Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907 – 1972

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American Jewish philosopher, theologian, and rabbi, the descendant of a long line of Hasidic masters, professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and one of the leading religious voices of the twentieth-century American civil rights movement. His God in Search of Man and Man Is Not Alone defended a phenomenology of religious experience in which the awareness of the radically transcendent precedes any theology, while The Prophets reread the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible as the model for moral and political imagination in the modern world. He marched at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. and described the experience as praying with his legs.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in January 1907 into a leading Hasidic dynasty; he was the namesake and great-great-grandson of the Apter Rebbe. He studied at the Realgymnasium in Vilna and the University of Berlin, where he took his doctorate in 1933 with a thesis on prophetic consciousness, and trained simultaneously at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. The Nazis deported him from Frankfurt to Poland in October 1938; he reached London via Warsaw and the United States in July 1940, taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and from 1945 until his death held the chair of Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

His books include Man Is Not Alone (1951), The Sabbath (1951), Man's Quest for God (1954), God in Search of Man (1955), the long expansion of his dissertation The Prophets (1962), Who Is Man? (1965), Israel: An Echo of Eternity (1969), and the posthumous A Passion for Truth (1973).

Heschel articulated a phenomenology of religious experience grounded in awe, wonder, and the divine pathos of the prophets, against both fundamentalist literalism and humanist reduction; he insisted that the Sabbath is a 'cathedral in time' and that prayer is a re-tuning of the self. He was an active participant in the civil-rights movement, marched at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr., opposed the Vietnam War, and shaped the Catholic-Jewish dialogue of Vatican II's Nostra Aetate. He died at his desk in New York in December 1972.