JEW

...Indeed, Heschel is best remembered today for his "prophetic" role as a leader of the anti-Vietnam and civil-rights movements...

...And one legacy of Heschel's involvement with Martin Luther King is the way it made mandatory the presence of Jews alongside Protestants and Catholics whenever religious stands are taken on public issues...

...On February 11, he successfully completed the oral defense of his doctoral dissertation on the Prophets, just weeks before Jews were expelled from the German academic system...

...As his daughter Suzannah has recently noted, the photograph of Heschel walking arm in arm with King has become "an icon of American Jewish life and of Black-Jewish relations," reprinted in innumerable Jewish textbooks and synagogue bulletins...

...And it was in Vil-na that he laid the foundation for his later involvement with leftist causes, living among "secular Jews who supported revolution" and studying "avant-garde politics and literature...

...In this volume, Kaplan and Dresner trace in illuminating detail Heschel's life from his birth in Warsaw in 1907 through his arrival in New York in 1940...

...As he left Warsaw—and the traditional, insular world of Polish Hasidic piety—Heschel shaved his beard and earlocks...

...Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate...

...His general view of the relation of religion to politics was, in fact, a considerable departure from the prevailing Jewish consensus—and remains today much closer to the neo-conservative view that most liberal Jews oppose...

...During the 1950s, the hostility of Egypt, supported by Soviet arms, convinced both Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr "that the very life of the new nation of Israel is at stake...

...Heschel fulfilled the prophecy...

...When Heschel joined the famous march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, he walked at the head of the procession with King, Ralph Bunche, and Ralph Abernathy...

...Indeed, Heschel's unequivocal commitment to a militarily secure Israel would separate, in the years following his death, his thought from that of his former friends and associates...

...The growth of Jewish day-school education, to which Heschel was deeply committed, prompted him to rethink his own earlier opposition to state aid for parochial schools...

...thesis), until his death ten years later, Heschel appropriated the teachings of the ancient prophets to lend support and spiritual "authenticity" to the radical causes that he came to espouse...

...Liberal Jewish theology, Heschel maintained, fails to answer the critical question of how the evil we have seen in the twentieth century could possibly have arisen...

...The former New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels recalls, "it was hard not to imagine that God himself was coming out against the war" when Heschel rose to say the closing prayer at the group's initial meeting in Manhattan's Riverside Church...

...Awaiting a visa to the United States, Heschel left for London, where he studied English and founded an adult institute for Jewish studies...

...In this new job, Hes-chel received considerable moral support from the anti-Nazi Quaker community in Frankfurt and its leader, Rudolf Schlosser...

...Heschel's relating of biblical theology to politics seemed inescapably relevant during the tumultuous 1960s, and Heschel, more than any other Jewish thinker of his era, struck a responsive chord among many Jews in America...

...But that was because of the liberally approved positions that he derived from his theology...

...More than any other Jewish theologian of his generation, Hes-chel became an influential presence in American public life...

...And the limits of his liberalism were not merely in theology: He was no pacifist, for example, when Israel's security was at stake...

...From the 1962 publication of his monumental work on biblical theology, The Prophets (an expanded translation of his Ph.D...

...social critic—unabashedly appropriating the writings of the Hebrew prophets to support the liberal political causes he espoused—the greater part of his legacy as a public theologian seems, in retrospect, more conservative than liberal...

...And he addressed for the first time the obligations of religious believers in times of political crisis—a theme that would define his public theology and social activism in America in the 1960s...

...And in the spring of 1939, he received an invitation from Julian Morgenstern to join the faculty of Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio...

...His activist friends, the Protestant chaplain William Sloan Coffin and the radical Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, dubbed him "Father Abraham...

...Equality as a religious commandment means 'personal involvement.' " Before he appeared on the scene, only Reform Judaism had played a prominent role in the struggle for civil rights...

...He electrified his audience with the speech...

...His departure, he would later say, was "just six weeks before the disaster began...

...Two years later, Heschel's mother and two sisters, whom he had been unable to rescue from the Warsaw ghetto, were murdered by the Nazis...

