shalom center - heschel theology

8/14/2019 Shalom Center - Heschel Theology

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HESCHEL'S THEOLOGY: ORGANIZED EXCERPTS

Selected and Arranged by Hershel J. Matt

Dear Chevra,

These excerpts from the theological writing of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschelwere selected by Rabbi Hershel Matt z'tz'l, who was a student of Rabbi Heschel'sin the 1940s at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Sources for the excerpts arepresented at the end.

These excerpts are being supplied by The Shalom Center as part of our effort toencourage continuing observance of the Yohrzeit of Rabbi Abraham JoshuaHeschel. Please see further information on the Council for the Heschel Yohrzeit.

A. PARADOX AND POLARITY

A necessary condition affecting human beliefs in philosophy and religion is theparadox. The source of their paradoxical character has its origin in the essentialpolarity of human being.

To ignore the paradox is to miss the truth.

Jewish thinking and living can only be adequately understood in terms of adialectic pattern, containing opposite or contrasted properties. As in a magnet, the

ends of which have opposite magnetic qualities, these terms are opposite to oneanother and exemplify a polarity which lies at the very heart of Judaism, thepolarity of ideas and events, of mitzvah and sin, of kavvanah and deed, of regularity and spontaneity, of uniformity and individuality, of halakhah andagadah, of law and inwardness, of love and fear, of understanding and obedience,of joy and discipline, of the good and the evil drive, of time and eternity, of thisworld and the world to come, of revelation and response, of insight and



information, of empathy and self-expression, of creed and faith, of the word andthat which is beyond words, of man's quest for God and God in search of man.Even God's relation to the world is characterized by the polarity of justice andmercy, providence and concealment, the promise of reward and the demand toserve Him for His sake. Taken abstractedly, all these terms seem to be mutually

exclusive, yet in actual rising they involve each other; the separation of the two isfatal to both.

Since each of the two principles moves in the opposite direction, equilibrium canonly be maintained if both are of equal force. But such a condition is rarelyattained. Polarity is an essential trait of all things. Tension, contrast, andcontradiction characterize all of reality.

However, there is a polarity in everything except God. For all tension ends in God.He is beyond all dichotomies.

B. THEOLOGY AND DEPTH THEOLOGY

Thus many issues of religious existence may be looked upon in two ways: fromthe perspective of depth theology and from the perspective of theology.

The theme of theology is the content of believing; the theme of depth theology isthe act of believing, its purpose being to explore the depth of faith, the

substratum out of which belief arises. It deals with acts which precede articulationand defy definition.

Theology speaks for the people; depth theology speaks for the individual.Theology strives for communication, for universality; depth theology strives forinsight, for uniqueness.

Theology is like sculpture, depth theology like music. Theology is in the books;depth theology is in the hearts. The former is doctrine, the latter an event.Theologies divide us; depth theology unites us.

Depth theology seeks to meet the person in moments in which the whole personis involved, in moments which are affected by all a person thinks, feels and acts. Itdraws upon that which happens to man in moments of confrontation withultimate reality. It is in such moments that decisive insights are born.



Why are dogmas necessary? We cannot be in rapport with the reality of the divineexcept for rare, fugitive moments. How can these moments be saved for the long hours of functional living, when the thoughts that feed like bees on the inscrutabledesert us, and we lose both the sight and the drive? Dogmas are like the amber inwhich bees, once alive, are embalmed, and which are capable of being electrified

when our minds become exposed to the power of the ineffable. For the problemswith which we must always grapple are: How to communicate those raremoments of insight to all hours of our life. How to commit intuition to concepts,the ineffable to words, communion to rational understand. How to convey ourinsights to others and to unite in a fellowship of faith. It is the creed that attemptsto answer these problems.

The insights of depth theology are vague; they often defy formulation andexpression. It is the task of theology to establish the doctrines, to bring aboutcoherence, and to find words compatible with the insights. On the other hand,theological doctrines tend to move on their own momentum, to become asubstitute for insight, informative rather than evocative. We must see to it thateach has an independent status, a power and efficacy of its own which enables itto contribute something in the cooperation.

And yet man has often made a god out of a dogma, a graven image which heworshipped, to which he prayed. He would rather believe in dogmas than in God,serving them not for the sake of heaven but for the sake of a creed, the diminutiveof faith.

Dogmas are the poor mind's share in the divine. A creed is almost all a poor manhas. Skin for skin, he will give his life for all that he has. Yea, he may be ready totake other people's lives, if they refuse to share his tenets.

Depth theology may become an impasse, the catacomb of subjectivism. To be apassageway leading from man to man, from generation to generation, it must becrystallized and assume the form of a doctrine or principle. Theology is thecrystallization of the insights of depth theology.

However, crystallization may result in petrification. Indeed, the stability of thedogma or the institution has often taken precedence over the spontaneity of theperson.

The vitality of religion depends upon keeping alive the polarity of doctrine andinsight, of dogma and faith, of ritual and response, of institution and the individual.



C. WONDER AND RADICAL AMAZEMENT

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God

and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to thesublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man'sattitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking thingsfor granted, regarding events as a natural course of things. To find an approximatecause of a phenomenon is no answer to his ultimate wonder. He knows that thereare laws that regulate the course of natural processes; he is aware of the regularityand pattern of things. However, such knowledge fails to mitigate his sense of perpetual surprise at the fact that there are facts at all. Looking at the world hewould say, "This is the Lord's doing, it is marvelous in our eyes" (Psalms 118:23).

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information;but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in theunderstanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not awill to believe but a will to wonder.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does

with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is ouradjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder or radicalamazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore aprerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.

Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radicalamazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very actof seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed attheir ability to see.

The grandeur or mystery of being is not a particular puzzle to the mind, as, forexample, the cause of volcanic eruptions. We do not have to go to the end of reasoning to encounter it. Grandeur or mystery is something with which we areconfronted everywhere and at all times. Even the very act of thinking baffles ourthinking, just as every intelligible fact is, by virtue of its being a fact, drunk withbaffling aloofness. Does not mystery reign within reasoning, within perception,



within explanation? What formula could explain and solve the enigma of the veryfact of thinking?

