We live in the universe of His knowing, in the glory of attachment. "before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer.1.5). This is the task: to sense or to discover our being known. We approach Him, not by making Him the object of our thinking, but by discovering ourselves as the objects of His thinking. A. J Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1962). First Edition.
Long before Christmas I ordered this volume of Heschel’s magnum opus. It arrived today. It’s a 1962 first edition, handsomely bound, read but cared for, with a gold leafed postage stamp label indicating the seller was Kieffer’s Jewish Bookstore, Chicago. The publisher, The Burning Bush Press only printed quality Jewish publications. It’s a booklover’s book and I’m glad it found me!
I hope some time to write a personal appreciation of this profound and revered Jewish thinker who has taught me so much about prayer, about God’s holiness, and about the lovingkindness that called creation into being and has not abandoned it. His influence was decisive on Christians of such varied backgrounds and such similar calibre as Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Jurgen Moltmann and Walter Brueggemann. He was a substantial presence in the civil rights movement, and as a critic of Vatican II’s caginess about acknowledging the incipient, at times overtly hostile, anti-semitism in much of Christian history. His exposition of the pathos of God in this volume on the prophets was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, and is one of the most telling contributions to religious thinking in the 20th century.
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