Towards a "Structure" in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel

I. Above all, the Unity of God (The Shema)

A) God - beyond all dichotomies

B) God - in Whom both the fullness of Justice and the Fullness of Mercy

1) God against all injustice and fatalism
2) But "Will God not accept us in all our frailty and weakness?"

C) Through the Unity of God, the unity of God and human; The call "to hold God and the human in one thought at one time."

D) The Unity of God destroys the notion of religion or morality as compartments of life: The whole of life is in the purview of faith and ethics.

E) God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance,

II. Why is the relationship of the human to God crucial?

A) Because God is God.

B) Because the central human question is: "Who needs humanity?"

C) Because "a godless people is bound to become a satanic people."

III. How is the relationship with God entered and sustained?

A) Through the community:

1) A "Jew who abandons the people of Israel detaches herself from the God of Israel."

2) "He or she who goes their own way abandons the Jewish way."

B) Through words!...through learning!...through Torah!

1) The words must be words out of the depth, hallowed, words given by and in search for the Living God.

2) Learning, ultimately, is not unto comprehension, nor unto utility: Learning is unto reverence for God.

3) The study of Torah is involvement "in the dialogue of God and the human"; it is to sanctify time (find true freedom in time).

4) "Study is a form of worship."

5) "True learning is a way of relating oneself to something which is both holy and universal."

6) "Learning is life."

7) "The essential value of the intellectual experience is the experience itself."

8) Therefore, by implication, it is blasphemy and self-destruction to cut the mental life down to one's own size, down to the size of one's ego.

9) The "tragedy" of our generation is that we do "not know how to study."

C) Through personal life! for "there is no vicarious Judaism; "there is nothing in the universal that is not contained in the particular.",

1) Through willingness to suffer, and glory in ultimate questions!
2) Through personal, spiritual, intellectual, moral embarrassment!
3) Through willingness to enter the human depths,
4) Through perplexity and despair,
5) Through the sense of personal inadequacy,
6) Through the discovery one's indebtedness - indebtedness to others, and to God.
7) Through effrontery! audacity - through an overcoming of the bashfulness bred of fatalism (and, in turn, breeding that fatalism further),
8) Thus Heschel emphasizes an education, words, learning, a study of Torah which reaches the inner man or woman: The inner person must be saved!

D) Through action! personal and corporate:

1) "Thou art commanded, therefore thou canst."
2) "Human good deeds are single acts in the long drama of redemption, and every deed counts."
3) The sense for the ultimate preciousness of life comes through acts of justice and mercy
4) The just and merciful action "is wiser than the heart."
5) Actions expressing justice, mercy, humility may change one's motives, and bring one closer to faith,
6) But, of course, good action requires knowledge of the good required, knowledge about what to do; therefore, the person of faith:

a) Studies (above).
b) And Observes the commandments and teachings ever more thoroughly.

IV. What is the fundamental nature of faithful relationship to God? It is entrance into discovery that:

A) God is the answer to the central human question, Who needs humanity?

B) God is the crucial "problem" of human life (Much of the time persons ask, who wants to be needed?)

1) Not the problem of good and evil.
2) Not the problem of human needs,

a) Who knows his true needs?
b) Clarification of norms, ethical standards, and meeting the demands of these God-given and God-illuminated demands is the "problem," above clarifying and meeting our "needs."

C) God is the interrogator of the human - not the other way around: "Religion consists of God's question and the human's answer."

D) God challenged humanity to be fully human,

1) Human freedom only comes into view, and begins to be achieved when God's challenge is heard and grasped,

2) The world is unredeemed (i.e., the world remains in bondage to dehumanizing gods, ways, and structures): The task of the religious community and the religious person is to share in redeeming the world, or better, in preparing the world for God's redemption of it (i.e., in helping, or preparing, the world to become free from slavery to dehumanization and idolatry),

3) Full human dignity comes only through full recognition and acceptance of the fullness of human responsibility,

a) The deepest agony is the agony of spiritually stunted life.
b) "Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say No to oneself."

c) We are today being "pampered," spoiled: We have asked too little of humanity.

d) Trivialization of life, vulgarization of culture, and false worship of the self (p. 200), help destroy the capacity for responsibility and for self-discipline, and thus help destroy human dignity.

e) The need is for "audacity," "guts," "defiance."

f) Conformity to the American temper, in many of its manifestations, must be resisted for the sake of our humanity

E) The fundamental nature of faithful relationship to God thus also means that the community and person of faith are:

1) Deeply and painfully sensitized to the injustice and cruelty and absence of compassion in the world, and in themselves.

a) They are appalled and stunned by the human abdication of itself to evil inclination

b) They bear in themselves the frightful agony of human life.

c) The community and individual of faith recognize that they, too, share responsibility for the anguish of humanity.

i) A good conscience is demonic,
ii) Contrition and humility are merely acts of recognition of one's true life,

2) Yet they are moving from a life of suspicion to one, precisely, of faith,

3) And, ultimately, we are not taught to feel accused, to bear a sense of boundless guilt. We are asked to feel elated, bred to meet the tasks that never end.

"Every child is a prince; every man and woman is obliged to feel the world was created for their sake."


With thanks to Coleman Brown