"A religious man
is a person who holds God and man
in one thought at a time,
at all times,
who suffers in himself harm done to others,
whose greatest passion is compassion,
whose greatest strength is love
and defiance of despair."
( Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, (New York: Crossroad, 2010.)
Heschel was a biblical prophet born out of time. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, part of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, educated in Vilna and Berlin, fled the Nazi invasion via England to America in 1939, and became one of the most respected and influential religious figures in the mid 20th Century United States.
He is described as a man of "astounding knowledge, keen undersating and profound feeling; an awareness that man dwells on the tangent of the infinite, within the holy dimension; that the life of man is part of the life of God." (11) One of my all time favourite photos is of Heschel arm in arm and linked in protest with Martin Luther King on the Selma march.
Much of Heschel's writing is a gathering of essays, lectures, sermons, addresses and other occasional writing. His writing is religious writing in one specific sense; reading his words gives us a view of the heart that felt before the mind chose the words to write. In other words his writing has the quality of the prophet who writes of what he has seen, and who has seen the indescribable. One of his favourite words in reference to God is ineffable; and as a theologian and man of faith his default disposition is wonder, awe and what he called radical amazement.
In the Preface to his book of Yiddish poems Heschel confided about a conversation with God: " I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And you gave it to me." The anthology I Asked for Wonder distils into 150 pages excerpts from Heschel's writing under various headings. I mention them all because it shows the range of his thought and the core values and convictions by which he lived, and of which he wrote: God, Prayer, Sabbath, Religion, Man (Humanity), Bible, Holy Deeds, The People, The Land.
"God is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance." That is a foundation presupposition of Heschel's thought. His struggle for words to convey the ineffability of God was lifelong, and surfaces repeatedly in his writing:
"To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…The tangent of the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable…. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder."
If I'm honest, there are very few books about prayer that I have found helpful. That isn't a dismissal of the careful thought and holy learning and rich experience that went into writing such books. I think it is acceptance that prayer does not consist in practices and techniques, nor approaches modelled by others, nor even good advice or uplifting accounts of personal experience of God. All of these have their place. It was Heschel who, along with one or two others, helped me to break out of the self-centred, self-interested and overly self-conscious practice of prayer as a kind of contract with the Almighty.
"The focus of prayer is not the self…it is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centred thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to His concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right."
It was that view of prayer, and a lifetime of such praying that impelled Heschel to march against the Vietnam war, to walk alongside the Selma marchers, to rail against the blasphemy that uses the fundamental elements of matter to create nuclear weapons, a reversal of God's creative purpose.
Sabbath is one of Heschel's most widely read books. Written to describe an alternative to consumer frenzy, the pursuit of affluence, and the commodification of time, it reads like the slow movement of a concerto about God's runaway world.
"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time. It is a day on which we are called 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."
And so on. This is a wonderful anthology of the richer thoughts of a great religious thinker, one who took God with utmost seriousness as an agent of mercy and justice in His own creation. He was an ecumenical Jew, open to understand other faith traditions, and deeply secure in his own faith convictions. To read Heschel is to listen to a wise voice speaking hopefully in a despairing world, and telling a truth that arises from the deep core of reality to be found in such human longings as eternity, transcendence, everlasting mercy, and the home of the heart in the heart of God.
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