Christian faith has deep, continuing and life-dependant roots in the faith of Israel and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 

Periodically, and regularly, I spend a while in the company of my favourite Jewish writers. It's a way of keeping open the conversation between my personal experience of Christ, and acknowledging that Christian faith has deep, continuing and life-dependant roots in the faith of Israel and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 

My first serious encounter with Judaism as a faith and way of life was in a University class where we studied Pirke Avot, a short Tractate of practical ethics, with the Jewish philosopher Alexander Broadie. A few years later, while studying current academic work on the Sermon on the Mount, I read The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, by W. D. Davies, at the time a leading scholar of Rabbinic Judaism. By the mid 1970s I had discovered the novels of Jewish writer Chaim Potok, and was fascinated and moved by the intensity and passionate piety at the heart of Hasidic faith.

By the 1980's I had added the writing of the Holocaust survivor and later Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, and began a lifelong interest in the decades of historical, social and cultural history that produced a zeitgeist out of which grew a capacity for total war and industrialised genocide. When Wiesel's two volume Memoirs were published I read them, at times with tears. These volumes, like all his writings, bore witness on behalf of those who died in the Shoah. 

The Jewish voice that speaks most powerfully into the depths of my own faith and life experience is Abraham Joshua Heschel. I have written of him, quoted him and expressed my personal debt to his writing often enough before on this blog. And this post will end with another quotation which, 70 years on, lays open much of what we experience today as cultural malaise.  

This summer I have re-read In the Beginning by Chaim Potok, the new biography of Elie Wiesel by Joseph Berger, the Essential Writings Anthology of Heschel's writings compiled by his daughter Susannah Heschel, a slow reading of The Book of the Twelve ( unhelpfully named in the Christian canon by the misleading title of Minor Prophets!), and the still required reading on the evolution of Nazi ideology in 1930s Germany, Victoria Barnett, The Soul of the People. Each one of those books is a reminder of how easily, and culpably, Christian attitudes can be distorted and co-opted in ways that sow seeds of anti-semitic sentiment, and how vital (and that word is intended to have the full force of its life referring semantic roots) it is to respect and intentionally seek to understand the rock from which Christian faith has been hewn, and shaped.

Which brings me to Heschel again. Reading an extract from one of his essays published in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, I felt again the full force of Heschel the Jewish prophet, speaking into Western culture (in 1969!) with that defiant hope which is the primary hallmark of all his writing. It is a long quotation, to be read slowly, and humbly, as learners rather than critics:

The spiritual memory of many people is empty, words are diluted, incentives are drained, inspiration is exhausted. Is God to be blamed for all this? Is it not man who has driven Him out of our hearts and minds? Has not our system of religious education been an abysmal failure?

This spiritual blackout is increasing daily. Opportunism prevails, callousness expands, the sense of the holy is melting away. We no longer know how to resist the vulgar, how to say no in the name of a higher yes. our roots are in a state of decay. 

This is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out asy of preserving the strong and deep truth of a living God theology in the midst of the blackout. 

For the darkness is neither final nor complete. Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of God's grace and radiance.

We are called to bring together the sparks to preserve single moments of radiance, and keep them alive in our lives, to defy absurdity and despair, and to wait for God to say again, Let there be light. 

And there will be light.

(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, from the page 267)