D. MYSTERY

We cannot ignore the aspect of mystery if we want to be true to Jewish thinking.

We live on the fringe of reality and hardly know how to reach the core. What isour wisdom? What we take account of cannot be accounted for. We explore theways of being but do not know what, why or wherefore being is. Neither theworld nor our thinking or anxiety about the world are accounted for. Sensations,ideas are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Every sensation isanchored in mystery; every new thought is a signal we do not quite identify. Wemay succeed in solving many riddles; yet the mind itself remains a sphinx. Thesecret is at the core of the apparent; the known is but the obvious aspect of theunknown. No fact in the world is detached from universal context. Nothing hereis final. The mystery is not only beyond and away from us. We are involved in it.It is our destiny, and "the fate of the world depends upon the mystery."1

The mystery is an ontological category. What it stands for is to most people mostobviously given in the experience of exceptional events. However, it is adimension of all existence and may be experienced everywhere and at all times. Inusing the term mystery we do not mean any particular esoteric quality that may be

revealed to the initiated, but the essential mystery of being as being, the nature of being as God's creation out of nothing, and, therefore, something which standsbeyond the scope of human comprehension. We do not come upon it only at theclimax of thinking or in observing strange, extraordinary facts but in the startling fact that there are facts at all: being, the universe, the unfolding of time. We mayface it at every turn, in a grain of sand, in an atom, as well as in the stellar space.Everything holds the great secret. For it is the inescapable situation of all being tobe involved in the infinite mystery. We may continue to disregard the mystery,but we can neither deny nor escape it. The world is something we apprehend butcannot comprehend.

E. THE INEFFABLE

Yet, how would we know of the mystery of being if not through our sense of theineffable, and it is this sense that communicates to us the supremacy and grandeurof the ineffable together with the knowledge of its reality. Thus, we cannot deny



the superiority of the ineffable to our minds, although, for the same reason, wecannot prove it.

On the other hand, the fact of our being able to sense it and to be aware of itsexistence at all is a sure indication that the ineffable stands in some relationship to

the mind of man. We should, therefore, not label it as irrational, to be disregardedas the residue of knowledge, as dreary remains of speculation unworthy of ourattention. The ineffable is conceivable in spite of its being unknowable.

The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tinyfacts of reality alike. Some people sense this quality at distant intervals inextraordinary events; others sense it in the ordinary events, in every fold, in everynook; day after day, hour after hour. The sense of the ineffable is not an esotericfaculty but an ability with which all men are endowed; it is potentially as commonas sight or as the ability to form syllogisms. For just as man is endowed with theability to know certain aspects of reality, he is endowed with the ability to knowthat there is more than what he knows. His mind is concerned with the ineffableas well as with the expressible, and the awareness of his radical amazement is asuniversally valid as the principle of contradiction or the principle of sufficientreason.

Just as material things offer resistance to our spontaneous impulses, and it is thatfeeling of resistance that makes us believe that these things are real, not illusory, sodoes the ineffable offer resistance to our categories.

What the sense of the ineffable perceives is something objective which cannot beconceived by the mind nor captured by imagination or feeling, something realwhich, by its very essence, is beyond the reach of thought and feeling. What weare primarily aware of is not our self, our inner mood, but a transubjectivesituation, in regard to which our ability fails. Subjective is the manner, not thematter of our perception. What we perceive is objective in the sense of being independent of and corresponding to our perception. Our radical amazementresponds to the mystery, but does not produce it. You and I have not invented thegrandeur of the sky nor endowed man with the mystery of birth and death. We do

not create the ineffable, we encounter it.

Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. Mypower of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is notemptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot



utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.

F. BEYOND MYSTERY: MEANING

To the biblical man was given the understanding that beyond all mystery ismeaning. God is neither plain meaning nor just mystery. God is meaning thattranscends mystery, meaning that mystery alludes to, meaning that speaks throughmystery.

The mystery is not a synonym for the unknown, but rather a term for a meaning which stands in relation to God.

Being is a mystery, being is concealment, but there is meaning beyond the mystery.The meaning beyond the mystery seeks to come to expression. The destiny of human being is to articulate what is concealed. The divine seeks to be disclosed inthe human.

G. IMAGE AND DUST

It is the creation of man that opens a glimpse into the thought of God, into themeaning beyond the mystery.

"And God said: I will make man in my image (tselem), after My likeness(demuth).... And God created man in His image, in the image of God He createdhim" (Genesis I:26 f.).

These words, which are repeated in the opening words of the fifth chapter of Genesis--This book is the story of man.--When God created man, He made him inthe likeness (demuth) of God--contain, according to Jewish tradition, thefundamental statement about the nature and meaning of man.

There are two ways in which the Bible speaks of the creation of man. In the firstchapter of the Book of Genesis, which is devoted to the creation of the physicaluniverse, man is described as having been created in the image and likeness of God. In the second chapter, which tells us of the commandment not to eat of thefruit of the tree of knowledge, man is described as having been formed out of thedust of the earth. Together, image and dust express the polarity of the nature of man. He is formed of the most inferior stuff in the most superior image.



Man, then, is involved in a polarity of a divine image and worthless dust. He is aduality of mysterious grandeur and pompous aridity, a vision of God and amountain of dust. It is because of his being dust that his iniquities may be forgiven,and it is because of his being an image that his righteousness is expected.

H. HUMAN BEING AND BEING HUMAN

The sense of requiredness is as essential to being human as his capacity forreasoning.

The sense of requiredness is not an afterthought; it is given with being human; notadded to it but rooted in it.

What is involved in authentic living is not only an intuition of meaning but asensitivity to demand, not a purpose but an expectation. Sensitivity to demands isas inherent in being human as physiological functions are in human being.

A person is he of whom demands can be made, who has the capacity to respondto what is required, not only to satisfy his needs and desires. Only a human being issaid to be responsible. Responsibility is not something man imputes to himself; heis a self by virtue of his capacity for responsibility, and he would cease to be a self if he were to be deprived of responsibility.

