Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was a leader in the U.S. civil rights movement.
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, the youngest of six children of Moshe Mordechai Heschel and Rifka Reizel Heschel née Perlow. His father hailed originally from Medzhybizh and his mother was from Mińsk Mazowiecki. He was descended from preeminent European rabbis on both sides of his family. His paternal great-great-grandfather and namesake was Rebbe Avraham Yehoshua Heshel of Apt in present-day Poland. His mother was also a descendant of Avraham Yehoshua Heshel and other Hasidic dynasties. His siblings were Sarah, Dvora Miriam, Esther Sima, Gittel, and Jacob. Their father Moshe died of influenza in 1916 when Abraham was nine. He was tutored by a Gerrer Hasid who introduced him to the thought of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk.
After a traditional yeshiva education and studying for Orthodox rabbinical ordination (semicha), Heschel pursued his doctorate at the University of Berlin and rabbinic ordination at the non-denominational Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. There he studied under notable scholars including Hanoch Albeck, Ismar Elbogen, Julius Guttmann, Alexander Guttmann, and Leo Baeck. His mentor in Berlin was David Koigen. Heschel later taught Talmud at the Hochschule. He joined a Yiddish poetry group, Jung Vilna, and in 1933, published a volume of Yiddish poems, Der Shem Hamefoyrosh: Mentsch, dedicated to his father.
In late October 1938, while living in a rented room in the home of a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Heschel was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland in the Polenaktion. He then spent ten months lecturing on Jewish philosophy and Torah at Warsaw's Institute for Jewish Studies. Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel fled Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, and Alexander Guttmann, an eventual colleague at the Hebrew Union College, who secretly re-wrote Heschel's ordination certificate to meet American visa requirements.
Heschel's sister Esther was killed in the German bombing of Warsaw. His mother was murdered by Nazis who broke into her flat in the Warsaw Ghetto, where his sister Gittel also died, and his sister Devorah was deported from Vienna to Auschwitz, where she perished. He never returned to Germany, Austria or Poland. He once wrote, "If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated."
Heschel arrived in New York City in March 1940. He soon left for Cincinnati, serving on the faculty of Hebrew Union College (HUC), the main seminary of Reform Judaism, for five years. In 1946 he returned to New York, taking a position with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the main seminary of Conservative Judaism. He remained with JTS as professor of Jewish ethics and Kabbalah until his death in 1972. At the time of his death, Heschel lived near JTS at 425 Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
Heschel married Sylvia Straus, a concert pianist, on December 10, 1946, in Los Angeles. Their daughter, Susannah Heschel, became a Jewish scholar in her own right.
Heschel explicated many facets of Jewish thought, including studies on medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Hasidic philosophy. According to some scholars, he was more interested in spirituality than in critical text study; the latter was a specialty of many scholars at JTS. He was not given a graduate assistant for many years and he was mainly relegated to teach in the education school or the Rabbinical school, not in the academic graduate program. Heschel became friendly with his colleague Mordecai Kaplan. Though they differed in their approaches to Judaism, they had a very cordial relationship and visited each other's homes from time to time.
Heschel believed that the teachings of the Hebrew prophets were a clarion call for social action in the United States. He wrote about segregation, "Some are guilty, but all are responsible". He worked for African Americans' civil rights and spoke out against the Vietnam War.
He also criticized what he specifically called "pan-halakhism," or an exclusive focus upon religiously compatible behavior to the neglect of the non-legalistic dimension of rabbinic tradition.
Heschel is notable as a recent proponent of what one scholar calls the "Nachmanidean" school of Jewish thought - emphasizing the mutually dependent relationship between God and man - as opposed to the "Maimonidean" school in which God is independent and unchangeable. In Heschel's language, the "Maimonidean" perspective is associated with Rabbi Yishmael and the "Nachmanidean" perspective with Rabbi Akiva; according to Heschel neither perspective should be adopted in isolation, but rather both are interwoven with the other.
Heschel described kabbalah as an outgrowth of classical rabbinic sources that describe God's dependence on man to implement the divine plan for the world. This contrasts with scholars like Gershon Scholem who saw kabbalah as reflecting the influence of non-Jewish thought. While Scholem's school focused on the metaphysics and history of kabbalistic thought, Heschel focused on kabbalistic descriptions of the human religious experience. In recent years, a growing body of kabbalah scholarship has followed Heschel's emphasis on the mystical experience of kabbalah and on its continuity with earlier Jewish sources.
Heschel is a widely read Jewish theologian whose most influential works include Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, The Sabbath, and The Prophets. As a representative of American Jews at the Second Vatican Council, Heschel persuaded the Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned Jews, or referred to an expected conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity. His theological works argued that religious experience is a fundamentally human impulse, not just a Jewish one. He believed that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth. For these and other reasons, Martin Luther King Jr. called Heschel "a truly great prophet." Heschel actively participated in the Civil Rights movement, and was a participant in the third Selma to Montgomery march, accompanying Dr. King and John Lewis.
The Earth Is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe. 1949. ISBN 1-879045-42-7
Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion. 1951. ISBN 0-374-51328-7
The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. 1951. ISBN 1-59030-082-3
Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism. 1954. ISBN 0-684-16829-4
God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. 1955. ISBN 0-374-51331-7