Obstacles to a Theology of Hope

...Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to Him who is beyond all things...

...There was nothing light or playful about them, and they used language as if it were a sledgehammer...

...But in the case of the late Abraham Joshua Heschel's A Passion for Truth, the jacket blurb is right on target...

...What, for example, is one to make of the fact that Mendl of Kotzk spent the last 20 years of his life in near total isolation, or that Kierkegaard was convinced that he was doomed to die young...

...Certainly these are important matters, and they deserve more attention than they receive...

...Ironically, since he frequently complained that Judaism was the least known of the world's great religions, Heschel was by far the best known of contemporary Jewish theologians...

...At the same time, Heschel notes that the Kotzker has been a "steady companion and haunting challenge . . . who has urged me to confront perplexities that I might have preferred to evade...

...Heschel does not exaggerate in the least when he characterizes the two men as "high-strung, hyper-conscious, living strenuously...

...As a survivor of the Holocaust who spoke out in "prophetic witness" on current social and political issues, he possessed the automatic authority attached to the name Auschwitz...

...These perplexities stem from the need to affirm either "awe [or] consternation, fervor [or] horror . . . exultation [or] dismay" as the correct signposts pointing the direction to God...

...To a reader familiar with Heschel's deeply felt theology of hope, it is immediately apparent that A Passion for Truth marks a sharp break with the past...

...but it is clear that Christians could readily make use of many of his insights...

...Similarly, Heschel's preoccupation with ideas leads him to slight the biographical elements that might help to explain the theological outlooks of his two subjects...

...Heschel squarely faces up to them...

...And throughout his writings, he stressed the significance of man's capacity for wonder and awe: "Awe is an intuition for the creaturely dignity of all things . . . a realization that things are not only what they are, but also stand for something absolute...

...Indeed, in liberal Protestant and mainline Catholic circles in the United States, he was lionized as a latter-day Jewish prophet...

...and "No Reconciliation with the World...

...It is no wonder, then, that A Passion for Truth is studded with chapter titles like "Against Triviali-zation," "To Face the Unconditional," "To Disregard Self-Regard...

...As the scion of an illustrious Hasidic family and the bearer of the academic title Professor of Mysticism, he had a definite touch of the exotic about him...

...he was simply unwilling to accept it as an ultimate reality...

...In his introduction, revealingly titled "Why I Had to Write This Book," Heschel emphasizes his deep commitment to the religious teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement, who stressed God's nearness to man...

...Commentary" READING the claims made on the jacket cover of a book is most often a prelude to frustration...

...Heschel skillfully cites an almost endless number of parallels in the thought of Mendl of Kotzk and Kierkegaard...

...This volume is in fact a study of the ideas of two extraordinary religious figures—the Hasidic master, Mendl of Kotzk (1787-1859) and the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855...

...After all, in matters of faith and religious persuasion, one man's passion is another man's hot water bottle...

...They] continually and relentlessly attacked the soft spots in man's self-image, pointing up the difference between candor and pretense, authenticity and sham...

...This was all the more true because he employed a broad religious vocabulary and not a specifically Jewish idiom...

...Both were obsessed with the gulf separating God from his creation, and insisted that the life of faith, whose purpose was the pursuit of religious truth, required an unequivocal rejection of the blandishments of society as well as the self...

...This is partly attributable to his personal charisma...

...Though they inhabited entirely different cultural milieus and were completely unknown to each other, the Kotzker and Kierkegaard shared a radical, and some would say monomaniacal, commitment to the quest for religious truth...

...Still, A Passion for Truth is important for what it tells us about its author: It reveals Heschel's willingness to honestly confront aspects of reality clearly in conflict with his own religious outlook...

...Rather, he was preoccupied with the fundamental underpinnings of faith, and with how contemporary man in all his secularity could recover an awareness of the divine...

...In fact, the religious perspective explored in the book, that of Mendl of Kotzk and Kierkegaard, is the very antithesis of the "Heschelian" approach...

...In a similar vein, Heschel insisted that the core of prophetic religion was an ongoing and mutually reinforcing dialogue between divine "pathos" and human "sympathy...

...Despite the evidence of history, and most particularly of Jewish history, Heschel passionately affirmed the essential goodness of man and the benevolence of God...

...It is important to note, however, that Heschel has here joined their cause, with the result that this is as much a testament of personal belief as it is a critical analysis...

...Another key reason for Heschel's wide appeal is that his theology was precisely in tune with the fundamental optimism of Americans...

...As Jacob Neusner has pointed out, Heschel had little interest in presenting a historical account of Jewish religious thought, or in delineating the essence of a static and one-dimensional "Judaism...

...It is not that he was unaware of the evil that lurked in the world...

...If at the end of his last work Heschel remains a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov rather than the Kotzker, there is no arguing with his preference...

...Such choices are fundamental to the religious endeavor, of course, and in A Passion for Truth...

...But he fails to adequately discuss the social circumstances in which their ideas arose, making it difficult to appreciate the broader cultural significance of even the most striking similarities in the thinking of a Polish Hasidic rebbe and a Danish Lutheran...

...The point is underscored by the jacket comment that the work was "very close to Heschel's heart and he delivered it in person to his publisher a few weeks before he died...

...Thus his books carry such upbeat titles as Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, The Earth Is the Lord's...

...God's designs and man's aspirations were, in other words, distinctly compatible...

...It would be totally unfair to regard him as a Jewish version of Norman Vincent Peale, because he was a man of enormous erudition and profound spirituality...

...Nonetheless, it is true that Heschel was something of a mystical Utopian who lacked a sustained tragic vision of life...

...Having chosen to follow just such a course, the Kotzker and Kierkegaard were "antisocial, shocking, [enemies] to all established convention and propriety...

...Viewed as a scholarly study of two religious mavericks, A Passion for Truth is only a limited success...

...It is clear, though, that in his last years Heschel was very much aware of the serious stumbling blocks that stood in the way of an easy acceptance of his own brand of theological optimism...

...Finally, and this is no small matter, with his flowing white hair and beard he looked like everyone's conception of Isaiah or Jeremiah...

...He was convinced that such an awareness—achieved by sensing God's presence in nature, in the Bible and in sacred deeds—led directly to the distinctive truth of the Torah...

...If large numbers of Christians found the man himself distinctly attractive, they also responded enthusiastically to his theological enterprise and style...