Abraham Joshua Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschelwas a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the American Civil Rights movement...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth11 January 1907
CountryPoland
conceit forfeit ability
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
loyalty commitment religion
Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.
men looks done
New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. ... Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.
self roots discipline
Self-respect is the root of discipline
israel agony holocaust
There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.
essence justice care
Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
men essentials reign
The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
appreciation acceptance appreciate
Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.
art philosophy giving
Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question...awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.
prayer self world
We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
spiritual adventure goal
This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
relationship horizon events
All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.
recovery hysteria solitude
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
sacred-things deeds pagan
Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.