Abraham Joshua Heschel devoted his life to God and faith, fighting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for Civil Rights and spreading his philosophy around the world. Although Heschel died 34 years ago, Rabbi Gordon Tucker celebrated the centennial of Heschel’s birth last Thursday.
Tucker spent 12 years translating Heschel’s three volume work entitled “Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Ages.” Tucker never met Heschel and joked that the closest he came was a picture taken at a Bar Mitzvah of him standing next to a cardboard cutout.
According to Tucker, one of Heschel’s most important and controversial theories was that the world was made up of opposites and without understanding and accepting both it was impossible to understand God. From a young age, Heschel was torn between his devotion and faith in God and belief in learning and reason, which led him, in the end, to the theory that both were crucial.
“If you are blind in one eye, you are exempt from the pilgrimage,” Heschel once said quoting a decision some rabbis made saying half blind people are not required to take the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
For Heschel, however, the pilgrimage represented the entirety of a person’s spiritual journey and he believed the ending as a direct connection and relationship with God. According to Tucker, Heschel’s idea is that people can make as many spiritual journeys as they want, if they are even half blind to their whole being, it will be worthless.
Tucker said that Heschel was close to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and in the short time that he knew him he became a staunch anti-Vietnam activist. Once Heschel became aware of the Civil Rights issues and witnessed the constant violence in America, he said he was forced to do something because “indifference to evil is worse than evil itself.”
In addition to this theory, Heschel focused a lot of his writing on the prophets, seeing them as the main connection between God and human beings in the Bible. He believed that God was not an omnipotent being shown at the start of the Bible, but an emotional figure strongly connected to the people on earth.
Heschel also said that the creed, the actual words of the doctrine, “trivialize things and miss what it is for the infinite to meet the finite.”
While Heschel was clearly a heavy thinker and controversial theologian, he also stressed in the third volume of his work the importance of practicing his work. The turnout for Tucker’s lecture in the Oak Room on Heschel was large with 100 people in attendance, many of audience members stayed through the question and answer session. Although Heschel’s teachings were extensive and difficult to comprehend, the audience felt Tucker did an excellent job in simplifying them.
“(Tucker’s speech) was very interesting and his explanations for some very difficult things seemed simple,” said Buddy Katzen, a member of the Fairfield Community. “I don’t have a strong religious background, but he showed you how you have to look at religion and God.”
Sophomore Jackie O’Neill agreed that Tucker’s lecture was “very good.”
“We discussed a lot of this in class, and it was interesting to see it expanded upon,” she said.
Tucker has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a PhD. in philosophy from Princeton University. He is currently the senior rabbi at the Temple Israel Center, located in White Plains, New York.
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