A Militant Mystic

"It takes three things," he wrote, "to attain a sense of significant being: God, a Soul and a Moment." For Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the moment was the 20th century, an epoch whose tendencies he analyzed like a prophet who had walked from the Old Testament into America at midstream.

When he died in Manhattan at 65, Rabbi Heschel left no doubt that he had attained that hallowed sense of significant being. From the start, the descendant of seven generations of Hasidic rabbis moved with a palpable sense of holy destiny. As a doctoral candidate, he caught the attention of Martin Buber at the University of Berlin; Buber personally chose Heschel as his successor at the Jewish adult education center at Frankfurt am Main. The Nazi holocaust put an end to the rabbi's European career and triggered a new beginning in America.

His name became emblematic of his tradition. With mounting concern, he fused the Judaic strands of Abraham's mysticism and Joshua's militant vigor. He wrote scholarly, aphoristic arguments in four languages. Yet when he felt the constraints of injustice, he was not to be found in Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary where he taught, but on the front lines where he marched. He was with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, joined with Daniel Berrigan to form the Clergy Concerned about Viet Nam and appeared in a succession of meetings and demonstrations on behalf of Israel and, lately, the Jews of Russia. At an antiwar rally, he told a crowd: "This is not a political demonstration. It is a moral convocation, a display of concern for human rights."

It was that concern that alienated the conservative Jewish community when Heschel visited Pope Paul VI in the Vatican. It was only upon seeing the 1965 declaration on the absolution of Jewish guilt in the Crucifixion that the rabbi's critics were silenced. Characteristically, he continued to argue for interfaith convocations. The alternate, he felt, was "internihilism."

In the end, Rabbi Heschel's actions brought fewer changes than he would have wished; the world does not often honor its prophets. Nonetheless, he remained an ethical exemplar, a leader in whom faith and morality were inseparable. To the end he eschewed the "three blasphemous words" of the God-is-dead theorists.

Like his namesakes, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel believed throughout his life and career that "just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." He also believed, and last week his friends and followers took comfort in his words that "for the pious man it is a privilege to die."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.