by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 15, 2004
Ten years ago an author named Joshua Halberstein wrote an article for the magazine Tikkun that included a story about his first encounter with Abraham Joshua Heschel. At the time, Halberstein was a young Hassidic seminarian grappling with a severe crisis of faith. Propelled both by his own confusion and by an extraordinary fit of hubris, he showed up unannounced on Heschel's doorstep to engage him in theological debate (by this point in time Heschel was a world-renowned theologian). Having been graciously admitted, Halberstein then launched into a passionate critique of mysticism in general and, more specifically, Heschel's insistence on the divine dimension within the human. He finished his argument by stating flatly, "The fact is, human beings are just complex machines, complex molecular arrangements."
Heschel got up and walked over to him and said, "Well, of course you're right; we are all bundles of molecules, gobs of matter randomly bound." He raised his foot. "I'll kick you then, just because I feel like it, and because I don't mind kicking a bag of molecules." And then he lowered his foot and said, "No, I can't do that, can I? Because you know that by the simple fact of your existence as a human being, you have dignity, and it is a dignity I must respect forever and in all ways. Certainly, you are composed of molecules. But tell me please: Which molecule has the dignity?"
Which molecule has the dignity? For Heschel the answer was obvious: none of them -- and all of them. The big picture is much bigger than we think it is, and the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. God cannot be understood apart from humanity; religion cannot be separated from moral commitment; reverence cannot be meaningful if it is uncoupled from responsibility; religious commandments cannot stand apart from social imperatives. All of which gives you a pretty good idea of why I have been attracted to Heschel's writing for many years, and why I've come to consider him one of my spiritual ancestors and teachers, even though he lived his entire life as a devoutly religious Jew.
For those of you who might not know much about Heschel, here's a thumbnail sketch. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, into a long line of rabbis of the Hassidic tradition. As a young man he studied philosophy and religion in Berlin and earned a doctorate in religious studies. He was on track to become a rabbi or professor and settle down someday more or less in the community of his childhood, but his life was radically interrupted by the rise of Nazism. He lost nearly all of his family to the concentration camps and barely escaped with his life, first to England and then to the United States.
Beginning in the 1950s he was one of the prime movers for interfaith dialogue in this country, and in the 1960s he became an ally of Dr. Martin Luther King and a passionate advocate for civil rights. Well before King, Heschel went on to denounce the Vietnam War, and he helped found one of the strongest faith-based anti-war groups of that era, Clergy and Laity Concerned, with which he worked until his death at the end of 1972.
That's a nutshell biography of Heschel, to give you some sense of the context of his life. But what made Heschel such a force during his lifetime and continues to attract people to his writing thirty years after his death was not just his theological insight but his prophetic witness. In the tradition of the ancient Hebrew prophets he studied, Heschel raised his voice for justice based on his understanding of God and of the kind of divine/human pact that he discerned in the world, which was really a sense that humanity and God are mutually responsible for one another and for the fate of the earth.
In an interview about the prophetic witness, Heschel once said, "The spirit of the prophet is very much alive. The prophets are those who combine a very deep love, a powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope." It's those words, and the guidance I think they can give us still today, that I want to focus on today. What did it mean for Heschel to ground his life in the powers of love, dissent, rebuke and hope? And what does it mean for us?
When Heschel talked about "love" in the context of the prophetic witness, he didn't mean anything that could be connected to Valentines' Day, to hearts and flowers and warm fuzzy feelings. He meant something much deeper and more religiously grounded. Heschel understood God as a presence that was completely entwined with humanity, and he understood all of humanity's struggles as an inevitable wrestling with God. It is from this inseparable entwining of God and humanity that love arises as a prophetic imperative. By definition, God evokes ultimate reverence, awe and devotion. But to Heschel, none of those things could be expressed honestly except through the gaze, the word and the touch we give to one another.
This goes way beyond the traditional religious teaching that since God loves humanity, we ought to love each other as well. It's grounded in Heschel's belief that humanity is a manifestation of God. The human touch is a whisper of the Divine touch; each gesture offered to one another is also offered to God. Heschel wrote, "The one symbol of God is humanity, every person…Human life is holy …Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for humanity….An act of violence is an act of desecration. To be arrogant toward a person is to be blasphemous toward God."
That's part of what made Heschel a mystic -- that sense that the borders between the divine and the human were blurry and permeable. What Heschel called the "Divine pathos" lives within us. If we believe that, then our vision is irrevocably changed: we cannot see a human being without seeing God. So for Heschel, love for God was meaningless apart from love for people. This was such a deeply held conviction that it led him to sound perilously close to being a Universalist in some of his writings. If every human being is a manifestation of God, that divine essence trumps all religious law or practice, all forms of worship or study or prayer, and rises up as the only supreme imperative: Thou shalt love.
That supreme commandment led Heschel directly to the second element in his prophetic witness, which was dissent. Why does dissent have to follow immediately on the heels of radical compassion? Because it's impossible to live in a world of suffering and not raise a voice of protest against the pain. It's impossible to share in the "divine pathos" without an attempt to impede the savagery human beings visit on each other, and thereby visit on God.
What raises this protest to the level of prophetic dissent is Heschel's commitment to the indivisibility of human responsibility. He was the one who first made the famous statement, "some are guilty, all are responsible", and it's a way of insisting on the unity of the human tribe. Through brutal first-hand experience, Heschel knew the difference between victim and perpetrator. But the difference did not leave either victim or perpetrator cut off from one another, from the human family or from God. In writing of the Holocaust Heschel said, "What should have been humanity's answer to the Nazi atrocities? Repentance, a revival of conscience, a sense of unceasing, burning shame, a persistent effort to be worthy of the name human,… [and] to control the urge to cruelty…. If we have beheld evil, we may know that it was shown to us in order that we learn our own guilt and repent; for what is shown to us is also within us."
