Abraham Joshua Heschel

...The first is the incredible research on display...

...I knew that Heschel was lonely in Berlin, but I didn't realize the depth of the poverty that he endured or the isolation he must have felt, living between two worlds, learning Western philosophy while holding on bravely to his Jewish commitment and to its central affirmation--that God is real and not just a symbol, that God cares, that God reaches out, and that God speaKs--ideas that were absurd to his philosophy teachers who were willing to grant God the status of a hypothesis but not of a real being...

...Tracking down every detail of Heschel's life, every postcard and letter that he wrote, is in itself an enormous Commonweal 2 6 October9, 1998 achievement...

...he wanted to enter the modern world...

...A person who is depressed cannot really observe the Sabbath...

...He says that he dropped the book, the way one would drop hot fire...

...The authors do much more than accumulate data...

...Perhaps, he suggests, we feel a kind of moral disgust toward victims, toward those who cannot help themselves...

...Applicants must hold an earned Ph.D...

...His concluding call for a healing "forgetting" if nations are to move on from traumatic collective wounds is particularly provocative...

...My problem isn't with his headpatting of "conservatives," including the present pontiff, but with the seemingly total lack of Christian perspective...

...For information about the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement, contact: Vocation Director Graymoor ~ , E PO Box 300 Garrison, NY 10524-0300 914 424 3671 When Heschel was twelve or thirteen-his father had died a few years before-the hassidim treated this child prodigy as if he were already their rebbe...

...He strongly recommends the show, but I got little from his review other than his high opinion of what he expected the council to bring about...

...For more information or to apply contact: Anna Mae Bush, Coordinator Seminars in Christian Scholarship Calvin College, 3201 Burton Street SE, Grand Rapids MI 49546 e-marl: abush@calvin.edu _9 fax: 616-957-6682 phone: 616-957-8558 ~ website: www.calvin.edu/fss Deadline for applications is Feb...

...An example is a January 22, 1943 report by the Reich Central Security Office on the pope's 1942 Christmas message, cited by Anthony Rhodes in his 1973 book, The Vatican in the Age of Dictators...

...The sheer volume of the details of Heschel's life in Warsaw, in Vilna, in Berlin, and in Frankfort is astonishing...

...One would tell how a scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy in the university became a comforter and a teacher to the bewildered Jews of Germany in the time of the Nazis...

...they say: "shortly before midnight on 9 April 1940, Heschel boarded an all-night train to Cincinnati, Ohio...

...Forever afterwards he fought for an understanding of Judaism that included law and love in inseparable combination...

...And one would tell about how all these different facets of his education came together to produce the mind that arrived in America, a mind trained and ready to teach reverence for the human being, in theory and in practice, to Jews and to all America...

...We are sufficiently disgusted that we send UN troops into Bosnia and declare "safe havens...

...He arrived at Hebrew Union College the next afternoon and settled in a dormitory room, the lodgings Morgenstern had promised...

...It taught him that observance is not an end in itself, that it must always be accompanied by intention, and that lifting the spirits of another human being is a mitsvah...

...He knew that the gateway to the modern world was to learn Polish and so he begged his mother to buy him a Polish grammar...

...Heschel never got over that act of friendship...

...When he asked her to buy him a second volume, she turned him down, because they were so poor, and because she unC A L V X Y College SEMINARS IN CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP Susan M. Felch, Director June 21 - July 30, 1999 Realism vs...

...He is the chair of the National Rabbinic Network, a support system for rabbis across the denominational lines, and the co-editor of So That Your Values Live On (Jewish Lights...

...One would tell how the prince of a Hassidic dynasty became a Yiddish poet...

...I, 1999...

...She did and he devoured it quickly...

...Continued from page 4) ignore such material because it contradicts their preconceived theories...

...Experimenting with tradition since 1898...

...For example, there are photographs of Heschel at every age and that have never been published before...

...Modern audiences may consider Pius XII's public statements bearing on this question to be vague, but in their own time they were often considered provocative...

...Still, he would have us enforce the various Geneva Conventions that seek to ensure "that warriors conform to certain basic principles of humanity...

...Heschel had never in his life seen anyone handle money on the Sabbath...

...There is more, much more, in this fascinating biography, which traces Heschel's life from his earliest years in Warsaw to the day he arrived in Cincinnati...

...I didn't know how difficult a task that rescue was, how stubbornly Julian Morgenstern, president of the college, had to lobby the State Department until he got the visas for the teachers and students that he was determined to save, and therefore why Heschel never forgot what Hebrew Union College did for him...

...Heschel wrote with deference but with the courage to affirm his own faith and to challenge the master...

...Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals...

...The book is remarkable on two counts...

...The hassid explained: violating the Sabbath is a sin, a great sin...

...I also knew that Heschel had an ambivalent relationship to Martin Buber, but the book brings that ambivalence out clearly by letting us read the letters and even the postcards that Heschel wrote to Buber, who was richer, older, more famous, and more powerful than he was...

...We are sufficiently loath to risk "our" lives for "theirs" that we stand by and watch helpless civilians being shelled to pieces in refugee cities...

...They have a profound understanding of Heschel's inner life and they use all this information in order to craft a powerful portrait of a human being...

...But we are all in Ignatieff's debt for his insistent plumbing of the heart of contemporary darkness...

...I'm not sure that has any better chance of stanching the flow of blood than appeals to human rights...

...Returning to the theme of moral disgust, Ignatieff scores the West's cautious and incautious reactions...

