Divine-Human Encounter: The Path to God in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel

By Harold Kasimow, Maurice Friedman and Jo-Ann Mort

In his seminal work God in Search of Man, Heschel illustrates three paths to God and provides a practical guide for how the modern mind can open itself to God, or more precisely, through which the contemporary mind can respond to a God who is in search of human beings. In this book, Harold Kasimow clarifies the meaning of Heschel's "path to God" by devoting one chapter to each of the three aspects of this path. Using this "path to God" in its three aspects as an organizing principle, this book illustrates how Heschel's thought presents a balance between the rational and mystical poles of the Jewish tradition. A careful content analysis of his thinking reveals that Heschel is an authentic Jewish voice who presents an accurate Jewish theology. The first chapter is devoted to the Hasidic influence on Heschel, which Kasimow feels is most important for understanding Heschel's thought. The final chapter focuses on Heschel's unique attitude toward Asian religious traditions, which are becoming critical for authentic religious dialogue today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385211449

Harold Kasimow

Harold Kasimow is the George Drake Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Grinnell College. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of a number of books on interreligious dialogue and on his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel. His books include No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue and Abraham Joshua Heschel Today: Voices from Warsaw and Jerusalem.

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1

Major Influences on Heschel’s Thought

Hasidic masters had the most profound influence on Heschel’s theology, even as he was open to other significant influences. This was especially true of the Baal Shem Tov and the Kotzker Rebbe.

Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1907. During the first twenty years of his life, like other East European Jews, Heschel immersed himself in the study of biblical rabbinic and mystical Jewish literature. The scholar Fritz Rothschild noted that at the age of ten he was at home in the world of the Bible; he had acquired competence in the subtle dialectic of the Talmud and had also been introduced to the world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah.¹

Yet, unlike most Jews of his time and place, Heschel also delved deeply into secular studies. He relates how at the age of twenty he went with great hunger to the University of Berlin to study philosophy.² He soon came to realize, however, the profound difference between his own views and those of his professors. Heschel was not enamored with what he labeled the Greek-German way of thinking practiced by his professors at the University of Berlin.

While Heschel was a student in Berlin he became deeply involved in the study of the great medieval Jewish philosophers, and although he had the greatest respect for these scholars, his approach to Judaism and the conclusions he reached on essential issues contrast sharply with their views. Most of the Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages were Sephardim, Jews who lived in Spain. Their weakness, according to Heschel, was that they neglected some of the essential features of Judaism, in their attempt to reconcile Judaism with the ideas of the great Greek and Muslim thinkers, fashionable at the time.³

Who, then, were the major spiritual forces which shaped Heschel’s thought? For Heschel, the Bible was paramount. As he wrote in God in Search of Man, The presence of God is found in many ways, but above all God is found in the words of the Bible.⁴ Still, there can be no doubt that the Talmud, especially the ideas of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, had a great influence too in shaping Heschel’s thought. Yet neither the Bible nor the Talmud replaced the influence of the Hasidic masters on Heschel’s approach to religion. For Heschel, the Baal Shem Tov and the Kotzker Rebbe were preeminent.

Throughout my entire life the words of the Kotzker Rebbe burned within me, Heschel wrote.⁵ But the Kotzker was not the only Hasid whose words burned in Heschel’s heart. Heschel revered another rebbe, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement. He writes: I must admit that during my entire life I struggled between being a Hasid of the way of the Baal Shem or the way of the Kotzker Rebbe. There are moments in my life—may God forgive me for my Chutzpah—when I think and feel like a Kotzker Hasid.⁶

He continues: I am the last one of a generation, perhaps the last Jew from Warsaw, whose soul lives in Mezibzh [the place where the Baal Shem spent the last twenty years of his life] and his mind in Kotzk.⁷

Rabbinic Judaism consisted at that time of the study of the Torah as an end in itself. Hasidism arose as a revolt against rabbinic Judaism, a reaction to the cold, formalistic, rigid teaching of the eighteenth century. As the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow wrote, rabbinic Judaism at that time failed to satisfy the religious cravings of the common man. The latter needed beliefs . . . making an appeal to the heart rather than the mind.⁸ Even Heinrich Graetz, the great German Jewish historian, admitted that Rabbinical Judaism, as known in Poland, offered no sort of religious comfort.⁹ This, in spite of him having called Hasidism a daughter of darkness.¹⁰

For Heschel, Hasidic Judaism answered a yearning to include three sacred entities—God, Torah, and Israel.¹¹ The study of Torah took precedence over God, but Heschel insisted that the rabbis had forgotten that this study was but a path to God. With many people, the attitude toward learning had become a kind of idolatry, depreciating the values of the heart, Heschel wrote. "Excessive pilpul (sophistry) had often dried up the inner wells and became the object of pretentious display of the intellect."¹²

For Heschel, many of the rabbis of this time fell prey to a doctrine that he labeled religious behaviorism. He explains: There are people who seem to believe that religious deeds can be performed in a spiritual wasteland, in the absence of the soul, with a heart hermetically sealed; that external action is the essential mode of worship; pedantry the same as piety, as if all that mattered is how men behaved in physical terms; as if religion were not concerned with the inner life.¹³

Is Heschel’s religious behaviorism true to the spirit of the Talmudic sages to whom the Jewish spiritual elite had devoted all their lives? Heschel believed that this is a distortion of the spirit of rabbinic Judaism. Disciples do not always live up to the teaching of their masters. This distortion was not necessarily intentional; it occurred when the disciples stressed one idea over another, precisely what the rabbis did during the eighteenth century.

Indeed, the major struggle between Hasidism and rabbinic orthodoxy occurred because the rabbis became enamored with law (halacha) at the expense of inwardness (aggadah). Judaism is a religion of both halacha and aggadah, law and spirit. The Baal Shem Tov had no intention of doing away with halacha, but he was against its supremacy over aggadah.

Heschel agreed. He explains this most important polarity in Judaism:

Halacha thinks in the category of quantity; aggadah is the category of quality. . . . Halacha speaks of the estimable and measurable dimensions of our deeds, informing us how much we must perform in order to fulfill our duty, about the size, capacity, or content of the doer and the deed. Aggadah deals with the immeasurable, inwards aspect of living, telling us how we must think and feel; how rather than how much we must do to fulfill our duty; the manner, not only the content, is important. To halacha the quantity decides; aggadah, for which quality is the ultimate standard, is not dazzled by either the number of the magnitude of good deeds but stresses the spirit, kavanah, dedication, purity.¹⁴

Perhaps Heschel was inspired by two other scholars, both of whom touch on this point. Bahya Ben Joseph Ibn Paquda, who wrote his classical work in Spain around 1080, Duties of the Heart, makes a similar point when he writes, Strive therefore with all your might that your deeds shall be pure, even though they be few, rather than many but not pure. For that which is small in quantity, but impure is little and useless.¹⁵ The Talmud includes this same opinion: "Jerusalem was destroyed only because people insisted on the letter of the law—and did not go beyond