God’s Need for Man: A Unitive Approach to the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) is recognized not only as the leading theological voice among North American Jews in the postwar decades, but also as a writer whose theology had an particularly passionate and evocative quality, drawing a large following, both Jewish and Christian, including many who were not regular readers of theological treatises.¹ A major element in that attractiveness lay in Heschel’s ability to speak of God in deeply human terms, including especially his willingness to speak of God’s need for man.² In fact, if you open Shai Held’s magisterial treatment of Heschel’s theology, you will find in the introduction that, “The sentence that appears in Heschel’s writings more frequently than any other – one encounters it countless times in his vast corpus – is a simple one: ‘God is in need of man.’”³ While I think there may be some overstatement here, the point is clearly made. But Held interestingly goes on to say in that same paragraph: “God will not redeem the world alone, Heschel insists, but instead waits for human beings to participate in that work.” A more consistent way of following the prior sentence might have read “God cannot redeem the world alone … but instead needs human beings to participate in that work.” Here Held has perhaps unwittingly picked up on Heschel’s own subtle hesitation about this claim, as though Maimonides’ shudder at it is somehow ringing in his ears. But listen to Heschel’s own more unequivocal rendition, spoken (of all places!) in an address to Jewish day school principals: “God needs man’s cooperation. There will be no redemption without the cooperation of man. Omnipotence as such will not work. God cannot function in the world without the help of man.”⁴

I had the great privilege of studying privately with Dr. Heschel in the years 1963–67, while I was a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His main assignment to me was that I read Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai’s summary of kabbalistic teaching ‘Avodat ha-Kodesh and write a study of it. Ibn Gabbai, who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century,⁵ offers a great synthesis of Jewish mystical wisdom in the generation immediately preceding that of Moshe Cordovero and Yizhak Luria, who were to make such great additions and changes to that tradition. The key theme of the work, repeated frequently throughout, is ha-‘avodah tsorekh gavoha (lit.: “service is a need on high”), that worship, including the life of the mitzvot, fulfills a divine need. Ibn Gabbai is particularly outspoken in attacking Maimonides and the entire philosophical tradition on this question, which he considers to be at the very root of true faith. To support it, he marshals a vast number of rabbinic and zoharic sources, many of which will be familiar to readers of Heschel’s Torah min ha-Shamayim.⁶

Ibn Gabbai is very rarely an original thinker. In this matter he is defending a term coined by Nahmanides⁷ but representing a view widely held throughout the kabbalistic world. In reflecting on this term over many years, I have come to realize that, in sending me to Ibn Gabbai, Heschel was in fact giving me a key to understanding his own oeuvre, which I consider to be of a single piece. To say it in a somewhat offhand manner, I have come to read God in Search of Man, the title of Heschel’s theological masterwork, as a biblicized restatement of ha-‘avodah tsorekh gavoha, devotion to fulfill a divine need.⁸

I am here to suggest that this phrase represents an overarching theme in Heschel’s work, one that binds together his investigation of the early rabbis in Torah min ha-Shamayim, his ongoing fascination with the Hasidic world from which he came, his own theological writings, and perhaps also, as I hope to show, his lifelong engagement with the prophets. While I have no argument with Held’s most impressive demonstration that self-transcendence is key to Heschel’s...