The Earth is the Lord’s, and: A Passion for Truth (review)

During the late 1960s, when “Holocaust theology” was the rage, Heschel was criticized for not articulating a theological response to the Holocaust. During those years, Heschel was also criticized for being overly involved in social action, and not adequately engaged with the spiritual condition of American Jewry. Both of these criticisms are unfounded. For example, as the Protestant scholar W. D. Davies observed soon after Heschel’s death, Heschel’s social action was, in substantial measure, part of his response to the Holocaust (“Conscience, Scholar, Witness,” America 128:9 [March 10, 1973]: 213). Further, as Morris Faierstein has demonstrated, Heschel—especially in his Yiddish writings —offered a (theological) response to the Holocaust that “was very much in line with the response of the remnant of East European Jewry which survived the Holocaust” (“Abraham J. Heschel and the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism 19:3 (1999): 255–275). In addition, in his essays and addresses (collected in The Insecurity of Freedom [1966] and Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity [1996]) as well as in daily conversation with his students, Heschel constantly articulated his views about the spiritual condition of American Jewry.

Toward the end of his life, as individuals such as Richard Rubenstein, Arnold Jacob Wolf, and I and others can attest, Heschel would often use bold imagery to depict the spiritual condition of American Jewry and his prognosis for it. For example, Rubenstein quotes Heschel as saying to him, “When I think of what our people have accumulated over the centuries that nobody will ever know about, it seems like a second holocaust. Hitler destroyed our people. Now we let their spirit die” (Rubenstein, Power Struggle [New York: Scribner’s, 1974], p. 128). Similarly, Arnold J. Wolf reports a conversation he had with Heschel weeks before Heschel’s death in which he was very pessimistic about the continuity of Jewish learning and spirituality in America, and about the possibility of a renaissance of Jewish values in the diaspora. Wolf quotes Heschel as saying, “[I]n America we have ten more years. (That was not his usual style.) He didn’t say thirty or forty or sixty—but he said ten. After that some factors will be irreversible” (Wolf, Sh’ma 10:185 [ January 11, 1979]: 39). In 1965, in an address to the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, Heschel said, “We may claim to be a success, but in the eyes of Jewish history we may be regarded as a failure” (Moral Grandeur, p. 23).

Heschel’s response to the Holocaust, the articulation of his concerns about the spiritual condition of American Jewry, and his observation that the spiritual suicide of American Jewry was leading to a “second holocaust” all relate to his apprehension that the spiritual legacy of East European Jewry was being lost, forgotten and dismissed, or distorted by the American Jewish community. In his early work, The Earth is the Lord’s, and in his last work, A Passion for Truth, this apprehension is clearly articulated. Heschel considered the preservation and the conveyance of the spiritual heritage of East European Jewry, especially Hasidism, as the key to the continuity of an authentic form of Judaism in post-Holocaust America. He would have agreed with Chief Rabbi Lau’s tongue-in-cheek remark that “the religion closest to Judaism is Hasidism.”

In January 1945, as World War II moved toward an end in Europe, and as the catastrophe that had decimated European Jewry was becoming public knowledge, Heschel delivered a lecture in Yiddish at YIVO in New York in which he offered his eulogy for the now lost Atlantis of east European Jewry. This lecture, published in Yiddish as “The East European Jew,” metamorphosed into his 1950 English volume, The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in East Europe (on this metamorphosis, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Heschel and Yiddish: A Struggle with Signification,” The Journal of...