This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me. Every human being has had a moment in which he sensed amysterious waiting for him. Meaning is found in responding to the demand,meaning is found in sensing the demand.

But to whom does man in his priceless and unbridled freedom owe anything?Where does the asking come from? To whom is he accountable?

Religion has been defined as a feeling of absolute dependence. We come closer to

an understanding of religion by defining one of its roots as a sense of personalindebtedness.

Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; itlives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. Itmeans having a task, being called. It experiences living as receiving, not only astaking. Its content is gratitude for a gift received.



God is not only a power we depend on, He is a God who demands. Religionbegins with the certainty that something is asked of us, that there are ends whichare in need of us.

Unlike all other values, moral and religious ends evoke in us a sense of obligation.Thus religious living consists in serving ends that are in need of us. Man is a divineneed, God is in need of man.

Do I exist as a human being? My answer is: I am commanded --therefore I am.There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awarenessof owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to reciprocate, toanswer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

I. THE MYSTERY OF SINAI: REVELATION

What happened on Sinai? The Bible tries to say it in two ways. What it says in oneis something words can hardly bear: "The Lord came down upon Mount Sinai"(Exodus 19:20). No sentence in the world has ever said more: He who is beyond,hidden and exalted above space and time was humbly here, for all of Israel tosense. But the Bible also speaks in another way: "I have talked to you from heaven"(Exodus 20:22). He did not descend upon the earth; all that happened was that His

word welled "from heaven." These passages do not contradict each other; theyrefer not to one but to two events. For revelation was both an event to God andan event to man. Indeed, in the second passage it is God who speaks (in the firstperson); the first passage conveys what the people experienced (it speaks of Godin the third person). The same act had two aspects. God did and did not descendupon the earth. The voice came out of heaven but man heard it out of Sinai.

The meaning of revelation is given to those who are mystery-minded, not to thosewho are literal-minded, and decisive is not the chronological but the theologicalfact; decisive is that which happened between God and the prophet rather than

that which happened between the prophet and the parchment. We accept theauthority of the Pentateuch not because it is Mosaic, but because Moses was aprophet.

The dogma of revelation in regard to the Pentateuch consists of two parts: thedivine inspiration and the Mosaic authorship. The first part refers to a mystery, thesecond to a historic fact. The first part can only be alluded to and expressed in



terms of grandeur and amazement; the second may be analyzed, examined, andconveyed in terms of chronological information.

Philosophy of religion must deal with the first part. Its concern is not whether thePentateuch was written down in its entirety during the forty years of Israel's

sojourn in the desert, but rather to understand the meaning and the validity of theclaim that the will of God reached the understanding of man, and that thePentateuch is a mirror of God's reaching man; the second part is the concern of theology which must define the dogma of revelation and offer an answer tohistorical questions.2

We must not try to read chapters in the bible dealing with the event at Sinai as if they were texts in systematic theology. Its intention is to celebrate the mystery, tointroduce us to it rather than to penetrate or to explain it. As a report aboutrevelation the Bible itself is a midrash.

The essence of our faith in the sanctity of the Bible is that its words contain thatwhich God wants us to know and to fulfill. How these words were written downis not the fundamental problem.

To convey what the prophets experienced, the Bible could use either terms of description or terms of indication. Any description of the act of revelation inempirical categories would have produced a caricature. This is why all the Bibledoes is to state that revelation happened; how it happened is something they could

only convey in words that are evocative and suggestive.

The same word may be used in either way. The sound is the same, but the spirit isdifferent. "And God said: Let there be light" is different in spirit from a statementsuch as "And Smith said: Let us turn on the light." The second statement conveys adefinite meaning; the first statement evokes an inner response to an ineffablemeaning. The statement, man speaks, describes a physiological and psychologicalact; the statement, God speaks, conveys a mystery. It calls upon our sense of wonder and amazement to respond to a mystery that surpasses our power of comprehension.

Are the words of Scripture coextensive and identical with the words of God?

In the eyes of those who experience daily their inability to grasp fully the meaning of a Scriptural verse, such a question represents an attempt to compare the hardlyknown with the totally unknown.



Granted that the text of Scripture as handed down to us consists of gems of Godand diamonds quarried out of prophetic souls, all set in a human frame. Yet whoshall presume to be an expert in discerning what is divine and what is but "a littlelower" than divine? What is the spirit of God and what the phrase of Amos? Thespirit of God is set in the language of man, and who shall judge what is content

and what is frame? This is why the theme of Biblical criticism is not the theme of faith, just as the question of whether the lightning and thunder at Sinai were anatural phenomenon or not is irrelevant to our faith in revelation. The assumptionof some commentators that the Decalogue was given on a rainy day does notaffect our conception of the event.3

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact,phrased in the language of man.

J . PATHOS AND PROPHECY

Prophecy consists in the inspired communication of divine attitudes to theprophetic consciousness. The divine pathos is the ground-tone of all theseattitudes. Echoed in almost every prophetic statement, pathos is the centralcategory of the prophetic understanding of God.

To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in aspecific and unique way--in a personal and intimate revelation to the world. God

does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affectedby what happens in the world and he reacts accordingly. Events and humanactions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath. He is not conceived as

judging facts, so to speak, "objectively," in detached impassibility. He reacts in anintimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events. Quiteobviously in the Biblical view, man's deeds can move Him, affect Him, grieveHim, or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him. This notion that God can beintimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but alsofeeling and pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.

The idea of pathos is both a paradox and a mystery. He Who created All shouldbe affected by what a tiny particle of His creation does or fails to do? Pathos isboth a disclosure of His concern and a concealment of His power. The humanmind may be inclined to associate the idea of God with absolute majesty, withunmitigated grandeur, with omnipotence and perfection. God is most commonlythought of as a First Cause that started the world's mechanism working, andwhich continues to function according to its own inherent laws and processes. It



seems inconceivable that the Supreme Being should be involved in the affairs of human existence.

