‘Where Are The Abraham Heschels Of Today?’

At a centennial celebration of the activist-scholar-rabbi’s legacy, many bemoan the dearth of leaders with his social conscience and gravitas.

Fiery orator Rev. James Forbes, center, speaks at Sunday’s Heschel centennial conference. From left: JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen, Peter Geffen, founder of the Heschel School, Rabbi Andy Bachman and American Jewish World Service President Ruth Messinger.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

‘Time is life,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the towering Jewish scholar and activist, used to say, according to his daughter, the scholar Susannah Heschel. “To kill time is to commit murder.”
They were fitting words to begin a daylong event celebrating the centennial of Rabbi Heschel’s birth. While it might be said that Sunday’s conference, held at the Center for Jewish History, came a bit late — Rabbi Heschel’s 100th birthday would have been celebrated almost a year ago, on Jan. 11 — the eight-hour affair wasted little time.
The two main lectures that framed the conference were shared by several distinguished speakers who had either known Rabbi Heschel personally or were greatly influenced by his work. They ranged from the best-selling

Catholic author James Carroll to the prominent African American minister and fiery orator Rev. James Alexander Forbes, Jr. The heads of the seminaries for both the Reform and Conservative movements, Rabbi David Ellenson and Arnold Eisen respectively, spoke for their institutions, where Rabbi Heschel spent most his professional life, though not always on good terms.
The Jewish Theological Seminary, one of the event’s sponsors, “was not the most respectful place to Rabbi Heschel,” Eisen, the new chancellor of the seminary noted. “But I think we owe him a lot of gratitude.”
The seminary gave Rabbi Heschel tenure in 1945 after he had spent his first five years in the United States at the Cincinnati campus of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which also sponsored the conference. A young but accomplished religious scholar, Rabbi Heschel, who had descended from a dynastic line of chasidic rabbis in Warsaw, also earned a doctorate from the University of Berlin. HUC helped Rabbi Heschel secure a visa to the United States, after a scramble that led him from Nazi Germany to Poland, where he taught for a year in 1939, to one last stop in London.
But it was ultimately the Jewish Theological Seminary that gave Rabbi Heschel a coveted academic chair and provided the stricter religious environment that he desired. Once there, though, the seminary’s stress on scholarship over Rabbi Heschel’s imperatives of “kavannah” — or religious intention — and his ironclad commitment to broader social issues, made the JTS a less hospitable home. He taught there nonetheless until his death, in 1972.
Though Sunday’s conference focused on Rabbi Heschel’s social activism, more so than others this year that highlighted his formidable theological contributions, the two were never far apart. Most speakers made note that Rabbi Heschel’s activism stemmed from his religiosity. At Selma, where he marched alongside his close friend Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he famously said: “When I march in Selma, my feet are praying.”
When he worked with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, an activist clergymen who headed the Riverside Church near the Jewish Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, to take a stand against Vietnam, he also couched the decision in religious terms. JTS’s Eisen recalled meeting Rabbi Heschel when Eisen was an overconfident 20-year-old at the seminary, and Rabbi Heschel an almost prophetic figure. Eisen asked, “What gives you the right” to speak out against Vietnam? Rabbi Heschel replied that his religious tradition not only gave him the right, “but demanded it.” Rabbi Heschel’s better-known reply to his activism against Vietnam, now iconic, was, “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
“Some of the quotes by Heschel, I wish I had a tape recorder,” said David Rivkin, who attended the conference with his wife, Judith, both retired seniors living in New Jersey. “It’s an intellectual experience,” Rivkin said.
The afternoon seminars, which broke up the two near-capacity lectures at the beginning and end of the conference, were a chance for guests to discuss Rabbi Heschel’s writings and theology. Most sessions were led by young scholars or rabbis from various Jewish institutions. At one small group discussion, a rabbinical student at the HUC in New York, Joseph Aaron Skloot, quoted from a first-edition family copy of Rabbi Heschel’s “Man’s Quest for God,” first published in 1954. An important theme in Rabbi Heschel’s work — how to inject kavannah, or religious feeling into the prayer service — was debated.
“The problem is not how to attract bodies to enter the space of a temple but how to inspire souls to enter an hour of spiritual concentration in the presence of God,” one guest read aloud, quoting Rabbi Heschel’s writing from a handout. “The problem is still with us,” said Skloot. One guest, an Orthodox Jew who attended a smaller minyan, or prayer group, expanded on the dilemma. “How are you going to measure the success of a shul? Attendance?” The Orthodox man gave a skeptical look. But he added, “How are you going to measure kavannah?”
In the closing lecture, which included several speakers, Rev. Forbes, recently retired from the Riverside Church, gave the kind of dramatic, inspired speech for which he is known. Forbes called for “prophetic leadership,” a Heschelian idea, in the face of the vexing social issues of today: poverty, religious fanaticism, Darfur. “I see an insistence on the stop waiting,” Forbes bellowed, calling for the same religiously inspired activism today.
“Where are the Abraham Heschels of today?” was a question repeated several times in a speech by Cora Weiss, a former Vietnam activist who worked with both Rev. King and Rabbi Heschel, and who now heads the Hague Appeal for Peace.
“She was saying ‘Where are the Heschels?’ because the lack of powerful and informed leadership is evident today,” said Peter Geffen in a later interview. Geffen also worked with Rev. King and Rabbi Heschel in his youth and has since founded the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan. He, along with Susannah Heschel, a Jewish studies professor at Dartmouth, and Judith Siegel, who works at the Center for Jewish History, organized the conference.
While speaking about Rabbi Heschel’s contributions to the burning social issues of his day — civil rights, Vietnam, the liberalizing of the Catholic Church — his daughter Susannah closed the conference with a note on his writings. His philosophical tracts like “Man Is Not Alone,” “Man’s Quest for God” and “God in Search of Man,” all establish a “quiet intimacy” with their readers, she said. This was not that different from the intimate relationship he formed with his wife, Sylvia, who died earlier this year, and with Susannah herself.
“He loved to laugh,” she said, “he loved life, every moment of it.” And, she added, he loved playing games with Susannah, when she was a child. His favorite? “You can probably guess by his books: hide and seek.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization