Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (born January 11, 1907 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; died December 23, 1972 in New York City ) was a conservative rabbi , Jewish scribe and religious philosopher of Polish origin.

Life

Parental home and education

Abraham Joshua (Yehoshua) Heschel was the youngest of six siblings in a Polish-Jewish family from which a number of important Hasidic rabbis came, including Abraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apta . In his parents' house he learned the Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and German languages, but above all was taught basic Hasidic ideals such as love, compassion, justice and piety.

From 1922, Heschel's first smaller works on the Talmud appeared in the Hebrew-language Warsaw monthly Sha'arey Torah: Kovetz rabbani hodshi ("Gates of the Torah: Monthly Rabbinical Journal"). With that he rose into the circle of Talmudic teachers. With the help of his mother, Heschel was able to avoid getting married to his cousin Gittel Perlow, so that he could pursue his interest in other Jewish cultures without being bound.

In 1925 he went to Vilnius , which at that time belonged to Poland, in order to do the Abitur there in 1927 at the mathematical and natural science high school. At the same time he published a volume of Yiddish poems, which were published in Warsaw in 1933 and were well received by Chaim Nachman Bialik, among others .

Studied in Berlin

In 1927 he enrolled in Berlin at the University for the Science of Judaism , where he studied with Leo Baeck , Ismar Elbogen and Julius Guttmann , among others . At the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin he completed his doctoral thesis in 1932 and had his oral examination on February 23, 1933 with Max Dessoir and Alfred Bertholet . After the transfer of power to the National Socialists , however, he could no longer find a publisher in the German Reich, so that he only received his doctorate in 1935 with the proofs. His doctoral thesis "The Prophetic Consciousness" was published in 1936 in Krakow . With this work, Heschel opposed the understanding of the Bible prevailing in scholarship at the time, as it was represented in particular by the German Christians , who called for a departure from the Old Testament and a reduction and reinterpretation of the New Testament . In his doctoral thesis, Heschel analyzes the “prophetic consciousness” of the pre-exilic scriptural prophets: How did the prophets experience God's inspiration and revelation, and how did this affect them, how did they deal with it? In the thinking and feeling of the prophets a "pathetic theology" developed, to which a "religion of sympathy" corresponds in action. Heschel expressed these thoughts in particular in his book The Prophets (1962), a later complete revision of his dissertation.

The last few years in Europe

Martin Buber appointed him in 1937 as his successor at the Jewish Lehrhaus in Frankfurt am Main. In 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo while deporting Polish Jews and deported to Warsaw. Since Poland refused entry to Jews, the deportees were taken to an internment camp. After a few months, Heschel was released through the influence of his family and lived in Warsaw until the summer of 1939. There he taught at the Institute for Jewish Studies until, in the summer of 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, he went to London, where his brother Jakob was a rabbi. After six months he received an entry permit into the USA. After the German invasion of Poland , his sister Esther was killed in a bombing. His mother and two other sisters were killed in concentration camps. After the Second World War he stayed briefly in Europe, but did not return to Poland or Germany. He said: "If I were to go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of killed children, of mothers burned alive, of people who were suffocated."

In the USA

Heschel came to New York City in March 1940 , where he met his eldest sister Sarah and other members of his family. He soon moved on to Cincinnati , where he taught at Hebrew Union College for five years . Here he met Sylvia Straus, a pianist from Cleveland; they married in Los Angeles in 1946. Heschel had already gone to New York City in 1945 to accept a professorship for Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which he retained for his entire life. Their daughter, Susannah Heschel, is a professor of Jewish studies and is particularly concerned with the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Social, political and interreligious engagement

Abraham Heschel campaigned in particular for the rights of African Americans in the USA. In January 1963, he first met Martin Luther King at a Christian-Jewish conference in Chicago and became friends with him. In 1965 both took part in the famous March from Selma to Montgomery . For the funeral service for Martin Luther King on April 8, 1968, Heschel was asked by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to hold the obituary, and he agreed to this request. Together with John Bennett and Richard John Neuhaus , he founded the organization "Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam" in 1963. Together with Cardinal Bea he worked on the drafting of the “Declaration of Jews” of the Second Vatican Council, which is contained in the Declaration Nostra Aetate . In 1970 Heschel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in March 1971 he received an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome . who was positive about his writings.

In 1972 Abraham Joshua Heschel died.

