22'22" Interview on Abraham Joshua Heschel

An excellent article! I will use it in teaching an adult class on religion and sacredness.

Dear Rabbi Kimelman,

Greetings from the Philippines on the last day of Hanukkah and a week before Christmas!!

I am a Catholic sister belonging to the Congregation of the Maryknoll Sisters who has been teaching Sacred Scripture in the Philippines (at seminaries and formation institutes) for the past forty-three years now. But I have also had several opportunities (via scholarship) to study at the Bat Kol Institute in Jerusalem – an institute dedicated to Christians studying the Bible (particularly the Torah) within its Jewish milieu using Jewish sources, and with a faculty that includes some very fine rabbis.

I first came upon your name through your articles, “Psalm 145: Theme, Structure, and Impact,” JBL 113/4 (1994) 37-58 and “The Seduction of Eve and Feminist Readings of the Garden of Eden” (downloaded from the internet in 1968). So when Sergiu Simmel was offering a free trial tele-webinar a few years ago, I and my students (some 40 in all) all repaired to our library to listen to your talk “The Seduction of Eve,” and later to download it. Since then my Torah/Pentateuch students listen to it every first semester. I also have your in memoriam article on Heschel “Our Teacher” as well as your of Heschel comparison with Rabbi Soleveitchik whose book On Repentance I have read (with some difficulty).

So I was delighted to be able to download the two forms of your article on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I do have a copy of the English translation of his Heavenly Torah and your article made me pick it up again and wish I had the time to just sit down and read it through. It is a very long book, however, and I have other responsibilities!

I have posted the Tikkun version of the article for my students and printed out the longer version for myself. I finished my first reading last evening. I found it extremely helpful in that it helps me to understand an article written in America several years ago by Susan Heschel which spoke of her father’s experience of difficulties in teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Your article provided an excellent background for understanding the “Maimonidean” vs. the “Nachmnanidean” (or Akiva vs Ismael) and Heschel’s ability to eschew the either/or for the both/and approach. Many thanks for this.

I have been “tempted” to order the entire set of your cds and workbooks from Our Learning Company but have not done so due to finances and the prohibitive cost of mailing to the Philippines. I am, after all, a missioner in the Philippines who lives off the donations of hardworking folks, so I do not have a large spending budget and have to think before I spend! Our modest library is also very poor and depends a great deal on my donations! However, I am thinking now that when I am in New York (at our center at Maryknoll) this coming May 2010 I will seriously consider ordering a set and carrying it back in my luggage to avoid postage costs. I do appreciate and use in my teaching the talk on the leadership of Abraham and Moses as well as the “Ten Genesis Surprises,” which were also FREE from Our Learning Company.

Most sincerely,

Sr. Helen

Thanks for asking my opinion. Unfortunately, I constantly have so much to read that even after reading the article thoroughly (which I did) it is easy for some of it to slip away from me as I consume additional articles on all kinds of subjects every day. I’m particularly susceptible to that now as I plan my retirement from Federation and am starting to put together some curricula for what I hope will be a second career teaching Jewish studies on the University level. Combine that reading load with a progressively enfeebled mind due to advancing age, and you get what can only be called “forgetfulness” or more charitably “absentmindedness”.

I suspect Reuven has aged better than I have (although I still remember him respectfully and fondly from the days when we were in Springfield together).

Nevertheless I do remember some of the major themes of the article. It was a great discussion of how we perceive God, with Rambam on one end and Heschel on the other (if I recall correctly).

We know, with Rambam, that God is transcendent, invisible, etc etc. Yet, is He quite “unknowable?” Not entirely, as He apparently wants us to know Him in certain ways. But the awe and respect and fear that we have for Him must not be diminished. I believe Pirkei Avot talks about this when it advises us to act appropriately not for any reward (but presumably out of love for God and His Torah) but then immediately applies a corrective if we slip from love to familiarity: “and let the fear of Heaven be upon you”. We dare not treat Him familiarly.

Similarly we cannot say “God needs us”. What chutzpah that would be! God by definition has no needs and I am certain that this statement is literally correct.

