c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Even though Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel died 25 years ago this month, his influence as one of this century’s greatest religious leaders continues to increase.

Heschel was a unique”crossover”teacher whose extraordinary insights about the human condition profoundly touched _ and continue to touch _ both Jews and Christians.

Born in Warsaw in 1907, Heschel was a descendent of a long line of scholars stretching back 400 years. His early education was anchored to the traditional study of Torah and Talmud, but Heschel also received a Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power.

Because he held Polish citizenship, the Nazis expelled him from Germany in 1938 and Heschel returned to Warsaw. He left for London a year later, just two months before the Germans invaded Poland. Heschel later wrote that he was”plucked from the fire, in which my people were burned to death … millions of human lives were exterminated to evil’s greater glory.” In 1940, he came to the United States and joined the faculty of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and from 1945 until his death on Dec. 23, 1972, Heschel was professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Conservative Judaism’s rabbinical school, where his charismatic personality, his eloquent writings, and his personal involvement in the major issues of the day influenced countless rabbis, priests, and ministers.

He also served as a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a leading Christian center of learning, and Heschel lectured at the universities of Iowa, Minnesota, and Stanford. Incredibly, he wrote masterfully on many subjects in four different languages: English, Hebrew, Yiddish and German. “My major concern,”he wrote,”is the human situation … the agony of contemporary man is the agony of the spiritually stunted man … the main theme of Jewish law is the person not the institution … and the highest peak of spiritual living is not necessarily reached in rare moments of ecstasy; the highest peak lies where we are. … Religion is not made for extraordinary occasions.” At the heart of his teachings is the relationship between humans and God.”It is not enough to say `I am’; I want to know who I am in relation to with whom I live. … I want to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: what am I here for?” Men and women must make ultimate commitments about their individual lives. Part of those commitments is the awareness of reciprocity with our fellow humans and between us and God. While much is demanded of us by God, Heschel wrote, God also is in need of us to be fully divine.

Heschel actively followed his own teaching that”to be human is to be involved, to act and react, to wonder and to respond … to think of God is not to find Him as an object … but to find ourselves in Him.” Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., bitterly opposed American military involvement in Vietnam, advocated Christian-Jewish dialogue, pressed for the liberation of Soviet Jewry, and strongly supported Israel even when many of his Christian colleagues abandoned it after the 1967 Six Day War.

Heschel was a devout Jew who wrote in lyrical terms.

For him”Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. … No two hours are alike. Every hour is unique … exclusive and endlessly precious.” It was precisely this rootedness in Judaism that was the source of Heschel’s spiritual energy, and it gave him exceptional credibility when he marched in rallies and demonstrations for”universal”causes like voting rights for blacks and world peace. The long-ago Jewish world of pre-World War I Warsaw and the racial discrimination of post-World War II America were merged within Heschel’s writings and actions. He became an authentic descendent of the Hebrew prophets whom he deeply loved.

When the first volume of Heschel’s religious philosophy was published in 1951, another 20th-century giant of the spirit, Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, called Heschel”a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.”Niebuhr was not wrong.

MJP END RUDIN