Reading Journal 2023: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Reading Journal 2023: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity
Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel (edited by Susannah Heschel)

One of the great spiritual and relgiious minds of his (and our) time. This publication of essays explores the intersection between faith and ethics, with the two groupings of essays at the beginning and the end (Existence and Celebration and The Holy Dimension respectively) forming a bookend with a strong emphasis on the nature of the transcendent, and in particular the convictions he holds as an orthodox Jewish mystic.

I loved the way he fleshes out the distinction between his faith in God and his faith in the story of Israel, something that flows outwars into the practical nature of his continued reflections on good, evil, humanity, creation, modernity, antiquity.. Even more pertinent is the way he formulates a bridge between Judaism and Christianity, drawing out their indebtedness to each other. He has a way of speaking directly and honestly with conviction without isolating, and I think that is a testiment to how this man of God entered the deeply cut and sharp divides of the world he occupied, a world that doesn’t look all that different from our own.

At one point he writes that, “the major religious problem today is the systematic liquidation of man’s sensivity to the challenge of God.” By which he means, the more we reduce the challenge of God to the answers of modernity, the more we reduce ourselves. Or in true Jewish form, we reduce “humanity” to the answers of modernity, thus closing ourselves off to the necessary mystery that leaves us open to knowledge and, indeed, life. These things remain insperable. “The most radical question we face does not really concern God but man… The world we live in has become a single neighborhood, an the role of religious commitment, of reverence and compassion, in the thinking of our fellow man is becoming a domestic issue.” The context of this sentiment is a reflection on the once isolation of the story of Israel to its own failures and its own continued call to faithfulness being set within a world that modernity has now made small. If the point of Israel’s story in antiquity was to be a people for the world, a people through whom God who remake a fallen world in His own image, the point of Israel’s story today is to be part of this remade world bearing witness with the whole to the truth that God is doing what He promised to do. What’s so curious about this statement is that he begins with the Jewish-Christian relations. What better vision to bring these two stories into harmony across the differences. For Heschel, if such a truth is to be bound to an orthodox faith, it is to be bound to such a faith by way of the prophetic Tradition, one built on entering into the everyday workings of society and speaking words of imminence regarding a way of life commited to matters of justice.

Here we find the intersection between the truth of transcenence and the necessity of earthly matters. For a Jewish perspective, eternity is a truth that formulates itself in the here and now, informing a kind of reality rather than linear projections based on beginnings and endings. “The Philosophy of Jewish living is essentially a philosphy of worship… our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to return.” A poignant word that ends with this proclomation- “This is the meaning of existence: to reconcile liberty with service, the passing with the lasting, to weave the threads of temporality into the fabric of eternity.”