This divine pathos is the key to inspired prophecy. God is involved in the life of man. A personal relationship binds Him to Israel; there is an interweaving of the

divine in the affairs of the nation. The divine commandments are not mererecommendations for man, but express divine concern, which, realized orrepudiated, is of personal importance to Him. The reaction of the divine self (Amos 6:8; Jer. 5:9; 51:14), its manifestations in the form of love, mercy,disappointment or anger convey the profound intensity of the divine inwardness.

Pathos is not, however, to be understood as mere feeling. Pathos is an act formedwith intention, depending on free will, the result of decision and determination.The divine pathos is the theme of the prophetic mission. The aim of the prophetis to reorient the people by communicating to them the divine pathos which, byimpelling the people to "return," is itself transformed. Even "in the moment of anger" (Jeremiah 18:7), what God intends is not that His anger should be executed,but that it should be appeased and annulled by the people's repentance.

To the prophets, the divine pathos is not an absolute force which exists regardlessof man, something ultimate or eternal. It is rather a reaction to human history, anattitude called forth by man's conduct; an effect, not a cause. Man is in a sense anagent, not only the recipient. It is within his power to deserve either the pathos of love or the pathos of anger.

God's concern for justice grows out of His compassion for man. The prophets donot speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle or idea, called justice.They are intoxicated with the awareness of God's relationship to His people andto all men.

Justice is not important for its own sake; the validity of justice and the motivationfor its exercise lie in the blessings it brings to man. For justice, as stated above, isnot an abstraction, a value. Justice exists in relation to a person, and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken,

but because a person has been hurt. What is the image of a person? A person is abeing whose anguish may reach the heart of God.

The task of the prophet is to convey the word of God. Yet the word is aglow withthe pathos. One cannot understand the word without sensing the pathos. And onecould not impassion others and remain unstirred. The prophet should not beregarded as an ambassador who must be dispassionate in order to be effective.



An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental experience of theprophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divinepathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about throughthe prophet's reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos. The typical

prophetic state of mind is one of being taken up into the heart of the divinepathos. Sympathy is the prophet's answer to inspiration, the correlative torevelation.

Prophetic sympathy is a response to transcendent sensibility. It is not, like love, anattraction to the divine Being, but the assimilation of the prophet s emotional lifeto the divine, an assimilation of function, not of being. The emotional experienceof the prophet becomes the focal point for the prophet's understanding of God.He lives not only his personal life, but also the life of God. The prophet hearsGod's voice and feels His heart. He tries to impart the pathos of the messagetogether with its logos. As an imparter his soul overflows, speaking as he does outof the fullness of his sympathy.

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty,but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measureconditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual's crime disclosessociety's corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering,uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concernedfor God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common.

The prophet is not only a censurer and accuser, but also a defender and consoler.Indeed, the attitude he takes to the tension that obtains between God and thepeople is characterized by a dichotomy. In the presence of God he takes the partof the people. In the presence of the people he takes the part of God.

Is it proper to apply the term "personal" to God? We have suggested that theoutstanding feature of a person is his ability to transcend himself, his attentivenessto the nonself. To be a person is to have a concern for the nonself. It is in thislimited sense that we speak of God as a personal Being: He has concern for

nondivine being.

He is always felt as He Who feels, thought of as He Who thinks, never as object,always as a Being Who wills and acts.

He is encountered not as universal, general, pure Being, but always in a particularmode of being, as personal God to a personal man, in a specific pathos that comes



with a demand in a concrete situation. Prophetic thought is not focused upon Hisabsoluteness, as indeterminate being, but upon His "subjective" being, upon Hisexpression, pathos, and relationship. The dichotomy of transcendence andimmanence is an oversimplification. For God remains transcendent in Hisimmanence, and related in His transcendence.

K. FACING EVIL

Many modern theologians have consistently maintained that the Bible stands foroptimism, that pessimism is alien to its spirit! There is, however, very littleevidence to support such a view. With the exception of the first chapter of theBook of Genesis, the rest of the Bible does not cease to refer to the sorrow, sins,and evils of this world.

There is one line that expresses the mood of the Jewish man throughout the ages:"The earth is given into the hand of the wicked (Job 9:24).6

How does the world look in the eyes of God? Are we ever told that the Lord sawthat the righteousness of man was great in the earth, and that He was glad to havemade man on the earth? The general tone of the biblical view of history is set afterthe first ten generations: "The Lord saw how great was man's wickedness on earth,and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And theLord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened"

(Genesis 6:5-6; cf.8:21). One great cry resounds throughout the Bible: Thewickedness of man is great on the earth.

More frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty, and tempting is the fact thatit thrives so well in the disguise of the good, and that it can draw its nutrimentfrom the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do notexist apart but are mixed, interrelated, and confounded; it is a world where idolsare at home, and where even the worship of God may be alloyed with theworship of idols.

The ambiguity of human virtue has been a central issue in the lives of many Jewish thinkers, particularly in the history of Hasidism.

"God asks for the heart."81 Yet our greatest failure is in the heart. "The heart isdeceitful above all things, it is exceedingly weak--who can know it?" (Jeremiah17:9). The regard for the ego permeates all our thinking. Is it ever possible todisentangle oneself from the intricate plexus of self-interests? Indeed, the demand



to serve God in purity, selflessly, "for His sake," on the one hand, and therealization of our inability to detach ourselves from vested interests, represent thetragic tension in the life of piety.82 In this sense, not only our evil deeds, but evenour good deeds precipitate a problem.

What is our situation in trying to carry out the will of God? In addition to ourbeing uncertain of whether our motivation--prior to the act--is pure, we arecontinually embarrassed during the act with "alien thoughts" which taint ourconsciousness with selfish intentions. And even following the act there is thedanger of self-righteousness, vanity, and the sense of superiority, derived fromwhat are supposed to be acts of dedication to God.

In the face of so much evil and suffering, of countless examples of failure to liveup to the will of God, in a world where His will is defied, where His kingship isdenied, who can fail to see the discrepancy between the world and the will of God?

