Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence by Shai Held (review)

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was one of the most prominent and influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He was raised in a traditional Hasidic community in Poland and educated in Warsaw, Vilna, and Berlin; but the majority of Heschel’s literary career was spent in the U.S. He moved to America in the eleventh hour before the outbreak of the Second World War, and, after a brief stay at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, he spent nearly three decades at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Heschel’s work had a profound impact on American Jewish readers, and he was a social critic as well as a visionary theologian, fighting for civil rights and fiercely condemning the Vietnam War. The influence of Heschel’s writings and activism thus extended beyond the Jewish community. Protestants and Catholics read his works seriously during his lifetime, and he cultivated a well-known friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr., supported interfaith dialogue, and was involved in Vatican II.

Shai Held’s book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, is a sophisticated interpretation of Heschel’s theology. Held reads Heschel’s project as revolving around a single theme: The imperative for human beings to move beyond self-interest and private affairs and achieve a type of “transitive concern,” a deeply-felt empathy for the suffering and needs of others. Without relinquishing our personal identities, we are challenged to become mindful of the pain of those around us and act with the courage and conviction necessary to help them. This notion of self-transcendence, claims Held, is the key to unlocking all the major issues in Heschel’s thought. It is central to Heschel’s writings on prayer, Revelation, prophecy, wonder and radical amazement, religious activism, the confrontation of human evil, and protest in face of divine silence. Held also suggests that Heschel’s focus on self-transcendence also reveals one of his greatest critiques of modernity: Heschel was scandalized by philosophies arguing that the human being is all-powerful and that no external claims can be made upon us, but he was equally repulsed by nihilistic visions in which human deeds—or even lives—are inescapably arbitrary and meaningless.¹

But Heschel’s central theological claim is about God as much as it is about man. We are also called upon to attune ourselves to the suffering of the Divine caused by human callousness and capriciousness. Attaining self-transcendence is mankind’s greatest expression of imitatio dei, for God accepted limitation by entering into a partnership with mankind because of His love and concern for man. Held formulates this nicely in his analysis of Heschel’s thinking on Revelation, confronting the question of why an omnipotent God would reach out to mankind. He suggests that this issue, as do so many others, gives rise to “a core polarity in his [Heschel’s] theology—a God who is at once transcendent and in need, a God, in other words, both majestic and vulnerable.”² The Divine longs for human response and needs mankind to become a partner, but this need is lovingly selfimposed.³

Held’s investigation of these themes is no simple task for it required him to assemble relevant passages scattered throughout Heschel’s works in four languages. His exploration is a sensitive but critical engagement with Heschel’s thought. He does not fall into the trap of giving clever solutions to contradictions in Heschel’s various writings, nor does he simply dismiss Heschel as naïve and inconsistent. He explores the tensions and gives order to Heschel’s corpus without erasing the many complexities, ambiguities.⁴ The following analysis could rightly apply to all of Heschel’s theological projects: “What emerges from all this, in the end, is not resolution but relationship, not theology but liturgy—liturgy not as evasion of theology, but as culmination thereto.”⁵ Heschel’s ideas may stand in tension with one another.

His remarks...