Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Pre- And Post-Holocaust Approach To Hasidism

In this article, I examine the change in Heschel’s attitude toward Hasidism following the Holocaust. As we shall see, a distinction must be made between two periods: the young Heschel was very critical of Hasidism, however following the Holocaust, his attitude changed. In order to ground this assertion, I will examine writings from the two periods, and will consider some of Heschel’s autobiographical statements. These statements are of great value to our understanding of how Heschel perceived what was happening in his life.

One enlightening comment upon his evolving view of Hasidism appears in Heschel’s book The Earth is the Lord’s. In 1944, Heschel was invited by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York to deliver a lecture on Eastern European Jewry. The lecture formed the basis for that book. At the end of the book, Heschel states:

In the spiritual confusion of the last hundred years, many of us overlooked the incomparable beauty of our old, poor homes. We compared our fathers and grandfathers, our scholars and rabbis, with Russian or German intellectuals.....measured the merits of Berditchev and Ger with the standards of Paris and Heidelberg.¹

This is a very important statement. Berditchev and Ger are not random examples. Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev and Ger Hasidism—which originated with the Kotzker Rebbe—were highly significant for Heschel. As Kaplan notes, after the death of Heschel’s father, Rabbi Mordechai Heschel (1873–1916), his mother’s brother, Rabbi Alter Yisrael Shimon Perlow, the Rebbe of Novominsk (1864–1933), supervised Heschel’s education. He guided his young nephew in the direction of Ger Hasidism, appointing Bezalel Levi, a Ger Hasid and disciple of the Kotzker Rebbe, as his tutor. The two formed a very intense relationship. Rabbi Bezalel accompanied Heschel everywhere, teaching, questioning, and challenging him.² As Kaplan also points out, upon reaching the age of bar mitzva, Heschel was granted the special honor of donning the tefillin of Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, whom he was related through his mother.³ It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that in the statement earlier, Heschel was referring to a comparison that he had made between Ger and Berditchev and the Russian and German intellectuals.

It is no coincidence that Heschel chose the prophets as the subject of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin. In that work, Heschel contrasts the prophet and the mystic, thus confronting his ideals with the Hasidic mystical tradition of his forebears.⁴ Moreover, it should be noted that young Heschel had a prophetic soul, and in addition to writing his dissertation, he published poetry, which he began writing while still in Vilna. In those poems, Heschel not only identifies with the prophets’ struggle, but also sees himself as bearing the burden of actively participating in the prophetic effort. Both in his academic work and his poetry, Heschel is sharply critical, indirectly and directly, of the fundamental concepts of the Hasidic thought of his forebears. The first part of this article addresses this, before proceeding to a discussion of the change that occurred after the war.

Before the War

Heschel’s doctorate addressed the consciousness of the prophets. In this phenomenological examination, he expresses his critical view of one of its central subjects, that of self-denial. This term also appears in the book Ohev Yisrael⁵ by Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt, and in the book Kedushas Levi⁶ by Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. There can be little doubt that in writing his dissertation Heschel was well aware of the close connection between the mystical terms he was criticizing and those employed by his ancestors.

The Prophets—self-denial

In his book The Prophets, Heschel claims that the Greeks employed the term “ecstasy” to refer to a state in which the soul is separate from the body, such that it could come into contact—and in some cases even unite—with divine entities. Heschel employs the distinctions made by mysticism scholar Evelyn Underhill to explain that a person who is in a state of ecstasy disengages and becomes oblivious to...