His prophetic dissent was not meant only for the big or obvious wrongs of our world. Heschel's dissent targeted the whole sweep of society, from the large horrors of war to the much subtler violations of consumer society. In one of his most impassioned critiques of our culture he wrote, "America's problem number one is … the perversion of the eighteenth-century conception of the pursuit of happiness …Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction…The cure of the soul begins with a sense of embarrassment, embarrassment at our pettiness, prejudices, envy and conceit; embarrassment at the profanation of life. A world that is full of grandeur has been converted into a carnival. … The ceiling of aspiration is too low: a car, color television, and life insurance. Modern humanity has royal power and plebian ideals."
The third element of Heschel's prophetic witness is rebuke, which I understand as the intimate face of dissent. If dissent is turned outward, toward the world, rebuke is turned inward. Rebuke is the family voice, the scolding when one of the partners in an agreement has blown it somehow and let down the other partner. In Heschel's world view, the partners are God and humanity. Both sides are responsible for what happens in the world, and both can be rebuked for what goes wrong.
In a poem from his young adulthood in Berlin, watching the coming storm as the power of the Nazis grew, Heschel wrote,
Yet sometimes, rain drops like a tear,
God's confession to the world --
I feel sad, embarrassed,
For God Himself and for our own sake.
Still our pain demands: Have mercy!
Instead of tears give help, action not regret…
Let us, men, dogs and God
Atone together and return
Or do penance for one another.
Forgive us God our sins
And we shall forgive you of Your own.
The eternal question of prophetic rebuke is, "Where are you?", and Heschel flung it out simultaneously toward both God and humanity. It is a constant call to awaken and to respond, and Heschel always includes himself in the radical "we" who have failed to do enough, to love enough, to awaken enough. He wrote, "From [the prophets] I learned the niggardliness of our moral comprehension, the incapacity to sense the depth of misery caused by our own failures…There is immense silent agony in the world, and our task is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty…Morally speaking there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings…"
The fourth essential element in Heschel's prophetic witness is hope. The voice of the prophet is completely futile if we cannot believe that the direction to which it points us is truly possible. Trembling behind every dissent and rebuke is the vision of what could be, what should be. Inherent in the notion that we continually fail ourselves and fail God is the promise that somehow, someday, we will not fail, and that to at least some degree we really can build the sort of world we dream of. Heschel's prophetic hope sustained him throughout his life, despite the immense suffering that came his way. His hope was anchored in his profound and personal belief in God, his conviction that no matter how perilous and deadly the forces we turn against each other, some part of us will always be connected to something that utterly transcends both our failures and our suffering.
But Heschel's prophetic hope was also anchored in his certainty that everything we know is a work in progress, and the endpoint is far beyond our sight. Our world, our being, the universe and the Divine Itself are all still in process. We are all an enormous unfinished task, all of us together, and the very fact that there is no final word spoken is an articulation of hope: as long as the experiment of life unfolds, the possibility for ultimate salvation remains.
The certainty that the divine/human enterprise is unfinished is the word of hope that can be spoken no matter what trauma or defeat may come our way. Resolution is still possible. Our vision is always partial, our understanding narrow and limited; so even in the face of all that evokes our tears, it is possible to stand in the realm of awe and wonder. As stated in a Hassidic teaching about suffering that Heschel often repeated, "He who stands on a normal rung weeps; he who stands higher is silent; but he who stands on the topmost rung converts his sorrow into song."
So -- what does any of this have to do with us? What does Heschel's prophetic call have to say to Unitarian Universalists today? There are some stark differences between our theological ground and Heschel's. His personal history and the deep sustenance he drew from his Hassidic heritage are foreign to us. Most of us don't have his fierce conviction about the existence of the Divine; we struggle with what we do and don't believe about God, we struggle even for the language to use when trying to express our spiritual beliefs. Most of us don't have Heschel's sense of intimate entanglement with the Divine. Nor do we rely on the Torah, or on any scripture to the degree that Heschel did.
But like Heschel, we have all been shaped by the traumas of the last century, and like him, we are unendingly troubled by the cruelties one part of this human family can visit on another part. Like him, we try to find some guidance for how we ought to live in the world and how we can raise our voices or take a stand toward healing. So the prophetic call to love, dissent, rebuke and hope is something that resonates for us, and we would do well to measure ourselves against them at least from time to time, looking to our faith and what it draws from us in our lives to see whether we're heeding the call as we ought to be.
But it seems to me that the broadest challenge of Heschel's voice to Unitarian Universalists is something a little simpler. We might summarize it this way: Recognize the seriousness with which you ought to take your religious commitments. Heschel wrote, "The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder or fear. Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us… "
Religion that is worth the name is supposed to be about the business of transformation. It's supposed to help us figure out how to be better human beings and how not to waste the extravagant gift of time on this sweet earth. This is the demand of the prophetic voice, for us and for all people: how seriously are we taking our lives?
This fundamental challenge, spoken with both love and fury, has been issued by every prophet in every language and every faith. Heschel said it this way: "Living is not a private affair of the individual. Living is what we do with God's time, what we do with God's world." Whether or not we choose his language, this passionate call to wake up is one I hope we can hear every day of our lives. AMEN.