Vision and Authenticity in Heschel's The Sabbath

When Abraham Joshua Heschel published The Sabbath (1951), ¹ Jews faced a new reality in America: far more suburban than urban, less anti-Semitic in the wake of the Holocaust, but one still driven by consumerist pressures and technological advances. Jews were wealthier too, now living with their Christian neighbors, and middle-class choices awaited them. With greater acceptance and visibility, American Jews could see a different, more enticing future with luxury goods, seductive comforts, safe homes, honest work, and caring families. If the television series The Goldbergs ² offered homespun advice for common, familial tensions, those conflicts were often resolved, muted, and visually displaced for a more cohesive, accommodating picture. Jews could visualize themselves as the Americans they wanted to be, and yearned for the security of home so often denied them elsewhere.

Yet, Heschel's The Sabbath sought to challenge this comforting image of American Jewish experience. Throughout his work, Heschel appeals to the grandeur of time in contrast to the entrapments of space, advancing a phenomenology of being to help deflect the technology of acquisition. Jews could certainly enjoy the fruits of American capitalism, democracy, and geographical security, but they were to live among this material wealth as they searched for spiritual meaning in time. Heschel seeks to deflect an "enslavement to things" that seduces Jews into desiring only physical delights, which blinds them to the ineffable splendors of spiritual moments. If America beckoned in the accommodating episodes of The Goldbergs, then Heschel's The Sabbath partitioned the material goods from the spiritual, and in doing so, summoned American Jews to covet things in time as well as in space.

For Heschel, America is both a land of opportunity and a threat to Jewish religious experience. To subvert material enticements, The Sabbath sets out to educate Jews about spiritual values that lie beyond America's borders. Heschel argues that authentic Jewish experience involves a release from material luxury, and an awakening to spiritual wonder. These ineffable moments of experience, so Heschel believes, enable Jews to recognize holiness in time as a spiritual sense of being in accord.

That spiritual sensibility, I want to argue in this paper, is critically tied to Heschel's claims about Jewish vision and authenticity. Heschel's notion of Jewish authenticity requires a visual capacity to see beyond material things to their spiritual wonder. According to Heschel, Jewish visual awareness makes possible an authentic life in America. To be sure, Heschel writes far more on Jewish experience than Jewish seeing in The Sabbath. But if the text calls for an experiential commitment to wonder, a reawakening to spiritual plenty in everyday life, then it also demands a new mode of seeing that transforms material sight into spiritual perception. Indeed, Heschel argues that Jews must envision time rather than gaze at things in space. In Heschel's view, envisioning spiritual things rather than material objects facilitates authentic Jewish experience in America. In this alliance between vision and experience, Heschel's The Sabbath reveals how visual discourse informs Jewish claims to authenticity.

Heschel's account of Jewish authenticity is deeply embedded in visual models of phenomenological experience. His portrayal of sabbatical time as a revelatory moment of the ineffable requires a visual practice in which Jews unlearn consumerist forms of gazing at objects in space. To experience the Sabbath as authentically Jewish, Heschel argues here, Jews must see things differently. In this sense, authenticity is a practice furthered by visual knowledge. In The Sabbath, Jewish authenticity is a mode of perceiving spiritual objects as windows to eternity, and a comportment to those objects in ways that manifest this spiritual awareness. This interplay between authenticity and vision situates Jews within but not of the American landscape. Looking beyond (American) things toward their spiritual meaning uproots Jews from a homeland that Heschel fears will blind them to spiritual realities. Jewish authenticity, Heschel argues, demands a more distant relation to America. The Sabbath seeks to enact this separation by enabling a sight beyond American materialism and technology, and evokes a "scopic mentality" that Elliot Wolfson calls an "iconic visualization." ³ In Heschel's...