Abraham Joshua Heschel and a Life of Meaning

Abraham Joshua Heschel speaking at UCLA, May 25, 1963

I find it helpful in life to identify role models, people who inspire you to live with meaning and purpose, to act in ways worthy of praise and admiration, and who move you to be kinder, seek justice, and help in some small way to make the world a better place. Some of our role models are found close to home—a parent, a teacher, a coach, a minister or rabbi, a mentor. Others are less personal but equally important, people of history who opposed injustice, spoke out when others remained silent, and led exemplary lives filled with integrity and meaning. For me, one such person is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel was a rabbi, teacher, philosopher, writer, and social and political activist. He was a loving father and husband. And he was a man of spiritual faith, a Jewish theologian who wrote beautifully and convincingly, with eloquent and poetic ease, about humankind’s desperate need of purpose and connection, and of his belief in a living God who sought human partners to repair the world.

Born into a Polish Hasidic community in 1907, Heschel was an observant Jew who respected the mosaic of all faiths and lived experiences he encountered along the way. He was a seeker who asked, “How can I rationally find a way where ultimate meaning lies? Why am I here at all, and what is my purpose?” In the academy, many of his colleagues and professors found these questions unworthy of philosophical analysis. But to Heschel, these questions were essential to a life well lived.

Heschel combined his theological studies with a study of philosophy and poetry, literature and political theory, theater and music. As explained by the historian Julian E. Zelizer in Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale University Press, 2021), Heschel was “fascinated with the nexus between the secular and the sacred” and, although for him a belief in God “was at the center of understanding all human ethical and religious activity,” he appreciated secular culture and respected the many secular writers and thinkers who shared his desire to better the world.

As a theologian, Heschel embraced a degree of intuitive thinking even as he accepted the scientific rationalism of modern society. His belief that all human beings were created in the image of God and that every person had the capacity for holiness deeply influenced his sense of justice. And yet, historic realities would challenge that belief. As a university student in Berlin in the 1930s, Heschel witnessed the disintegration of the Weimar Republic as the Nazi Party rose to power. He witnessed first-hand the rise of Hitler and Germany’s acquiescence to the brutality of Nazism. He saw Jewish-owned stores forced to place yellow stars on their doors as part of a national boycott on Jewish businesses and professions. He watched as an autocratic government brutally and systematically suppressed the freedom of fellow Jews.

On October 28, 1938, the Nazis detained Heschel and placed him in a detention camp as the Gestapo raided Jewish homes to deport thousands of Polish Jews then living in Germany. Less than two weeks later, on the night of November 9, violent mobs organized by the Nazi Party wreaked havoc on Jewish life in Germany. In what came to be known as Kristallnacht (“the night of the broken glass”), German authorities did nothing as violent mobs set hundreds of synagogues on fire and vandalized thousands of Jewish-owned businesses. Mobs of Nazi paramilitaries broke into homes, smashed furniture, and terrorized Jewish families. Following orders given by Nazi leaders, police forces and fire brigades did nothing to stop the destruction.

Although an invitation in 1939 to teach at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, allowed Heschel to emigrate to the United States and escape the Holocaust, Heschel’s mother and other family members who remained in Europe were not so fortunate. Their tragic deaths at the hands of the Nazis would profoundly influence Heschel’s life’s work and mission. The passive silence of most German Christians during the Holocaust deeply troubled Heschel and caused him to focus more intensely on how human detachment from God and morality can have tragic consequences. This would become the foundation of Heschel’s social and political activism.

As Heschel learned more about the catastrophic destinies of European Jews, he became convinced that humankind’s silence in the face of evil made everyone complicit in the persecution and suffering of fellow human beings. In trying to understand a broken world, Heschel came to believe that humankind’s relationship with God had weakened and contributed to a spiritual crisis in modern society that revealed itself in the brutality of a world war, the Holocaust, and the development of weapons of mass destruction. Humanity became disconnected from morality and ethics.

As the reality of mass genocide and the Holocaust became widely known, it challenged deeply held beliefs and created an existential and spiritual crisis for many people of faith. How was it possible to believe in God after Auschwitz and Treblinka? Heschel never wavered in his belief in God, but these historic realities profoundly challenged his life’s work. How could Germany, which had been the center of scientific inquiry and cosmopolitan culture, so quickly transform from light into darkness? How could an otherwise enlightened civilization suddenly turn into such a morally depraved and brutal country? As Zelizer explains, “Heschel spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of this, wrestling with the question of whether and how Judaism—and all religion—could offer the key toward preventing this kind of mass injustice from rearing its head again.”

