Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shortly before the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967, a well-meaning Christian friend asked Jewish Scholar Abraham J. Heschel why he was "so dreadfully upset." Heschel thought for a moment. Then he replied gently: "Imagine that in the entire world there remains one copy of the Bible, and suddenly I see a brutal hand seize this copy, the only one in the world, and prepare to cast it into the flames...
...most Jews, though, it is not only a historical homeland but part of an eternal theological reality, as Heschel argues in a new book called Israel: An Echo of Eternity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $5.50). Part poetry, part polemic, part plea, the book stems from his response to the 1967 war. Though one of Judaism's most admired religious thinkers-he is professor of ethics and mysticism at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary-Heschel admits that the war profoundly changed his attitude toward Israel. "I had not known," he said, "how deeply Jewish...
People and Prophets. Heschel views the war as a "rendezvous with history" that illuminated not only his own life but the lives of Jews everywhere. Speculations on "why it is significant to be a Jew" were no longer necessary. "We felt all of Jewish history present in a moment. Suddenly, we sensed the link between the Jews of this generation and the people of the time of the prophets." That "eternal link," Heschel argues, makes Israel unique. "It is the only state which bears the same name, speaks the same tongue, upholds the same faith, and inhabits the same land...
Actually, Alma appears to have been no helpless, trusting flower but a full-blooded coquette who ultimately found Oskar too demanding. When Kokoschka marched off to war in 1914, even he felt a certain sense of relief. ("It was very exhausting," he was later heard to say. "I had to climb into her room at night.") By the time he came back, Alma had become the wife of Walter Gropius, the German architect, whom she subsequently divorced in order to live with and eventually marry Franz Werfel, the novelist...
Regardless of their genesis, Milner argues, the best proverbs easily transcend ethnic and geographical barriers. They deal in the fundamental stuff of life: love and war, birth and death, sickness and health, work and play. Like the human mind itself, they seek the core meaning of things and the satisfying symmetry of antithesis. They touch the taproots of the mind without requiring the service of the intellect...