that he's probably related to almost all the great mystics who sparked the revival of mystical Judaism in Europe. The elders around this unusual boy were stalwart in their faith. They prayed with their entire bodies. For them, religion was Life and life was the art of being a representation of God in the world.

Abraham, as a nine-year-old boy, was already expressing such a mastery of the great Judaic texts, these wise men considered having him step into the role his father suddenly left vacant when he passed prematurely, stricken by influenza. Though he didn't assume such a big mantle, it was a sign of the depth and leadership that would come. Much later in his life, Heschel expressed his gratitude for the spiritual village he was born into,"I was very fortunate having lived as a child and as a young boy in an environment where there were many people I could revere, people concerned with problems of inner life, of spirituality and integrity. People who have shown great compassion and understanding for other people."

Heschel published on the Talmud and received a secular education as well, excelling in philosophy, Latin, and mathematics, first in Vilna and then in Berlin. While in Germany, the violence of Nazism rose up all around him. He witnessed the mass book burning at the University of Berlin, and once had to quickly slip out of a concert hall when Hitler unexpectedly arrived for the same performance. A harrowing few years followed. The war grew more and more heated. Heschel searched for visas to head to safety. All the while, as one who sheltered him then described, he maintained his piety, his prayers. In 1938 he was abruptly deported to Poland, after a few years of struggle and with the help of kind friends and associates, he was finally able to exit first to London, then America, landing at a modest teaching post in Ohio. It is hard to imagine now the actuality of those years and the mold they set for his sense of the spiritual in the world.

Teaching and writing from an academic platform, Heschel made his home in Manhattan, at the Jewish Theological Seminary. From there, he travelled. A meeting with President Kennedy. The 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, where he strode, shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr. Martin Luther King, each step worship."These feet were praying,"he said."In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible," and with that he became one of the first Jewish theologians to actively denounce the Viet Nam war.

"Mindfulness of God rises slowly, a thought at a time. Suddenly we are there. Or is He here, at the margin of our soul? When we begin to feel a qualm of diffidence lest we hurt what is holy, lest we break what is whole, then we discover that He is not austere. He answers with love our trembling awe. Repentant of forgetting Him even for a while, we become sharers of gentle joy; we would like to dedicate ourselves forever to the unfoldment of His final order."

Loved by Christians as well as Jews, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said he was "an authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America." They became close friends. Niebuhr extended to Heschel a personal expression of his love, requesting that on his death, the Rabbi to give the eulogy at his funeral service. At the Vatican II Council, Heschel served a pivotal role. When he met Pope Paul VI again, he was greeted with a smile,"[Pope Paul VI] opened the conversation by telling me that he is reading my books,"Heschel wrote in a correspondence,"that my books are very spiritual and very beautiful, and that Catholics should read [them]. He expressed his blessing that I may continue to write."

I love Heschel. He thinks with a prophet's mind and he preaches with a mystic's melody. He has a soul and a spirit and a passion that when I read him I feel like he is reaching through the ink and paper and clasping my arm. I feel him close, like an uncle I could have been related to, I feel his affection, but also his distance. He speaks from and to a focus beyond me, animated by a current too deep to see.

"God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. In every man's life there are moments when there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a sight of the eternal."

And I find him troublesome, challenging. He has a conscience that could only arise from the conditions of Nazi Germany, from a first generation, eye-witness, heart-witness to a cultured, sophisticated, and systematized rationale for extinction of others. Troublesome because he harps at theological complacency, which avoids involvement in the injustices of the time. For him the spiritual is the political, so now we must ask, What is a spiritual response to a militarized global economy? How do we express our love for the earth and all its inhabitants, from plankton to homo sapiens? Are we confronting the forces that fortify race and class divides?

To read his words is to ask those questions, to wrestle with complicated realities. This is why I find him troublesome. Contemplating his essays is sometimes like fumbling with a potted cactus, little pricks in an effort not to let something precious fall to the floor. Little splinters of questions and incongruities that are hard to extricate from my flesh without great patience, a steady hand, and a close look.

But the Heschel I love most and the one that exalts me is Heschel the mystic, who speaks to me beyond time. The lover of God. The poet. The worshipper. The pious one in a true sense of the word. The bard of the unknown. The voice of prayer that fills the heart with rapture and the tongue with song.

He who is satisfied has never truly craved,

and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor,

His life for love,

knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light

The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise,

A yearning to serve.And when the waves of that yearning

Swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside:

the crust of callousness,

the hysteria of vanity,

the orgies of arrogance.

For it is not the I that trembles alone,

it is not a stir out of my soul but an eternal flutter that sweeps us all.