Excerpts from his thoughts

Even in his first years in the USA, Heschel, who had already opposed the then valid categorizations of modern biblical studies in Europe with his doctoral thesis “The prophetic consciousness” , opposed the conventional understanding of religious experiences. In his first articles written in English, he describes the usual categories of interpreting piety, prayer, and holiness as reductionist and inappropriate. Scientists, for example, often describe piety as a psychological phenomenon or criticize it as irrational and counterproductive. “Just as one cannot study philosophy through prayer, so cannot one study prayer through philosophizing.” In Man Is Not Alone he writes: “A description of faith in terms of reason is like an attempt to use love as a syllogism and To understand beauty as an algebraic equation . "Piety must rather be described as a phenomenon of its own with its own expressions, as an attitude and way of thinking in which the pious person always feels close to God:" The consciousness of God is as close to him as one's own heartbeat, often deep and calm, but sometimes also overwhelming and intoxicating. "Piety causes awe, which sees the" dignity of every human being "as well as the" spiritual value that is inalienable even in inanimate things. " Exploitation and domination are real piety strange, and material possessions only lead to loneliness. A pious person's bond with God is “his constant striving to go beyond himself”, to dedicate himself to goals, tasks and ideals. For a pious person, fate means not only achieving something, but also contributing. “He who helps a creature helps God. Those who stand by the poor care for something that affects God. Whoever admires the good worships the Spirit of God. "

Ultimately, religion is not based on the human consciousness of God, but on God's interest in people. In prayer man does not seek to make God visible, but to make God visible to himself. Man does not seek to understand God, God seeks man and even needs him: “To be means to mean, and the meaning of man is the great mystery of being God's partner. God needs people. "

The "divine pathos", ie the fact that God needs people, is the central point of Heschel's theology.

Heschel develops these thoughts in the book God Seeks Man. A philosophy of Judaism in detail. God is not an object that man examines like a thing, but the living counterpart of man. The search movement of God is followed by the answer of “Man asks about God. Studies on prayer and symbolism ”. One cannot pour one's heart out into empty space, writes Heschel in the introduction (p. IX). What is important in Heschel's thinking is his special understanding of time and space. In addition: “The Sabbath. Its significance for people today ”. It is about freeing oneself from the tyranny of the things of space and living in freedom (of time, of the Sabbath).

Works

Major works

  • Man Is Not Alone: ​​A Philosophy of Religion. Farrar, Straus & Young, New York 1951.
  • God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1955, German: God seeks man. A philosophy of Judaism. 1980. 2nd edition 1989.
  • The Prophets. Harper & Row, New York 1962.
  • Torah min Ha-Shamayim b'Espakloriah schel Ha-Dorot. (Torah from Heaven in the Mirror of Generations), Hebrew. Volume I: 1962, II: 1965, III: 1990 (posthumous), engl. Translated: Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations , Continuum, New York 2006, preview .
  • Man's Quest for God. Scribner, New York 1954, German: Man asks about God, investigations into prayer and symbolism. 1982, 2nd edition 1989.

Other works

  • The prophetic consciousness (1932), published in 1936 as “Die Prophetie”, Publishing House of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow.
  • Maimonides , Berlin 1935, reprint Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, English: New York 1983.
  • The Earth Is the Lord's. The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe (first lecture in Yiddish in 1945), Schuman, New York 1950, German: The Lord's Earth , 1985.
  • The Insecurity of Freedom. Essays on Human Existence , New York 1959, German: The unsecured freedom. Essays on Human Existence , Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985.
  • The Sabbath: Its meaning for Modern Man , Farrar, New York 1951, German: The Sabbath. Its significance for people today , Neukirchen-Vluyn 1990.
  • Israel, an echo of eternity , Farrar, New York 1969, German: Israel, Echo der Ewigkeit , Neukirchen-Vluyn 1988.

Secondary literature

  • Maurice S. Friedman: "Divine Need and Human Wonder": The Philosophy of AJ Heschel. In: Judaism 25/1 (1976), 65-78.
  • Harold Kasimow / Byron L. Sherwin (eds.): No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue , New York 1991.
  • Edward K. Kaplan: 1936: Abraham Joschua Heschel # s first major scholarly work "Die Prophetie" is published in Cracow, Poland, and distributed in Erich Reiss Verlag in Berlin. In: Sander L. Gilman , Jack Zipes (ed.): Yale companion to Jewish writing and thought in German culture 1096-1996. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 526-531
  • EK Kaplan / SH Dresner: Abraham Joshua Heschel : Prophetic Witness, 2 vol., Vol. 1: New Haven: Yale University Press 1998.
  • ST Katz: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hasidism , in: Journal of Jewish Studies 31 (1980), 82-104.
  • JC Merkle (ed.): Abraham Joshua Heschel : Exploring His Life and Thought, New York 1985.
  • JJ Petuchowski: Faith as the Leap of Action: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel in: Commentary 25/5 (1958), 390-97.
  • Fritz A. Rothschild / Ephraim Meir: Art. Abraham Joshua Heschel , in: Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., Vol. 9, 70–72.
  • S. Tanenzapf: Abraham Heschel and his Critics , in: Judaism 23/3 (1974), 276-86.
  • B. Dolna: Surrendered to the presence of God. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Life and Work Mainz 2001.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Heschel, Abraham Joshua
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American rabbi and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 1972
Place of death New York City