Poetic Theologian

Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence
by shai held
indiana, 352 pages, $38.95
Few modern theological personalities have been as widelyloved as the inimitable Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It takes a unique souland a special voice to exhilarate at once Jew and Christian, conservative andliberal, scholar and layman. The spiritually thirsty of all stripes have foundnourishment in his teachings. “Grandeur, audacity, radiance,” wrote Fr.Neuhaus, “that was ­Heschel.”

Heschel’s enduring popularity has earned for his writing aconsiderable secondary literature. You have your reader’s guide introductions,your scholarly investigations, your biographies, devotional meditations—throwin a selected works collection or two and you’ve got yourself a satisfying dayat the beach. But abundance does not in itself meet all needs: Too much of theexisting commentary on Heschel, Shai Held laments, ­collapses into “either uncriticaladoration or overly facile dismissal”: Loyalists praise and exalt withoutpause, critics dismiss and deride out of hand. And so Held, a recently mintedHarvard Ph.D. and the dean of Yeshivat Hadar (a non-denominational Jewishseminary in New York), aims to fill the gap with a treatment both “genuinely sympathetic and unapologetically critical.” Simply put, Held’s mission is totake Heschel seriously.

For many, the virtue of ­Heschel’s writing lies less in itsproposi­tional content than in its electrifying spiritual lyricism and personalresonance—its incomparable capacity to set readers’ souls aflame. Those lesscharitably inclined cite the same qualities in dismissing Heschel’s writing as merepoetry, mere liturgy, or else just a “fountain of devotional aphorisms andlapidary formulations”; serious thinking, however, it is not. Others, ofcourse, are more candid: Held quotes one critic’s caustic observation that “onreading Heschel, one gets the impression that inconsistency is not onlytolerated but is made a virtue.” This is a representative complaint.

What is needed, Held counsels, is an approach that gives dueregard to Heschel’s poetic dynamism—he is “emphatically not a systematicphilosopher who just happens to write beautifully”—without ignoring theintellectually substantial reasoning at its foundation: “Heschel does seek tomove his readers, but he does not seek merely to move them.” Held appeals hereto Karl Rahner’s concepts of ­poetic theology and mystagogy, modes oftheological discourse whose business is not only to analyze and clarify, but toenliven, awaken, and inspire. For Rahner, religiously fruitful theo­logy “mustnot speak only in abstract concepts about theological questions, but must alsointroduce people to a real and original ­experience of the reality being talkedabout.” It follows that to ask “­whether Heschel is a philosopher or apoet” is to posit a false dichotomy; Heschel, Held insists, is “a theologian anda poet, and to some extent he is the latter precisely because he isthe former.” And he ought to be read that way.

Held’s first order of business is to engage Heschel’s thoughtwith the kind of “sustained critique” it has so rarely received but soeminently deserves. Central among Heschel’s preoccupations is the role ofwonder and “radical amazement” as the foundation of all genuine religious,moral, and indeed human experience. We moderns have come to take the world forgranted, isolating ourselves in shells of indifference, ignoring any intimationthat the universe might be more than a set of objects for our exploitation.

This indifference is the root of our day’s unprecedentedhuman crimes and calamities, and, if we do not soon recover our spiritualbearings, the source of untold perils to come. (Students of C. S. Lewis, MartinBuber, Hans Jonas, Aldous Huxley, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Karol Wojty?a,and of course Martin Heidegger, to name a few, will find they are on familiarterritory here.) Cocooned in artificial worlds governed by egocentric utilityand mechanistic, ­value-allergic calculation, we moderns lose touch with thatwhich transcends us and thereby compromise our faith, morality, and humanity.The hallmark crisis of modernity is the comprehensive eclipse of­transcendence.

For Heschel, and in contrast to the unyielding theocentrismof thinkers like Karl Barth, natural human experience itself contains a genuinepremonition of God; regarding the world with due wonder, man instinctuallygrasps the allusiveness of all worldly beings to something higher, beyond.Trees, rocks, oceans, the sky, and the sheer reality of existence all sing thepraises of him whose concern they express—we have only to open our ears. If wedo, we will find God, and we will, in realization of our natural humanity, formour lives in awe, love, and worship. Authentic belief in God is not the productof logical reasoning but the immediate result of living experience:

The certainty of the realness of God does not come about asa corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realmof ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transitionfrom an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness toa definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the ­presence of God to anawareness of His existence.

Far from a leap beyond the evidence, to assert that “God is”dramatically understates the reality of our awareness. It is an insight, not aninference.

Here Held begins his interrogation in earnest. Is Heschel’sclaim, he asks, to be taken simply as a description of personal religiousphenomenology—to the man of faith, the reality of God is an unquestionable given—or,as it would appear to be, an argument intended to persuade the unconvinced? Isthere a truth here, some proposition that Heschel is aiming to demonstrate? Orare we to take his writing as confessional poetry and no more? As afull-fledged epistemological argument, Held avers, the reasoning “obviouslyfails, essentially sidestepping a question by re-asserting a conviction.” Ifthe problem is the uncertainty of God’s existence, it is of no rational help toshout one’s ­certainty louder.