...In 1938, at Schloss-er's request, Heschel delivered a public lecture, "The Meaning of This Hour," on the moral responsibility of religious leaders in Germany...

...Believing that religion had a legitimate place in American public life, Heschel rejected the view that the interests of American Jews are best served by what his old friend Richard John Neuhaus would later dub "the naked public square"—the banning of all religion from American political life...

...But Heschel's prophetic role had found its quintessential expression even earlier, in his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr...

...After receiving Orthodox rabbinic ordination at the age of sixteen, he began privately studying German, Polish, and Latin to prepare himself for secular high-school studies in Vilna ("the Jerusalem of Lithuania," as the authors describe the city...

...The book, which remains one of his most popular works, was an attempt to explain why the Holy Land is precious to Jews...

...Today, however, one dimension of his legacy remains ignored...

...The Holocaust in Germany and the barbarities of Stalinism in Russia seemed to both Heschel and Niebuhr to have destroyed the foundations of the liberal faith—shared by Reform Judaism and liberal Christianity—in the "natural goodness" of man...

...A secular career closed to him by the Nazis, Heschel devoted himself to Jewish education and scholarship, completing in 1935 a biography of the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides and teaching at Berlin's liberal rabbinical seminary...

...Between November 1938 and June 1939, Heschel desperately sought a way to escape to the United States...

...Even Heschel's view of the relation between theology and politics seems more conservative than liberal in today's setting...

...Evaluating faith in terms of reason," he wrote in Man Is Not Alone, "is like trying to understand love as a syllogism and beauty as an algebraic equation...

...Although Heschel was revered by many as the Jewish community's preeminent David G. Dalin is an ordained rabbi and a visiting associate professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary...

...At the age of twenty, Heschel left for Germany to pursue his doctoral studies in philosophy and theology at the University of Berlin, which he completed within days of Hitler's ascension in 1933...

...A descendant of an illustrious line of Hasidic rabbis, Heschel was a child prodigy who had read all the books in his father's library by the age of ten...

...Heschel did not attempt to rationalize the Holocaust by interpreting the birth of Israel as an "atonement" (either by God or the United Nations...

...In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses...

...Heschel argued, moreover, that post-Holocaust Jewish theology would have to be predicated upon a sober recognition of human limitations...

...The outcome of that summit meeting has not yet come to an end...

...Like Heschel, King invoked and venerated the ancient prophets as paradigmatic social critics and identified their biblical religion with political activism...

...In 1951, reviewing Heschel's Man Is Not Alone on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, no less a figure than Reinhold Niebuhr predicted that Heschel would soon become "a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America...

...He is co-author, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience...

...He had been active in Zionist work in Warsaw and Germany, and he greeted the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as a miracle...

...During the last decade of his life, he became a media celebrity and one of American Jewry's most outspoken activists: the keynote speaker at the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth, a leader of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, a passionate advocate of environmentalism and disarmament, and the first American-Jewish leader to protest publicly the plight of Soviet Jews...

...Zionism was another cause to which Heschel was deeply committed...

...Arriving in the United States in 1940, he spent five years as an associate professor in Cincinnati, where he began to write prolifically in his adopted language...

...After all, on such church-state policy questions—as on civil rights, disarmament, and the Vietnam War— Heschel believed that his religious commitment shaped his political involvement: The political protests he led and participated in were, as his daughter has noted, "a religious experience" for him...

...Heschel and King first met in January 1963 at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago—at which Heschel began his opening address with the words: At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses...

...In 1965, he co-founded (with Richard John Neuhaus and Daniel Berrigan) "Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam...

...During the 1950s and 1960s, his writings enjoyed a wide audience among Christian theologians...

...They describe his religious and intellectual journey from his childhood in a Hasidic community through his years in secular Jewish Vilna, Berlin, and Frankfurt during the late 1920s and 1930s—seeking to discover how Heschel's first thirty-three years in Europe made him into the religious philosopher, biblical theologian, and American social activist he would later become...

...And yet, although Heschel was "a man of the left," his prophetic radicalism led him to embrace a view of the proper relation between religion and public life that was decidedly less liberal than conservative...

