Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (review)

Susannah Heschel’s edited collection of forty short essays and two interviews spanning the full range of A. J. Heschel’s career does much more than bring together previously difficult-to-find material with a fine biographically oriented and detail-rich introduction; Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity has itself become a major work. No other volume conveys the breadth of A. J. Heschel’s work so fully—both his writings and his activism—or provides so many powerful and pithy summaries of concepts elaborated elsewhere in his corpus. The volume’s main demerit is technical: the lack of an index.

Here we find Heschel standing on one foot speaking to German Jews in 1936 as Hitler hosted the first televised Olympics (pp. 68–70) and to the American people in a nationally televised interview more than 35 years later as the country reflected and reeled in response to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement (pp. 395–412). Heschel speaks to seekers—Jewish, Christian, and secular—as well as scholars and to the leaders of Reform, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, and, especially, Conservative Judaism. One of the volumes great merits is its presentation of some of Heschel’s most recurrent themes—God is in search of the human being (pp. 16, 158–63, 185–90, 260, 293, and especially 396) and the need to be more than human to avoid being less than human (pp. 7, 60, 92)—from multiple vantages as Heschel speaks in different contexts.

Susannah Heschel, A. J. Heschel’s daughter and one of his foremost expositors, has admirably organized these essays under five headings: I. Existence and Celebration; II. No Time for Neutrality; III. Toward a Just Society; IV. No Religion is an Island; and V. The Holy Dimension.

The bookend sections, one and five, contain especially wide-ranging material marked by Heschel’s sustained effort to reformulate the basic questions and assumptions that propel inquiry about and into religion. Encapsulating the broad arc of Heschel’s work, the first section emphasizes the Jewish context, while the fifth and final section emphasizes the religious situation more generally.

In the first section, the essays speak to such issues as what it means to be a Jew (pp. 3–11, 47); the theological primacy of events over ideas (pp. 12–17); the Hasidic message of “hope and exultation” (pp. 39; 33–9); “Israel as memory” (pp. 40–43); a critique of Reform, secular, and Orthodox Judaism (pp. 48–52); the meaning of tshuvah (pp. 68–70); and a poetic meditation on Nazi anti-Semitism (pp. 71–2). Ranging over wide terrain, Heschel argues that “[t]he very existence of a Jew is a spiritual act” (p. 55); blasts Jewish demographers with his insistence that “[t]here are two words I should like to strike from our vocabulary: ‘surveys’ and ‘survival’” (p. 29); and offers a phenomenology of Talmud study, suggesting that pilpul “represented a desire to sublimate feelings into thoughts, to transpose dreams into syllogisms” (p. 36).

The final section is of special interest to the historian and philosopher of religion, for here themes such as piety (pp. 305–17), holiness (pp. 318–27), faith (pp. 328–39), prayer (pp. 340–53), and death (pp. 366–79) are approached as basic human phenomena. In “An Analysis of Piety,” Heschel summarizes a fundamental aspect of his analysis of religion: “man’s affinity with God is his persistent aspiration to go beyond himself . . . to live for an ideal” (p. 316). Religion is imagined here as a vehicle to actualize this aspiration that may manifest in devotion to “the family, a friend, a group, the nation . . . art, science, or social service. . .” (p. 316).

The second essay in the final section, The Holy Dimension, contains the volume’s most pointed critique of religious studies, which is also touched on elsewhere in the volume through Heschel’s critique of symbolism “as the supreme category in understanding religious truth” (pp. 88, 128; see also 92). Heschel laments,

Modern man seldom faces things...