And yet, just because of the realization of the power of evil, life in this worldassumed unique significance and worth. Evil is not only a threat; it is also achallenge. It is precisely because of the task of fighting evil that life in this world isso preciously significant.

All of history is a sphere where good is mixed with evil. The supreme task of man,his share in redeeming the work of creation, consists in an effort to separate good

from evil and evil from good.

This is what the prophets discovered: History is a nightmare. There are morescandals, more acts of corruption, than are dreamed of in philosophy. It would beblasphemous to believe that what we witness is the end of God's creation. It is anact of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final. Others may besatisfied with improvement; the prophets insist upon redemption. The way manacts is a disgrace, and it must not go on forever.

The climax of our hopes is the establishment of the kingship of God, and a passion

for its realization must permeate all our thoughts. For the ultimate concern of the Jew is not personal salvation but universal redemption. Redemption is not anevent that will take place all at once at "the end of days" but a process that goes onall the time. Man's good deeds are single acts in the long drama of redemption, andevery deed counts. One must live as if the I redemption of all men depended uponthe devotion of one's own I life.



At the end of days, evil will be conquered by the One; in historic times evils mustbe conquered one by one.

L. HALACHAH AND AGADAH

To maintain that the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of halacha is aserroneous as to maintain that the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of agada.The interrelationship of halacha and agada is the very heart of Judaism.4

Halacha represents the strength to shape one's life according to a fixed pattern; itis a form-giving force. Agada is the expression of man's ceaseless striving whichoften defies all limitations. Halacha is the rationalization and schematization of living; it defines, specifies, sets measure and limit, placing life into an exact system.Agada deals with man's ineffable relations to God, to other men, and to the world.Halacha deals with details, with each commandment separately; agada with thewhole of life, with the totality of religious life. Halacha deals with the law; agadawith the meaning of the law. Halacha deals with subjects that can be expressedliterally; agada introduces us to a realm which lies beyond the range of expression.Halacha teaches us how to perform common acts; agada tells us how to participatein the eternal drama. Halacha gives us knowledge; agada gives us aspiration.

Halacha gives us the norms for action; agada, the vision of the ends of living.Halacha prescribes, agada suggests; halacha decrees, agada inspires; halacha is

definite; agada is allusive.

Halacha thinks in the category of quantity; agada is the category of quality. Agadamaintains that he who saves one human life is as if he had saved all mankind. Inthe eyes of him whose first category is the category of quantity, one man is lessthan two men, but in the eyes of God one life is worth as much as all of life.Halacha speaks of the estimable and measurable dimensions of our deeds,informing us how much we must perform in order to fulfill our duty, about thesize, capacity, or content of the doer and the deed. Agada deals with theimmeasurable, inward aspect of living, telling us how we must think and feel; how

rather than how much we must do to fulfill our duty; the manner, not only thecontent, is important. To halacha the quantity decides; agada, for which quality isthe ultimate standard, is not dazzled by either the number or the magnitude of good deeds but stresses the spirit, kavanah, dedication, purity. Agada thereforelooks for inwardness rather than for the outer garments.To reduce Judaism to law, to halacha, is to dim its light, to pervert its essence andto kill its spirit. We have a legacy of agada together with a system of halacha, and



although, because of a variety of reasons, that legacy was frequently overlookedand agada became subservient to halacha, halacha is ultimately dependent uponagada. Halacha, the rationalization of living, is not only forced to employ elementswhich are themselves unreasoned; its ultimate authority depends upon agada. Forwhat is the basis of halacha? The statement "Moses received the Torah from

Sinai." Yet this statement does not express a halachic idea. For halacha deals withwhat man ought to do, with that which man can translate into action, with thingswhich are definite and concrete, and anything that lies beyond man's scope is notan object of halacha. The event at Sinai, the mystery of revelation, belongs to thesphere of agada. Thus while the content of halacha is subject to its own reasoning,its authority is derived from agada.

Halacha does not deal with the ultimate level of existence. The law does notcreate in us the motivation to love and to fear God, nor is it capable of endowing us with the power to overcome evil and to resist its temptations, nor with theloyalty to fulfill its precepts. It supplies the weapons, it points the way; thefighting is left to the soul of man.

The code of conduct is like the score to a musician. Rules, principles, forms maybe taught; insight, feeling, the sense of rhythm must come from within.Ultimately, then, the goal of religious life is quality rather than quantity, not onlywhat is done, but how it is done.

To reduce Judaism to inwardness, to agada, is to blot out its light, to dissolve its

essence and to destroy its reality. Indeed, the surest way to forfeit agada is toabolish halacha. They can only survive in symbiosis. Without halacha agada losesits substance, its character, its source of inspiration, its security against becoming secularized.

There is no halacha without agada, and no agada without halacha. We mustneither disparage the body, nor sacrifice the spirit. The body is the discipline, thepattern, the law; the spirit is inner devotion, spontaneity, freedom. The bodywithout the spirit is a corpse; the spirit without the body is a ghost. Thus amitsvah is both a discipline and an inspiration, an act of obedience and an

experience of joy, a yoke and a prerogative. Our task is to learn how to maintain aharmony between the demands of halacha and the spirit of agada.

It is impossible to decide whether in Judaism supremacy belongs to halacha or toagada, to the lawgiver or to the Psalmist.



M. POLARITY OF PRAYER

1. Keva and Kavanah

There is a specific difficulty of Jewish prayer. There are laws: how to pray, when

to pray, what to pray. There are fixed times, fixed ways, fixed texts.22 0n theother hand, prayer is worship of the heart, the outpouring of the soul, a matter of kavanah (inner devotion). Thus, Jewish prayer is guided by two oppositeprinciples: order and outburst, regularity and spontaneity, uniformity andindividuality, law and freedom,23 a duty and a prerogative,24 empathy and self-expression, insight and sensitivity, creed and faith, the word and that which isbeyond words.25 These principles are the two poles about which Jewish prayerrevolves. Since each of the two moves in the opposite direction, equilibrium canonly be maintained if both are of equal force. However, the pole of regularityusually proves to be stronger than the pole of spontaneity, and, as a result, there isa perpetual danger of prayer becoming a mere habit, a mechanical performance, anexercise in repetitiousness. The fixed pattern and regularity of our services tendsto stifle the spontaneity of devotion. Our great problem, therefore, is how not tolet the principle of regularity impair the power of spontaneity (kavanah). It is aproblem that concerns not only prayer but the whole sphere of Jewish observance.He who is not aware of this central difficulty is a simpleton; he who offers asimple solution is a quack.

