Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Heschel This Week on Words of Prayer

It takes two things to make prayer come to pass:  a person and a word.

Words are not made of paper.  Words of prayer are repositories of the spirit.  It is only after we kindle a light in the words that we are able to behold the riches they contain.  It is only after we arrive within a word that we become aware of the riches our own souls contain.

To be able to pray is to know how to stand still and to dwell upon a word.  This is how some worshippers of the past would act:  "They would repeat the same word many times, because they loved and cherished it so much that they could not part from it."....  "Am I not the word 'Baruch' (blessed)? Hearken to me when you pronounce me.  Consider me when you utter me."

--from Man's Quest for God

Heschel This Week on Halacha and Aggada

Halacha (literally "walking") refers to Jewish law -- the rules.  Aggada (literally "telling", like the Pesach Haggada) refers to everything else in Judaism -- stories, theology, philosophy, all religious thinking.

Halakhah deals with details, with each commandment separately; agadah with the whole of life, with the totality of religious life.  Halakhah deals with the law; agadah with the meaning of the law.  Halakhah deals with subjects that can be expressed literally; agadah introduces us to a realm which lies beyond expression...Halakhah without agadah is dead; agadah without halakhah is wild.

The code of conduct is like the score to a musician.  Rules, principles, forms may be taught; insight, feeling, the sense of rhythm must come from within...[Yet] to reduce Judaism to inwardness, to agadah, is to blot out its light, to dissolve its essence and to destroy its reality.  Indeed, the surest way to forfeit agadah is to abolish halakhah.  They can survive only in symbiosis...It is impossible to decide in Judaism whether supremacy belongs to halakhah or to agadah, to the lawgiver or to the Psalmist.

Heschel This Week on Prayer and Living

Prayer must not be dissonant with the rest of living.  The mercifulness, the gentleness, which pervades us in moments of prayer is but a ruse or a bluff if it is inconsistent with the way we live at other moments. The divorce of liturgy and living, of prayer and practice, is more than a scandal; it is a disaster.  A word uttered in prayer is a promise, an earnest, a commitment.  If the promise is not kept, we are guilty of violating a promise.

A liturgical revival cannot come about in isolation.  Worship is the quintessence of living...Let the spirit of prayer dominate the world.  Let the spirit of prayer interfere in the affairs of man.  Prayer is private, a service of the heart; but let concern and compassion, born out of prayer, dominate public life.

-- "On Prayer" (1970)

Heschel This Week: Hitlahavut

The Baal Shem Tov thought of the Jew's relationship to God as a romance, and it disturbed him to see how many rituals had become routine rather than rapturous acts, exercises in repetition rather than gestures of surprise -- a hand without a heart.  Faith was fire, not sediment.  Did not a pillar of fire serve as a guide when the people Israel roamed in the wilderness?  And fire was the beginning of light.

One of his contributions was to awaken a zest for spiritual living, expressed in hitlahavut, which literally means "being aflame" -- the experience of moments during which the soul is ablaze with an insatiate craving for God, when the memory of all other interests and the fear of misery and persecution are forgotten...The Baal Shem thought that obedience without passion, comformity without spontaneity was but a skeleton, dry, meager, lifeless.  A Jew should serve God with ardor. It was necessary, vital, to have fire in the soul. 

--from A Passion for Truth

Heschel This Week: The Baal Shem Tov

Next week is the first week of Adar, the month of Purim and joy.  So here are some words from Heschel about the Baal Shem Tov, who restored simcha to the center of Judaism:

The Baal Shem Tov was the founder of the Hasidic movement, and Mezhbizh was the cradle in which a new understanding of Judaism was nurtured.  When millions of our people were still alive in Eastern Europe and their memory and faith vibrated with thought, image, and emotion, the mere mention of Reb Israel Baal Shem Tov cast a spell upon them. The moment one uttered his name, one felt as if his lips were blessed and his soul grew wings.

The Baal Shem Tov made being Jewish a bliss, a continuous adventure.  He gave every Jew a ladder to rise above himself...Rarely in Jewish history has one man succeeded in uplifting so many individuals to a level of greatness...The Baal Shem Tov brought about a radical shift in the religious outlook of Jewry.  In ancient times the sanctuary in Jerusalem had been the holy center from which expiation and blessing radiated out to the world.  But the sanctuary was in ruins, the soul of Israel in mourning.  Then the Baal Shem Tov established a new center:  the tzaddik, the rebbe -- he was to be the sanctuary.  For the Baal Shem Tov believed that a man could be the true dwelling place of the Divine.

When we listen to the Baal Shem, we hear words issuing without premeditation from an overflowing heart, like the strains from the harp hanging over David's bed...The Baal Shem Tov was the Song of Songs of his time, intoxicated with the love of God.

