Word: heschel
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...book, one of the world's most illustrious Jewish theologians puts the prophets back into place as the first men to speak some bedrock ideas of Western thought. Abraham Joshua Heschel, 56, professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, writes in The Prophets (Harper & Row; $6) that if those peculiar ancients claimed to speak for God himself, their message is indeed worthy of the Creator. For they preached the dignity of the world's poor and downtrodden, and warned unjust men that God himself cared about what happened on earth...
...Personal God. Modern man finds it hard to sympathize with the prophets, Heschel argues, largely because Biblical thinking is so alien to his own. Unlike the Greek philosophers, or even Judaeo-Christian theologians of later years, the prophets did not think of God as a first cause or prime mover but as a person; they were unconcerned with what God is, but cared only for what he does and says. Unlike the mystics, the prophets did not express the ineffable glory of God, but spoke of specific situations-the machinations of Jewish foreign policy, or the selling of debtors into...
...prophets saw these incidents as symptoms; the disease was the corrupt state of Israel. Their cure was angry eloquence. "To us," Heschel writes, "a single act of injustice-cheating in business, exploitation of the poor-is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world...
...Heschel spoke on "The Intellectual View of Our Religious Convictions," and asserted that "we must respond to the mystery of living with a sense of awe before we can intellectually understand the existence of God." He described faith as the response to the "mystery of existence...
...Heschel asserted that "man is less concerned with God than God is with man," and cited Adam, Cain and Abel, and Noah as Biblical examples. "God in search of man is the great paradox of Biblical literature," he said. "God seeks us out by asking the Ultimate Question of us. Faith in God is an answer to the question. Thus God is not passive to our search...