In regard to most aspects of observance, Jewish tradition has for pedagogic reasons

given primacy to the principle of keva; there are many rituals concerning whichthe law maintains that if a person has performed them without proper kavanah,he is to be regarded ex post facto as having fulfilled his duty. In prayer, however,halacha insists upon the primacy of inwardness, of kavanah over the externalperformance, at least, theoretically.26 Thus, Maimonides declares: "Prayer withoutkavanah is no prayer at all. He who has prayed without kavanah ought to prayonce more. He whose thoughts are wandering or occupied with other things neednot pray until he has recovered his mental composure. Hence, on returning from a

journey, or if one is weary or distressed, it is forbidden to pray until his mind iscomposed. The sages said that upon returning from a journey, one should wait

three days until he is rested and his mind is calm, then he prays."27

Prayer is not a service of the lips; it is worship of the heart. "Words are The body,thought is the soul, of prayer." If one's mind is occupied with alien thoughts, whilethe tongue moves on, then such prayer is like a body without a soul, like a shellwithout a kernel.



And so it is with words of prayer when the heart is absent. Prayer becomes trivialwhen ceasing to be an act in the soul. The essence of prayer is agada, inwardness.Yet it would be a tragic failure not to appreciate what the spirit of halacha doesfor it, raising it from the level of an individual act to that of an eternal intercoursebetween the people Israel and God; from the level of an occasional experience to

that of a permanent covenant. It is through halacha that we belong to God notoccasionally, intermittently, but essentially, continually. Regularity of prayer is anexpression of my belonging to an order, to the covenant between God and Israel,which remains valid regardless of whether I am conscious of it or not.

How grateful I am to God that there is a duty to worship, a law to remind mydistraught mind that it is time to think of God, time to disregard my ego for atleast a moment! It is such happiness to belong to an order of the divine will. I amnot always in a mood to pray. I do not always have the vision and the strength tosay a word in the presence of God. But when I am weak, it is the law that givesme strength; when my vision is dim, it is duty that gives me insight.32

In reality, however, the element of regularity has often gained the upper hand overthe element of spontaneity. Prayer has become lip service, an obligation to bedischarged, something to get over with. "This people draw near, with their mouthand with their lips do honor Me, but have removed their heart far from Me andtheir fear of Me is a commandment of Me learned by rote."30

And yet the polarity exists and is a source of constant anxiety and occasional

tension. How are we to maintain the reciprocity of tradition and freedom; how toretain both Keva and Kavanah, regularity and spontaneity, without upsetting theone or stifling the other?

2. Alone or Together

The thirst for companionship, which drives us so often into error and adventure,indicates the intense loneliness from which we suffer. We are alone even with ourfriends. The smattering of understanding which a human being has to offer is notenough to satisfy our need of sympathy. Human eyes can see the foam, but not the

seething at the bottom. In the hour of greatest agony we are alone. It is such asense of solitude which prompts the heart to seek the companionship of God. Healone perceives the motives of our actions; He alone can be truly trusted. Prayer isconfidence, unbosoming oneself to God. For man is incapable of being alone. Hisincurable, inconsolable loneliness forces him to look for things yet unattained, forpeople yet unknown. He often runs after a sop, but soon retires discontented fromall false or feeble companionship. Prayer may follow such retirement.



We have stressed the fact that prayer is an event that begins in the individual soul.We have not dwelled upon how much our ability to pray depends upon our being a part of a community of prayer.

It is not safe to pray alone. Tradition insists that we pray with, and as a part of, thecommunity; that public worship is preferable to private worship. Here we arefaced with an aspect of the polarity of prayer. There is a permanent unionbetween individual worship and community worship, each of which depends forits existence upon the other. To ignore their spiritual symbiosis will prove fatal toboth.

How can we forget that our ability to pray we owe to the community and totradition? We have learned how to pray by listening to the voice of prayer, byhaving been a part of a community of men standing before God. We are oftencarried toward prayer by the reader: when we hear how he asks questions, how heimplores, cries, humbles himself, sings.

Those who cherish genuine prayer, yet feel driven away from the houses of worship because of the sterility of public worship today, seem to believe thatprivate prayer is the only way. Yet, the truth is that private prayer will not surviveunless it is inspired by public prayer. The way of the recluse, the exclusiveconcern with personal salvation, piety in isolation from the community is an act of impiety.

Judaism is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances, butprimarily living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people, the living in the Jewsof the past and with the Jews of the present. Judaism is not only a certain qualityin the souls of The individuals, but primarily the existence of the community of Israel. It is not a doctrine, an idea, a faith, but the covenant between God and thepeople. Our share in holiness we acquire by living in the Jewish community. Whatwe do as individuals is a trivial episode; what we attain as Israel causes us tobecome a part of eternity.

The Jew does not stand alone before God; it is as a member of the communitythat he stands before God. Our relationship to him is not as an I to a Thou, but asa We to a Thou.31

We never pray as individuals, set apart from the rest of the world. The liturgy isan order which we can enter only as a part of the Community of Israel.



Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space,becomes our sole concern.

Our intention here is not to deprecate the world of space. To disparage space andthe blessing of things of space, is to disparage the works of creation, the works

which God beheld and saw "it was good." The world cannot be seen exclusivelysub specie temporis. Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of themis to be partially blind. What we plead against is man's unconditional surrender tospace, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing thatlends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.

The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in thedimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than tocountries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. Tounderstand the teaching of the Bible one must accept its premise that time has ameaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significanceand sovereignty of its own.

The solution of mankind's most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.

In regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one properattitude--to have them and to be able to do without them. On the Sabbath welive, as it were, independent of technical civilization: we abstain primarily from

any activity that aims at remaking or reshaping the things of space. Man's royalprivilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day.

What are the kinds of labor not to be done on the Sabbath? They are, according tothe ancient rabbis, all those acts which were necessary for the construction andfurnishing of the Sanctuary in the desert. The Sabbath itself is a sanctuary whichwe build, a sanctuary in time.

It is one thing to race or be driven by the vicissitudes that menace life, and anotherthing to stand still and to embrace the presence of an eternal moment.

The seventh day is the armistice in man's cruel struggle for existence, a truce in allconflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peacewithin man; a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on whichman avows his independence of that which is the world's chief idol. The seventhday is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, theinstallation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.



In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where manmay enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity. The island is the seventh day, theSabbath, a day of detachment from things, instruments and practical affairs as wellas of attachment to the spirit.

This is what the ancient rabbis felt: the Sabbath demands all of man's attention,the service and single-minded devotion of total love. The logic of such aconception compelled them to enlarge constantly the system of laws and rules of observance. They sought to ennoble human nature and make it worthy of being inthe presence of the royal day.

Yet law and love, discipline and delight, were not always fused. In their illustriousfear of desecrating the spirit of the day, the ancient rabbis established a level of observance which is within the reach of exalted souls but not infrequently beyondthe grasp of ordinary men.

The glorification of the day, the insistence upon strict observance, did not,however, lead the rabbis to a deification of the law. "The Sabbath is given untoyou, not you unto the Sabbath."9 The ancient rabbis knew that excessive pietymay endanger the fulfillment of the essence of the law.10 "There is nothing moreimportant, according to the Torah, than to preserve human life . . . Even whenthere is the slightest possibility that a life may be at stake one may disregard everyprohibition of the law."11 One must sacrifice mitzvot for the sake of man rather

than sacrifice man "for the sake of mitzvot." The purpose of the Torah is "to bring life to Israel, in this world and in the world to come."12

Call the Sabbath a delight:14 a delight to the soul and a delight to the body. Sincethere are so many acts which one must abstain from doing on the seventh day,"you might think I have given you the Sabbath for your displeasure; I have surelygiven you the Sabbath for your pleasure.'' To sanctify the seventh day does notmean: Thou shalt mortify thyself, but, on the contrary: Thou shalt sanctify it withall thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy senses. "Sanctify the Sabbath bychoice meals, by beautiful garments; delight your soul with pleasure and I will

reward you for this very pleasure."15

Unlike the Day of Atonement, the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively tospiritual goals. It is a day of the soul as well as of the body; comfort and pleasureare an integral part of the Sabbath observance. Man in his entirety, all his facultiesmust share its blessing.



According to the Talmud, the Sabbath is me'en 'olam ha-ba, which means:somewhat like eternity or the world to come.

The Sabbath as experienced by man cannot survive in exile, a lonely strangeramong days of profanity. It needs the companionship of all other days. All days of

the week must be spiritually consistent with the Day of Days. All our life shouldbe a pilgrimage to the seventh day; the thought and appreciation of what this daymay bring to us should be ever present in our minds. For the Sabbath is thecounterpoint of living; the melody sustained throughout all agitations andvicissitudes which menace our conscience; our awareness of God's presence in theworld.

Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unlessone is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy thetaste of eternity in the world to come. Sad is the lot of him who arrivesinexperienced and when led to heaven has no power to perceive the beauty of theSabbath....

While Jewish tradition offers us no definition of the concept of eternity, it tells ushow to experience the taste of eternity or eternal life within time. Eternal life doesnot grow away from us; it is "planted within us," growing beyond us. The world tocome is therefore not only a posthumous condition, dawning upon the soul on themorrow after its departure from the body. The essence of the world to come isSabbath eternal, and the seventh day is an example of eternity.

*****************************

SOURCES

Sources for the passages included in this set of excerpts are as follows: (See keybelow)

A. PARADOX AND POLARITY Israel: 9, 10; Between: 178-Search 341;

Insecurity: 136B. THEOLOGY AND DEPTH THEOLOGY Insecurity: 117-121C. WONDER AND RADICAL AMAZEMENT Between: 40,41 - Search: 43,45,46D. MYSTERY Teaching: 13; Between: 44, 45; Search: 56-58E. THE INEFFABLE Between 46, 47 - Man 32, 15, 19, 20 Who: 87F. BEYOND MYSTERY: MEANING Who 76,77G. IMAGE AND DUST Insecurity: 156, 158, 150



H. HUMAN BEING AND BEING HUMAN: Who 106, 108, 111I. THE MYSTERY OF SINAI: REVELATION Search: 194, 185, 257, 258

J. PATHOS AND PROPHESY Between: 116, 117; Prophets: 232, 24, 216, 26, 486K. FACING EVIL Insecurity: 129, 130-35, 138, 146L. HALACHAH AND AGADAH Between 175 - Search 336; Search: selected

from 336-341M1. KEVA AND KAVANAH Quest 64-66; 68, 67 M2. ALONE ORTOGETHER Quest 17, 44-46M3. QUANTITY AND QUALITY Quest: 35N. SANCTUARY IN TIME Between: 229, 214, 216, 222, 219, 220, 226, 224 -Sabbath: 101, 3, 6, 28, 29, 17, 18, 19, 89, 74

KEY BETWEEN - Between God and Man (anthology of Heschel's writings ed.Fritz A. Rothschild)

INSECURITY - Insecurity of Freedom

ISRAEL - Israel: Echo of Eternity

MAN - Man is Not Alone

PROPHETS - The Prophets

QUEST - Man's Quest for God

SEARCH - God in Search of Man

TEACHING - Teaching Jewish Theology in the Solomon Schechter Day School

WHO - Who is Man?

The Shalom Center / web: http://www.shalomctr.org / email:[email protected]

mail: 6711 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA / tel: (215) 844-8494



O. MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY

The one symbol of God is humanity, every person…Human life is holy, holier even than the

Scrolls of the Torah….A person must therefore be treated with the honor due to a likeness

representing the King of Kings…Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for humanity.

