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Heschel This Week -- Critiquing the Synagogue

Rabbi's Note:  You have noticed by now that Heschel is direct, perhaps even shrill.  He speaks always in contrasts -- the ideal, always coupled with the criticism in the same sentence or paragraph.  I have my own dialogue with Heschel, with his words and his tone.  Nodding and shaking my head, rephrasing or reframing for myself.... I'm holding that back in these posts, and giving you the most emblematic themes of Heschel without my response or interpretation.

The modern temple suffers from a severe cold.  Congregants preserve a respectful distance between the liturgy and themselves...We have developed the habit of praying by proxy...Either because of lack of faith or because of religious bashfulness.  We would not admit that we take prayer seriously.  It would sound sanctimonious, if not hypocritical.  We are too sophisticated.  But if prayer is as important as study, if prayer is as precious a deed as an act of charity, we must stop being embarrassed at our saying Praised be Thou with inner devotion.

Ours is a great responsibilty.  We demand that people come to worship instead of playing golf, or making money, or going on a picnic...People take their precious time off to attend services.  Some even arrive with profound expectations.  But what do they get?  What do they receive?

-- from Man's Quest for God

Heschel This Week on Freedom

Chag Sameach!

The meaning of freedom is not exhausted by deliberation, decision, and responsibility, although it must include all this....Free is he who has decided to act in agreement with the spirit beyond all necessities.

Freedom is a challenge and a burden against which man often rebels.  He is ready to abandon it, since it is full of contradiction and continually under attack.  Freedom can only endure as a vision, and loyalty to it is an act of faith.

There is no freedom without awe.  We must cultivate many moments of silence to bring about one moment of expression.  We must bear many burdens to have the strength to carry out one act of freedom...Freedom is an act of engagement of the self to the spirit, a spiritual event.  Loyalty to freedom means loyalty to the substance of freedom.  But such loyalty must be actualized again and again.

--"Religion in a Free Society" (1958)

Heschel This Week -- More on Prayer

...there is a wider voluntary entrance to prayer than sorrow and despair -- the opening of our thoughts to God.  We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him.  So we open our thoughts to Him -- feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts.  We see more than we can say.

Mindfullness of God rises slowly, a thought at a time. Suddenly we are there.  Or is He here, at the margin of our soul?  When we begin to feel a qualm of diffidence lest we hurt what is holy, lest we break what is whole, then we discover that He not austere.  Repentent of forgetting Him even for a while, we become sharers of gentle joy...

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