--from A Passion for Truth (1973)

Heschel This Week on the Sinai Revelation

This week's selection from Heschel's God in Search of Man is keyed to Parashat Yitro and the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.  I'll post more passages in future weeks on Heschel's view of the Torah, or you can read a several page explanation I prepared for one of my classes here.  To subscribe to the weekly e-Heschel directly, send me a note.

Revelation does not happen when God is alone.  The two classical terms for the moment at Sinai are mattan torah and kabbalat torah, “the giving of the Torah” and “the acceptance of the Torah.”  It was both an event in the life of God and an event in the life of man. . . .  At Sinai God revealed His word, and Israel revealed the power to respond.  Without that power to respond, without the fact that there was a people willing to accept, to hear, the divine command, Sinai would have been impossible.  For Sinai consisted of both a divine proclamation and a human perception.  It was a moment in which God was not alone.

As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash... Thus the Bible is more than the word of God:  it is the word of God and man; a record of both revelation and response; the drama of convenant between God and man.

Heschel This Week on Wonder

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Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.  One attitude is alien to his spirit:  taking things for granted, regarding events as a natural course of things...He knows that there are laws that regulate the course of natural processes; he is aware of the regularity and 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 he would say, "This is the Lord's doing, it is marvelous in our eyes" (Me-et Adonai haytah zot, hi niflat b'aynaynu! -- Psalms 118:23 and Hallel).

Is wonder the same as curiosity?  To the prophet wonder is a form of thinking.  It is not the beginning of knowledge but an act that goes beyond knowledge; it does not come to an end when knowledge is acquired; it is an attitude that never ceases.  There is no answer in the world to man's radical amazement.

--from God in Search of Man

Heschel This Week on Shabbat

To receive a weekly quote from Heschel by e-mail, send a message to me with Heschel in the note or the subject.

The Sabbath as a day of abstaining from work is not a depreciation but an affirmation of labor, a divine exaltation of its dignity.  Thou shall abstain from labor on the seventh day is a sequel to the command:  Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work...The duty to work for six days is just as much a part of God's covenant with man as the duty to abstain from work on the seventh day.

In regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude--to have them and to be able to do without them.  On the Sabbath we live, 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 royal privilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day...The Sabbath itself is a sanctuary which we build, a sanctuary in time.

The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.

--From The Sabbath (1951)

Heschel This Week on Race and Justice

Twenty-seven people so far signed up in our congregation to receive a weekly quote from Heschel!  To subscribe to this by e-mail, send a note to me with "Heschel" as the subject or the text.

In honor of Martin Luther King Day:  From a speech on "Religion and Race" (1963)

Friends, at the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses.    Moses' words were, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let my people go" -- while Pharaoh retorted, "Who is the Lord that I should heed his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord. I will not let Israel go." The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began but is far from having been completed.

Humanity can thrive only when challenged, when called upon to answer new demands, to reach out for new heights.  Religion is a demand, God is a challenge, speaking to us in the language of human situations....Righteousness is not a trickle; it is God's power in the world, a torrent, an impetuous drive, full of grandeur and majesty.  In the eyes of the prophets, justice is more than an idea or a norm; justice is charged with the omnipotence of God.  What ought to be, shall be!

Introducing: Heschel Every Week

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory, was one of the great spiritual teachers in the Conservative movement in the 20th century.  He brought together Talmud, philosophy, and Chasidic thought.  He taught about the biblical prophets and marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'll put up a page on this site next week about him; in the meantime there is much to read and a terrific recent program to listen to from public radio's "Speaking of Faith."

From now until Shavuot, I'm trying something out -- a weekly e-mail with a short passage from the writings of Rabbi Heschel.  Here is first sample for everyone.  If you are interested in subscribing and getting a weekly "electronic Heschel', send me a note with "Heschel" as the subject or the message by clicking here and I'll add you to the list.

A person cannot see the beauty of life unless he remembers that the Finite (Sof) and the Infinite (Ein Sof) kiss each other; that the One who is enthroned on high is concerned with all below.  We live always at one with eternity.  Eternal life has been planted in our midst.  A family table is an altar in our house...And the most common acts that a person does are compared in their importance to things which are eternal.  Judaism teaches us to view any injustice--robbery or violence--or human oppression as a major tragedy, and to feel divine joy at bringing happiness to a mortal.  One who curses a human is insulting his Maker, and one who loves others gives pleasure to God.

Every human being is a kind of reminder of God, and all things are like traces of God's footprints in a barren desert.  Through all the things in the world it is possible to come close to the Source.  It is incumbent upon us, as Jews, to imitate the footprints, and remove the veil from God, who is masked in the costume of the world.

--from "Pikuach Neshama: To Save a Soul"