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  • Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Challenge of Religious Pluralism
  • Arnold Eisen (bio)

One of the gifts that great Jewish religious thinkers offer the rest of us—and I count Heschel as one of the greatest, not only of the twentieth century, but also of the modern period as a whole—is to help us, Jewish or non-Jewish, think about religion and the life that religion makes possible. We need such thinkers least at points of faith or commitment where our own thinking comes easily. Minds and souls like Heschel matter far more to us when, as at the present moment, religious thought and practice seem beset by obstacles and challenges that we do not seem able to overcome or get around.

For me at least, these are rarely the sort of modernist challenges to belief that so exercised the minds of our predecessors. I am thinking rather of the fact, indisputable in recent years, that religion is inextricably bound up in violence, so much so that it seems impossible to separate the two. There is the problem, too, that religion seems ineluctably drawn to the temptation of fundamentalism, an option powerfully latent in the very use of terms such as "truth," "holy scripture," and "salvation." I want to reflect with Heschel's help on a related and no less formidable challenge to the value of religion: the troublesome fact that the faithful and their institutions are so often intolerant of other faiths and faith communities. Religion seems actively to work against the attainment of real respect for differing religions. Faith, in a word, seems antithetical to pluralism.

The question I want to ask, then, is how Heschel managed to be at once such a fervent believer and practitioner of the Jewish religious tradition and such a firm religious pluralist. What in his theology permitted him to take this stance—let alone demanded that he do so? What choices can we see him making at key points in his work that allowed for pluralism? Could he have arrived at the same destination had he chosen otherwise? And—since pluralism is not relativism, and an "I'm okay, you're okay, all is okay" philosophy utterly trivializes any claim to moral knowledge, let alone the claims of faith to know something about God and how human beings are meant to live in the presence of God—I want to inquire into the limits of Heschel's pluralism. What could he not affirm? Whom could he, as it were, not [End Page 4] bless? Should we too abide by these limits? Or does Jewish religious pluralism in our day demand that we perhaps take advantage of doors that Heschel opened but did not himself walk through?

In the end, I find the "nos" that Heschel pronounced, and the "yeses" he could not bring himself to utter, every bit as challenging as the pluralism that he urged and practiced. The possibilities that even his capacious soul refused to entertain give me pause as I seek a religious path that avoids violence and fundamentalism. I want nonetheless to think, with Heschel's help, some thoughts that he did not or could not venture. If we are serious about attaining religious pluralism in our day, I believe that we have no choice.

Not An Island

Let's begin where Heschel addressed our topic most directly: the 1965 speech at Union Theological Seminary entitled "No Religion is an Island." Its first line identifies Heschel as "a member of a congregation whose founder was Abraham, and the name of my rabbi is Moses." He is, in other words, a Jew commanded by Torah. The next paragraph further identifies him as "a person who is often afraid and terribly alarmed lest God has turned away from us in disgust."1 The crimes of Nazism are then cited—the better, I suspect, to make the point that pluralism is necessary before proceeding to argue that it is possible. It is necessary, Heschel continues, because just as the Nazis had posed a threat to all the world in the 1940s, the Enlightenment posed a continuing threat to all religion in the 1960s. What is more, Jews and Christians still faced...

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