...They don't just tell us that he traveled from New York to Cincinnati...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain's most recent book is Real Politics (Johns Hopkins...

...Heschel opened the book--and there was the money between the pages...

...One would tell how a Yiddish poet somehow learned enough German and math and literature to gain admittance to a university in Berlin...

...thin in prescription...

...But when he walked into the synagogue, Sabbath had already begun...

...Some stories in this book are so dramatic that only the authors' meticulous attention to detail makes them credible...

...Tougher by far to recognize that victims are likely to be victimizers as well--a narrative that doesn't play as well on television...

...McConnell's blind spot When he's not talking about religion or politics, your media critic Frank McConnell often has insightful things to say...

...The Warrior's Honor is vivid in description...

...But melancholy, depression, on the Sabbath is an even greater sin...

...But Ignatieff, horrified by what he has seen, believes that we should call up and call upon whatever is in our cul~ral and political armamentaritwn to interdict killing, and in this he is surely right...

...The next morning the hassid handed him a book of the sayings of Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz...

...I have seen some very good television that I might have missed but for his recommendations...

...Even though it was Sabbath, Heschel was so distraught that he came to the hassid after the services and asked for the money with which to buy the book...

...Now we eagerly await the second volume, which will recount the story of how the man who was raised in a shtiebl became a moral force in the civil rights movement in America, a negotiator with the pope in Rome, a spokesman for the Jews of Russia, and "Father Abraham" to so many Catholic and Protestant theologians...

...ABRAHAM, OUR FATHER Jack Riemer his book is simply stunning...

...But it is none too clear how we are to go about enforcing codes of warrior honor in disintegrated situations and in light of the fact that, as Ignatieff makes painfully evident, many of those doing the killing are not warriors at all but irregulars who fight without training, without rules, and in the throes of a nigh-unlimited blood lust...

...And so I gave you the money, even though it was the Sabbath, so that you would know that you have it to use after the Sabbath...

...Aesthetics of rock Kudos to Bill McGarvey for his thoughtful piece, "Like a Rolling Stone" [September 11 ]. As a fellow Philadelphian, I too remember the Commonweal 2 8 October 9, 1998...

...There is material in this book for a dozen novels...

...Kaplan and Dresner have unearthed the very first hiddushei torah that the young Heschel wrote in his childhood and have interviewed people who were able to describe the home and the street of his youth...

...I never understood the reason: that it was in order to make contact with the world outside without embarrassing his family...

...I know that it goes against the rules of reviewing to make such an uncritical statement, but I can't help it...

...For example, I knew that Heschet left Warsaw and moved to Vilna in his late teens...

...I hope I'm wrong here, but McConnell seems to appreciate Vatican II primarily because he thought it would result in a church that would cater more comfortably to twentiethcentury American liberal secularists, and it is a "failed revolution" because it didn't...

...But McConnell's review of PBS's "Reflections on Vatican II" [September 11] illustrates a significant problem that shows up whenever he takes on a religious theme: in McConnell's muse, Christianity doesn't seem to count for very much...

...But Heschel didn't want to be a rebbe...

...And one does not ask for material things on the Sabbath...

...Commonweal 2 1 October 9, 1998 derstood what learning Polish meant...

...It reads as if every scrap of paper that Abraham Heschel ever wrote or that anyone else ever wrote referring to him has somehow been found by these two...

...The report complained: "In a manner never known before, the pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order...

...Honorable warriors do not slaughter civilians indiscriminately...

...He came to the synagogue that Sabbath very upset, and decided to ask one hassid who prayed there and who was fond of him to give him the money for a Polish grammar...

...Confronted with a "pure victim," we may fall into an unhealthy combination of pity and contempt as we prefer our victims to be blameless...

...DIMITRI CAVALLI Bronx, N.Y...

...Jack Riemer is the rabbi of Congregation Beth Tikvah of Boca Raton...

...How could you give me money on the Sabbath...

...And he asked the hassid: How could you do such a thing...

...While the occasional saint or theologian is mentioned here or there, the notion that the Holy Spirit is guiding the church into all truth is generally absent...

...But this in itself could have led to a petty and a pedantic book...

...What Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner have done in this biography is so remarkable that the regular rules of reviewing have to be suspended...

...This and similar items leave me wondering what a man with so little apparent use for Christianity is doing writing in a Catholic magazine...

...Finally, he lifts up the honor of warriors and suggests that where humanrights language and just-war argument fall on hostile or uncomprehending ears, appeals to the honor of warriors might take us some distance in limiting the damage...

...Antirealism William P. Alston Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Syracuse University God and Evil Peter van Inwagen John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame The Faculty Summer Seminar program seeks to promote quality scholarship that reflects a Christian perspective by encouraging Christian scholars to pursue current research in their disciplines...

...He doesn't really get beyond the themes of Blood and Belonging, here repeating his argument about the ways in which, given a particular concatenation of circumstances, even minor differences get magnified into deadly incommensurabilities that blind human beings to the suffering of others and justify wounding those same others...

...DANIEL W. MUTH Prince Frederick, Md...

...I knew that the Hebrew Union College had rescued Heschel and a number of others from Nazi Europe and I knew that Heschel was forever grateful...

...Made possible with funds from The Pew Charitable Trusts...

...Moving to "the narcissism of minor difference," a term he owes to Freud, Ignatieff puzzles over identities and the sometimes deadly "fictions" of nationalism...

...That second volume should also tell how Heschel was able to translate the central insights that he learned in his childhood into a language that spoke to the minds and souls of so many in this land...