On the other hand, it is less chutzapadik if we point out: A king with 10 servants is important. A king with 1000 servants is magnificent. A king the number of whose servants is equivalent to the number of people in the world (or at least the number of Jews), is beyond description and we know in our gut that this is MAJOR. In some sense a king does need these servants and their praises in order to be really great. Perhaps there’s actually a difference between knowing it and saying it. Just as we should probably never say about our actions: “I am helping God.” The article does make a case for the logic of Heschel’s title “God in Search of Man”.

After all, when we feed His children, cure them, house them, give them a friendly word of encouragement – are we not “helping” Him, or at least participating in the tasks He does and that he wants our participation in? When we turn to him at midnight on our pillows and seek what we and the world need from Him, does that “help” Him? Does He “feel good” that we are turning to Him? I’m hesitant to even whisper the affirmative response that I believe is correct.

The more I think about it the more I think we should make a difference between what we do (and how we feel) and what we say. It’s a matter of courtesy, of appropriateness, of honor. Not to say that Heschel did anything wrong…just that we ordinary mortals should keep at our tasks and not boast, so to speak, that “I am helping God” or that “God needs me”. In fact God “searching for me” is a nice and gentle way to put what may be the true situation.

I’m embarrassed to send these ramblings but since you were kind enough to ask, here it is.

Charles R. Schiffman
Executive Vice-President
Jewish Federation of Greater Portland
6680 SW Capitol Highway
Portland, Oregon 97219

This exposition of Heschel's thought and his debate with scholars like Sholem is quite illuminating. I have been very appreciative of Heschel's Biblical work, Prophets above all, but I did not understand the connection with Jewish mysticism. And Heschel's effort to work out a "philosophy" of Judaism did not seem to fit either. Now I see the "big picture." Thank you for the piece.

You note Heschel's comment that a prophet is someone who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times. Yet in the Moral Meaning of the Bible, you contrast Abraham and Moses on the one hand with Elijah on the other. You say that whereas Elijah argues for God to the people, Abraham and Moses not only do that but are also able to argue for the people to God. This duality elevates Abraham and Moses and sets them apart from all other prophets in the Tanach. Yet, in Heschel's teaching, all the prophets hold God and man in one thought at one time, at all times. How do you reconcile these seemingly different views?

An interesting start.

Dear Sergiu,

This is an amazing and quite remarkable interview with Professor Kimelman.
It deals with some fundamentally important issues that we, as a species, can
only afford to ignore at our own great peril. Particularly at this moment
in history in which we are seeing emerging confrontations between
fundamentalist ideologies for whom the world can only be black and white.
Confrontations that appear to be leading us to a very dangerous place.
There is so much of deep significance to be learned here.
Thank you for sharing this with us.

Best wishes,

Gary

The concept of complementarity that stands at the heart of Heschel's work and his focus on a phenomenology of faith that takes as its starting point first person human experience fits quite
beautifully with other ideas that emerged in parallel contexts in the 20th century.

Perhaps the best known of these is the example from quantum mechanics of Bohr's Principle of
Complementarity which states effectively that the one who observes the phenomenon has no special advantage over the one who directly experiences the phenomenon. Meyer-Abich has pointed out that
this complementarity is entirely analogous to that between a holistic view of organismic function/behavior and the analytic approach of conventional biomedical science. I would also argue that there is a fundamental basis for complementarity in the structure of the human brain and how consciousness is thus embodied. We have two separate cerebral hemispheres that operate very differently and encompass two different modes of thinking. This has obvious and profound implications for epistemology. Including the way that we think about theology.

JA Scott Kelso offers yet another explanation for the centrality of complementarity which rests on the framework of dynamical systems theory and the concept of 'meta-stability'. (see his book: "Complementary Nature").

This is all so fascinating.

It raises an important way to think about the Oneness of G-d: as the One who transcends complementary aspects and who encompasses the Whole of being. The One who is both immanent and transcendent. Who both loves and Who distributes Justice.