Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi, theologian and philosopher of religion, descended from Hasidic dynasties. Educated in Warsaw and Berlin, he was deported from Germany by the Nazis in 1938, reached the United States in 1940, and taught for most of his career at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In God in Search of Man he argued that faith begins not with proofs but with wonder, awe and 'radical amazement' before the world, and that the Bible records God's concern for humanity. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma and opposed the Vietnam War, seeing prophetic religion as a call to justice.

Key ideas

• Religious thinking begins in wonder, awe and radical amazement, not in abstract argument.
• The Bible is less a record of humanity's search for God than of God's search for humanity.
• God is affected by human deeds; the prophets reveal the divine pathos, God's real concern for justice and suffering.
• The Sabbath is a 'palace in time' that teaches us to sanctify time rather than things in space.
• In a free society some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Major works

• God in Search of Man (1955)
• Man Is Not Alone (1951)
• The Sabbath (1951)
• The Prophets (1962)
• Who Is Man? (1965)

In the Book corner

• God in Search of Man 1955 · Intermediate
  A full statement of Jewish religious thought by the rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, published in 1955 as a companion to…

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