Heschel believed that societal indifference, more than anything, had allowed the evil of Hitler and Nazism to take root in German society. Advances in science, economics, and modern technology did not produce a peaceful world. Economic advancement and self-interest surpassed humanity’s need for lives filled with meaning and purpose. Heschel partly blamed religious leaders and institutions for the resulting spiritual crisis. In God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), Heschel wrote:

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.

God in Search of Man expanded upon Heschel’s thesis that God needed human partners to achieve a just world. But how are individuals and societies to deal with the problem of evil? The “essential predicament of man,” according to Heschel:

…has assumed a peculiar urgency in our time, living as we do in a civilization where factories were established in order to exterminate millions of men, women and children; where soap was made of human flesh. What have we done to make such crimes possible? What are we doing to make such crimes impossible?

To answer these questions, Heschel looked to the Hebrew Prophets, who embodied a relationship between God and humankind essential to a functioning moral universe, in which indifference to injustice was unacceptable. In The Prophets (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), Heschel argued that the Hebrew Prophets refused to be neutral when witnessing evil in the world. Societal indifference was the root of how something like the Holocaust could happen. To “remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people . . . is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.”

The Prophets became one of Heschel’s most influential books and impacted the thinking of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and fellow civil rights activists. It helped them to combine their theology with real-world activism. Heschel himself became more actively engaged in the affairs of humanity. In Selma in 1965, when Heschel locked arms with Ralph Bunche and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, with King close by and three thousand peaceful protestors behind them, they shared a feeling of interfaith solidarity. The progressive religious community was on the side of the protestors, leading a movement for justice and morality.

From left: John Lewis, unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Fred Shuttlesworth

Heschel’s religious beliefs influenced his understanding of social justice and his pursuit of social justice helped shape his understanding of religion. It was what moved him into the world of protest and political activism. It was why he helped lead a progressive interfaith movement in support of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, why he worked to free Soviet Jewry, and why he willingly engaged in a dialogue with the Pope during the Second Vatican Council to convince the Catholic Church to condemn antisemitism and recognize the “religious dignity of the Jews.”

Heschel believed the purpose of religion was not to seek God’s salvation but to offer human beings moral guidance in a perilous world. And it came with expectations. “What is expected of me? What is demanded of me?” he asked. Perhaps for world humanity this was too much to ask. But if collectively we ever choose to accept the task of making the world worthy of redemption, it is difficult to imagine a world in which obvious injustices go unaddressed, or millions of people acquiesce in mass murder and destruction.

It would be easy to dismiss Heschel’s thesis in an age when belief in God is ridiculed and organized religion has lost credibility in most liberal intellectual circles. But to do so is to miss what he was trying to say. In a talk he gave in April 1963, Heschel explained that the task of religion “is to cultivate distrust for violence and lies, sensitivity to other people’s suffering, the love of peace. God has a stake in the life of every man.” Philosophy and religion, to be relevant, must offer wisdom to live by. “There is no human being who is not moved by the question, Am I needed?”

As a rabbi and theologian, Heschel believed that an openness to God, a sense of awe and wonder for the universe, and the ability to “feel the hidden love and wisdom of all things” would help lead humanity to more and deeper understanding, kindness, justice, and peace. To our more modern ears, this may sound naïve and unrealistic. But when societies do not have healthy alternatives, when people lose a sense of principled morality and spiritual connectedness, whether through organized religion or not, people inevitably gravitate toward something that is more authoritarian by nature. This has been true throughout history. Even if we focus on developing a purely secular sense of meaning and purpose, of love for our neighbor and compassion for human suffering, the result is a better, more just world.

Heschel died in 1972. Were he alive today, he may have found himself on the margins of society. But to understand Heschel’s life and legacy, and to read his writings and speeches, is to peer into the heart of a genuine zaddik, a holy man. Just as he spoke prophetically for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, Heschel could have offered much needed moral leadership today on the tragic conflict in Gaza, the authoritarian overreach of the Trump administration, the cruel and unlawful crackdown on immigrants, the abandonment of foreign aid, the disregard for the environment, and the dismissal of morality in the affairs of the nation.

Heschel saw politics in moral terms and addressed what he perceived as a spiritual crisis facing the modern world. He saw the violence and injustice all around us as a direct outgrowth of an emptiness in the human spirit. But amid anguish and despair, he taught that the human capacity for goodness and love can repair a broken world. The nation urgently needs Heschel’s moral guidance now more than ever. “The choice,” wrote Heschel, “is to love together or to perish together. Let the love of life have the final word.”