The fear you must feel of offending or hurting a human being must be as ultimate as your fear of

God. An act of violence is an act of desecration. To be arrogant toward a person is to be

blasphemous toward God.

My first task in every encounter is to comprehend the personhood of the human being I face, to

sense the kinship of being human, solidarity of being. To meet a human being is a major

challenge to mind and heart. I must recall what I normally forget. A person is not just a specimen

of the species Homo sapiens. A person is all of humanity in one, and whenever one person is

hurt, we are all injured. The human is a disclosure of the divine, and all people are one in God's

care for us. Many things on earth are precious, some are holy; humanity is holy of holies.

P. GOD IN SEARCH OF MAN

The minds are sick. The hearts are mad. Humanity is drunk with a sense of absolute sovereignty.

Our pride is hurt by each other's arrogance. The dreadful predicament is not due to economic

conflicts. It is due to a spiritual paralysis.

This is an age of suspicion, when most of us seem to live by the rule: Suspect thy neighbor as

thyself. Such radical suspicion leads to despair of man's capacity to be free and to eventual

surrender to demonic forces, surrender to idols of power, to the monsters of self-righteous

ideologies.

What will save us is a revival of reverence for man, unmitigable indignation at acts of violence,

burning compassion for all who are deprived, the wisdom of the heart. Before inputing guilt to

others, let us examine our own failures.

Religion's task is to cultivate disgust for violence and lies, sensitivity to other people's suffering,

the love of peace. God has a stake in the life of every man. He never exposes humanity to achallenge without giving humanity the power to face the challenge. Different are the languages

of prayer, but the tears are the same. We have a vision in common of Him in whose compassion

all men's prayers meet.

In the words of the prophet Malachi, "From the rising of the sun to its setting My name is great

among the nations, in every place incense is offered to My name, and a pure offering; for My



name is great among the nations." It seems to me that the prophet proclaims that men all over the

world, though they confess different conceptions of God, are all really worshiping the One God,

the Father of all men, though they may not even be aware of it.

What will save us? God, and our faith in man's relevance to God. Respect for each other's

commitment, respect for each other's faith, is more than a political and social imperative. It is

born of the insight that God is greater than religion, that fait h is deeper than dogma.

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, dull, oppressive, 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 an heirloom rather

than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the

voice of compassion-its message becomes meaningless.

To quote from classic rabbinic literature: "Pious men of all nations have a share in the world to

come, and are promised the reward of eternal life. I call heaven and earth to witness that the Holy

Spirit rests upon each person, Jew or gentile, man or woman, master or slave, in consonance with

his deeds."

God's voice speaks in many languages, communicating itself in a diversity of intuitions. The

word of God never comes to an end. No word is God's last word.

Man's most precious thought is God, but God's most precious thought is man.

Q. MAN’S QUEST FOR GOD

I would say that the major religious problem today is the systematic liquidation of man's

sensitivity to the challenge of God.

Let me try to explain that. We cannot understand man in his own terms. Man is not to be

understood in the image of nature, in the image of an animal, or in the image of a machine. Hehas to be understood in terms of a transcendence, and that transcendence is not a passive thing; it

is a challenging transcendence. Man is always being challenged; a question is always being

asked of him. The moment man disavows the living transcendence, he is contracted; he is

reduced to a level on which his distinction as a human being gradually disappears. What makes a

man human is his openness to transcendence, which lifts him to a higher level than himself.

Overwhelmed by the power he has achieved, man now has the illusion of sovereignty; he has



become blind to his own situation, and deaf to the question being asked of him.

To destroy the illusion that man is his own center cannot be done easily. In order to understand,

and to cultivate an openness to transcendence, many prerequisites are necessary, prerequisites of

the mind and of the heart. However, our society, our education, all continue to corrode men's'

sensibilities. I am not optimistic; we are getting poorer by the day. To give you an example: Man

does not feel a sense of outrage anymore, even in the face of crime. We are getting used to it. We

are getting accustomed to evil. We are surrendering to that which we call inevitable. That is

fatalism; it is pagan. The message of the Bible is that man is capable of making a choice. Choose

life -- but instead we choose death, blindness, callousness, helplessness, despair.

Religion, if taught as religion, has no life. In order to understand what the Bible says, one has to

understand life as seen by the Bible, all of life. My understanding of the meaning of God

depends on my way of looking at this very table, at this very desk, at everything, at creation. The

tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated. God hasbecome an alibi for our conscience, for real faith. He has become a sort of afterlife insurance

policy.

Just as we are commanded to love man, we are also called upon to be sensitive to the grandeur of

God's creation. We are infatuated with our great technological achievements; we have forgotten

the mystery of being, of being alive. We have lost our sense of wonder, our sense of radical

amazement at sheer being.

We have forgotten the meaning of being human and the deep responsibility involved in just

being alive. Shakespeare's Hamlet said: "To be or not to be, that is the question." But that is noproblem. We all want to be. The real problem, biblically speaking, is how to be and how not to

be; that is our challenge, and it is what makes the difference between the human and the animal.

The animal also wants to be. For us, it is the problem of how to be and how not to be, on the

levels of existence. Now, what is the meaning of God? The meaning of God is precisely the

challenge of "how to be.”

R. QUOTES

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who

suffers no harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is

love and defiance of despair.

God is of no importance unless He is of utmost importance.



Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to

oneself.

Life without commitment is not worth living.

In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are

responsible.

Remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Be sure that every little deed counts, that

every word has power. Never forget that you can still do your share to redeem the world in spite

of all absurdities and frustrations and disappointments.

When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and

dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the

incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they

are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evidentas light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that

seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is

the servant of God.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.



In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have

begun striving for ourselves.

The course of life in unpredictable. No one can write his autobiography in advance.

All it takes is one person… and another… and another… and another… to start a movement.

Note:

Sources:

A – N: Selected and Arranged by Hershel J. Matt

O – R: Personal Selections

shalom center - heschel theology

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