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March 23, 2007
Struggling with tenets of faith
Heschel, in his searches, represented the way many Jews examine
their spirituality.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Abraham Joshua Heschel is considered to be one of the towering
rabbinical figures of the 20th century. He was born 100 years ago
in Poland and received his doctoral degree in Berlin in 1933, the
year Hitler and the Nazis came to power.
Academic Judaism was then dominated by what had begun in Germany
during the 19th century, the so-called "higher criticism"
that subjected scripture to a historical and sociological analysis.
This was reflected among the Jews, especially in Germany, as the
"study of Jewish science."
Before the war, Heschel made his way from Poland to the safety of
the United States, where he taught at New York's Jewish Theological
Seminary. He wrote many books on Judaism, influencing its development
and thought. During the American civil rights struggle, Heschel
played an active and personal role, advocating and even demonstrating.
Heschel's life and thought highlight a division that has always
existed in all religions between observance and spirituality. A
failure to achieve a meaningful balance between the two leads, in
the case of exclusive or overstressed observance, to an "externalization"
of religion in which one's total obligation is to perform the mandated
commandments faithfully and punctiliously. This approach requires
knowledge of the "rules" and the discipline and circumstance
to carry them out. Its rationale is that it creates the framework
on which people, with all their temptations and distractions, constantly
remake their connection with God and with the Jewish people and
their history.
Under the impact of secularism, this form of religion is declining
significantly and it is almost impossible to carry out in isolation.
It imposes a discipline on one's life that offers opportunities
to continually re-orient one's thoughts and feelings from our many
needs and distractions and focus regularly, through deeds, on our
relationship with God.
Obviously, the purely esoteric expression of religion can decline
to a mechanical exactitude; a totally contractual aspect of our
covenantal relationship with God: I perform all the commandments
diligently and faithfully. God, therefore, must shield me from the
evils and vicissitudes of my life or, at least ultimately, reward
my immortal soul with His goodness and mercy.
The esoteric side of religion is emphasized a good deal today –
largely, perhaps primarily, because it makes so few demands. All
that is usually required is a period of meditation, the daily evacuation
of one's conscious concerns long enough to establish some non-intellectually
mediated relationship with the eternal other. Some have seen this
as a form of spiritual voluptuousness; a practice that demands little
and presumably offers much: from contentment to improvement of brain
wave patterns. On the other hand, some see it as a reflection of
a culture that avoids work and seeks sensual pleasures.
That, basically is what Heschel wrote about, and that fundamentally
is the central spiritual challenge we all face: the mystery that
is ultimately responsible for everything in our lives and in the
cosmos. We know it may entail "accidents." The Big Bang
may have been one of them, as are "black holes," which
suck in and destroy matter, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions,
disease, death and bodily corruption and, above all, the inconceivable
complexity of life and the inscrutability of its invariable and
ultimate demise.
Heschel, like most people, demanded answers: "Answer –
O God! – our never-ending yearning! Break your vaunted silence,
Master of all answers! Prisoners of a thousand years beg You: reveal
Yourself! Show us Your goodness, not Your cleverness, joy instead
of magic."
But there were no answers for Heschel, or for us. Even our greatest
efforts and achievements are invariably flawed, incomplete and ephemeral.
Nature consistently tantalizes science and then thwarts it. No matter
how much we know, or think we know, the infinitude of the universe
and all its contents means that no matter how much we remove from
the grasp of infinity, what remains is still just as infinite.
Heschel was strongly influenced by Chassidism, but Chassidism itself
was varied. The Bal Shem Tov looked around and concluded that things
were bad for the Jew and would likely get worse. His response: sing
and dance to a frenzy; let a niggun (a song without words) put its
arms around you and, as you sing, embrace you, squeeze you, until
with your exertion and its embrace, you can no longer sustain depression.
But not all Chassidic expression made Heschel joyous. "The
Bal Shem gave me wings," he said. "The Kotzker [the rebbe
of Kotzk, who was a skeptic] struck like lightning and encircled
me with chains." Heschel internalized this struggle, but he
never avoided it. He managed to escape the Holocaust, but it eradicated
the people, communities and halls of learning that he had known
and cherished.
The struggle to maintain their faith in the face of calamity was
nothing new for Jews. It was a constant and imposing burden. Religion
obviously affects people differently and in different ways at different
times. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who used a niggun to dispel his
gloom, was also called "the tormented" master. Heschel
read his teachings and later said that, in attempting to achieve
a higher level of spirituality, he avoided pleasures of any kind
for six months - even swallowing his food whole so that chewing
would not release its flavors.
For his entire life, Heschel knew that religion was a comfort for
many people and, at times, it was for him too. But more than anything
else, it was a struggle to which he often gave vent with his agonized
poetry. The basic mysteries of life, which he contemplated so deeply
and about which he had studied so painstakingly, evaded him, as
they have evaded everyone else and will, in spite of and, in some
ways, even because of, our increasingly greater understanding of
nature, continue to maintain their mystery.
When all the quests have exhausted themselves, as they invariably
must, only faith is left. That, in large measure, is the story of
the life of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He died, may his memory be blessed,
in faith, in New York City in 1972.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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