Held sees this as a ubiquitous feature of Heschel’s thought:“He raises epistemological questions again and again, only to invalidate themor swat them away,” with the result of a “double-edged deficiency in hiswriting—he neither fully repudiates epistemological criteria nor successfullymeets them.” Heschel rejects out of hand the possibility that his own spiritualexperiences are personally or culturally conditioned, and categoricallycondemns those whose ­experiences supposedly differ as dishonest, arrogant, orat best foolish. At its passional height, Heschel’s writing is less reasonedargument than authoritarian pronouncement.

A charitable critic, Held labors to reevaluate the nature ofHeschel’s project: “[His] formulations are so extreme that we ought to stop andask what he is trying to accomplish with such statements. . . . Are they meantas straightforward declarations of his position, or as rhetorical attempts toshake his readers free of their assumptions, to jolt them into another qualityof awareness?” While careful to avoid saying that Heschel “does not mean these dramatic declarations at all,” Held does favor an interpretation in terms ofhyperbolic excess: Overwhelmed by modern man’s near-total callousness to faith,­Heschel feels himself “out of options, as it were” and so elects a kind ofrhetorical counteroffensive as a last resort.

The result: “One of the fundamental problems in Heschel’swriting is that he . . . cannot always distinguish between an argument for faithand a description of faith. . . . This methodological confusion—the lackof clarity about what he is or is not doing—contributes greatly to thosemoments where he descends from forceful and compelling to dogmatic and shrill.”If Held’s aim was to show that, contra appearances, ­Heschel’s writing is notonly spiritually but also intellectually compelling, it seems the results mayhave, by his own lights, fallen somewhat short of his ­ambitions.

Heschel’s corpus is massive, varied, andfreewheeling—“systematic presentation was not his forte.” His lyrical proseranges widely across and beyond disciplines and genres. Yet Held claims that,in contrast to the work of contemporaneous Jewish luminaries like Martin Buberand Joseph Soloveitchik, Heschel’s ­theology is notable for its “exceptionalcoherence and consistency” and its “remarkable stability over time.” In thisspirit, Held argues that the motif of self-transcendence, the call to openourselves to that which is beyond ­ourselves, is throughout the ­animating andorganizing core of ­Heschel’s thought.

Sustained focus on this theme, therefore, offers a “freshperspective on what ultimately underlies and unifies Heschel’s variouswritings.” Religious awareness is the result of selfless receptiveness to theworld’s voice; genuine ethical regard a function of the self’s openness to theexistential other; prayer an exercise in realizing that God, not the personalself, is the world’s true center; and so on. The whole of Heschel’s literarycareer, Held explains, may be fruitfully read as an extended meditation on themotif of self-transcendence.

The insight is powerful. But are Heschel’s articulations ofself-transcendence sufficiently substantial to ground, as Held says, a “lucidand consistent interpretation of Judaism”? Held is persistently emphatic thatHeschel’s understanding of self-transcendence does not involve the kind oftotal self-annihilation found in the work of mystical writers like ­EvelynUnderhill and Thomas Merton. Heschel cautions that “elimination of the self isin itself no virtue. . . . Regard for the self is not evil.” Ultimately, “A manentirely unconcerned with his self is dead.” Maintaining a strong individualself is essential because God desires genuine covenantal partnership with man,not mere lordship. Judaism, for Heschel, is about joining our interests withGod’s in forging a common mission and destiny.

Yet Heschel’s formulations often take a less conciliatoryturn. In prayer, he says, “I leave the world behind as well as all interests ofthe self.” It is by assuming that “the self is not the hub but a spoke, neitherits own beginning nor its own end” that we may come to affirm the possibilityof “eliminating self-regard” (here Held ­acknowledges that this is“­uncharacteristically strong language for Heschel”). And generally statementslike “In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness toself-surrender” suggest more of a unilateral arrangement than a covenantal,two-party solution.

Doubtless Held would insist that these inconsistencies arebest taken as the effects of hyperbole, the words at times exceeding theirintended meaning in a desperate attempt to shake the reader from spiritualparalysis. But the de facto result is that Heschel’s thinking onself-transcendence is less than fully transparent. Precisely how, in the end,ought the individual integrate self-interest with full-hearted devotion to thedivine Other? Does it depend on the particular type of self-interest? Or is ita matter of proportion? Perhaps self-regard and self-transcendence can somehowreinforce rather than antagonize each other?

The point is not that Heschel would not have answers tothese questions, but that we have yet to see a sustained, systematic effort toclarify them. Here, as often, in place of reasoned demonstration we haveimpassioned assertion; instead of perspicuity we have alluring allusion; ratherthan proof and explanation we receive song and exaltation. Or, as Held morepithily puts it, “Heschel is keenly aware that his task may well be better servedby the evocative mode than by the argumentative.” That is all fine and well, ofcourse, but then if Heschel, ­Rahner, and Held are right, we justly look formore than poetry from our poetic theologians. 

Alex Ozar is a fellow at the Tikvah Fund.