...It was Heschel's visit to Israel immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967 that inspired his Israel: An Echo of Eternity...

...Even before Heschel's much-publicized role in the Catholic Church's historic declaration on the Jews at the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI read his books, as did the head of the committee that drafted the declaration, Cardinal Bea (who wrote Heschel to acknowledge "a strong common spiritual bond between us...

...But he was unrelenting in his criticism of those who refused to recognize Israel's right to exist...

...The prophets' great contribution to humanity, he thundered, was the discovery of the "evil of indifference": By "negligence and silence we have all become accessory . . . to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation...

...In presenting his view of God and Judaism during the 1950s, Hes-chel had criticized the theologians of the 1930s and 1940s who had espoused a liberal, rational approach to God...

...come its reluctance to supply Israel with weapons...

...His dissent on such issues has often gone unnoticed in evaluations of his life and thought...

...Like Niebuhr (who later became his close friend), he achieved prominence as a public theologian who sought to apply his religious tradition to political and social issues...

...In subsequent years, he wrote some of the best-known and most widely read Jewish books of his generation: The Earth Is the Lord's, A Passion for Truth, God in Search of Man, and The Prophets...

...According to the liberal Jewish consensus that prevailed from the 1950s to the 1970s, Jewish survival and religious freedom are most secure when the wall separating religion and state is strongest...

...But the success of Zionism represented for Heschel at least a partial answer: "Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a trace of God's radiance in the jungles of history...

...Thus, even while Heschel became a liberal icon during the 1960s, his Jewish theology was, in many respects, far from liberal...

...Heschel made it respectable, even necessary, for leaders of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism to become involved as well...

...But it is one of his most important legacies, and it demands to be critically analyzed, in substantive detail, in the second volume of Kaplan and Dresner's so-far excellent biography...

...The recent publication of the first volume of a major new biography, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, by Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, provides a welcome opportunity to reflect upon the man's extraordinary life and thought...

...The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed...

...Jeu by David G. Dalin I The Jewish Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel Before his death in 1972, Abraham Joshua Heschel was widely considered to be one of the most influential Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century...

...Since the 1940s at least, most Jews in America have desired a rigid distinction between religion and public life...

...Late in life, he had increasing misgivings about the efforts of some liberal Jewish leaders to challenge the constitutionality of tax exemptions for churches...

...With this searing indictment of the Nazis, he became a "prophetic witness" to the plight of his fellow Jews...

...To speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam," he once asserted, "is blasphemous...

...On October 28, 1938, along with eighteen thousand other Jews with Polish passports, Heschel was expelled from Germany—awakened in the middle of the night by the Gestapo, ordered to pack two small suitcases, and marched off to the nearby railroad station...

...As a public theologian for whom political and social problems were the main concern, he could not subscribe to any view that religious values and theological insight should be expunged from American public life...

...In the quarter century since his death, Heschel has remained someone still much invoked in moral and political debate within the American Jewish community...

...He did call upon both Jews and Arabs to work together for peace...

...In 1937, Martin Buber (who was emigrating to Palestine) invited Heschel to succeed him as the director of a Jewish adult-education organization in Frankfurt...

...Heschel dissented from this liberal Jewish consensus...

...In 1945, Heschel accepted an invitation to join the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he would remain a professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism until his death...

...Challenging his audience "to reach out for new heights," he coupled his analysis with a call to social action: "Equality as a religious commandment goes beyond the principle of equality before the law...

...The particular social battles Heschel fought, almost always on the side of the Left, are long over...

...After a brief stay in a displaced-persons camp, he returned to Warsaw, where he taught for the next academic year at the Institute for Jewish Studies...

...What remains is his constant awareness—apparently possessed nowadays only by the Right— that an American moral and political culture uninformed by religious belief threatens the health of a democratic society and undermines the position of Jews...

...Heschel's reputation as the spiritual voice of American Jewry was established in 1951 with the publication of both Man Is Not Alone and The Sabbath...

...The United States, they believed, needed to overThough Heschel was "a man of the left," he embraced a view of religion and public life that was decidedly less liberal than conservative...