“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, boring, stifling, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes a relic instead of a living spring; when religion speaks only in the name of authority instead of with the voice of compassion, its message is meaningless.” Thus begins Abraham Joshua Heschel his book, “God in Search of Man.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was born in Poland to a Hasidic family. He was descended from a prominent line of rabbis, on both his father’s and mother’s sides. He was educated in the traditional Orthodox manner, for which he received the title of rabbi, Smicha. He later earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin and was ordained as a liberal rabbi at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he studied with Chanoch Albeck, Ismar Elbogen, and Leo Baeck.

In October 1938, he was arrested in Frankfurt by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. Six weeks before the German invasion, Heschel managed to reach London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of the Hebrew Union College. Unfortunately, his entire family perished in the Holocaust. Back in the United States, in 1940, he began teaching at the Reform seminary in Cincinnati and in 1946 accepted a position as professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, where he worked until his death.

In addition to writing a series of works that greatly influenced Jewish theology, Heschel was an activist in major social movements. He marched in Salem with Martin Luther King Jr., advocating for the rights of people of color. He said that walking with King, «it seemed as if his legs were praying.» He said that «racism is man’s gravest threat to man: the greatest hatred for the least reason.» He also actively opposed the Vietnam War. He represented the American Jewish community at the Second Vatican Council, where he successfully eliminated ancient discriminatory prayers and practices of the Catholic Church regarding the Jewish people. He argued that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth. For him, «the opposite of goodness was not evil, but indifference.»

In his book «The Sabbath,» Heschel distinguishes between the «kingdom of space» and the «kingdom of time.» He argues that in our daily lives, we first attend to what our eyes perceive, what our fingers touch. Reality is translated into objects that occupy space. Time, on the other hand, is not perceived by the eyes nor can it be touched by the fingers. Many religions believe their deity resides in space, in cathedrals, rivers, or mountains. In the realm of space, one has power over things, but in the realm of time, one is oneself. The highest goal of spiritual life is not the accumulation of things, but sacred moments. What God first designated as sacred was not a thing or a place, but a time: the Sabbath. Judaism, says Heschel, teaches us to appreciate the sanctity of time. For Heschel, Jewish cathedrals are palaces in time, not in space.

By Marcos Gojman:

Bibliography: Abraham Joshua Heschel: “God in Search of Man,” “The Sabbath,” and other sources.