A Soulful Journey

  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that " the Bible is meant to be our critic, not we its critic." 

A rabbi stood in front of his congregation and said, “Before I begin my sermon I want to tell you something interesting.     I have a story to tell.     A Dutch Jew survived the Nazis by hiding in attics and cellars.     He came to the United States after the war and finished his education.     He was appointed head of the philosophy department at a university.     He assimilated, married a gentile woman, and had no interest in the Jewish community. His marriage was unhappy and he was on the verge of divorce.   A lecturer had been invited to the university and the President, a Catholic, asked the professor to greet the guest.  “Who is he?” The President answered, “He is a Jewish theologian and philosopher.” The professor, somewhat annoyed, asked the President, “Why are you sending me?” “There are two reasons.  First of all, you are a Jew.  Second, you are the chairman of the Philosophy Departm...

 "Do I exist as a human being?  My answer is: I am commanded; therefore I am." "Meaning is found in responding to the demand; meaning is found in sensing the demand." -Abraham Joshua Heschel Open your heart today and feel the Presence.  Then do.

  “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.” ― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

  “The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song." -Abraham Joshua Heschel Now, go sing to God!

  “Religion becomes sinful when it begins to advocate the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls. Religion has always suffered from the tendency to become an end in itself, to seclude the holy, to become parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines. It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle for truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular. Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to the stabilization of values.” ― Abraham Joshua Heschel God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

"Faith is only real when it is not one-sided but reciprocal. One can only rely on God if God can rely on the individual." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”   – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel  

If [a person] were able to survey at a glance all he has done in the course of the life, what would he feel?  He would be terrified at the extent of his own power.” - Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel “The impulse to do evil is at first like a passer-by, then like a lodger, and finally like the master of the house.” – Talmud, Sukkah 52b What habits have taken up residence this year?  (R. Debra Orenstein) “No sin is so light that it may be overlooked.  No sin is so heavy that it may not be repented of.” – Moses Ibn Ezra “Better an open rebuke than hidden love.” – Proverbs 27:5 It’s hard to hear that someone it is dissatisfied with us but considering that it is usually an actor friendship and love when someone is honest enough to tell you where they believe you have gone wrong.  (R. Debra Orenstein) “If a person sinned against another and the latter died before pardon was sought, the sinner should bring a minyan, station them at the grave of...

“ All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”  ―  Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is a story (which has been attributed to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel) of a great pianist who was asked by an ardent admirer: ‘How do you handle the notes as well as you do?’ He answered: ‘The notes I handle no better than many pianists, but the pauses between the notes – ah! That is where the art resides.’ ‘In great living, as in great music,’ Heschel says ‘the art may be in the pauses.’ Take time today to pause and breathe.

"He who wants to enter the holiness of the [Sabbath] day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else…. The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time…. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn…"   -Abraham Joshua Heschel,  The Sabbath: Its Meaning ...

“Wonder, or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward nature and history. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted, regarding events as the natural course of things. To find an approximate cause of a phenomenon is no answer to his ultimate wonder. He knows that there are laws that regulate the course of natural processes; he is aware of the regularity and pattern of things. However such knowledge fails to mitigate his sense of perpetual surprise at the fact that there are facts at all.”  “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension. As civilization advances the sense of wonder declines. Such a decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of happiness lies in understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”    - Abraham Jos...

"All needs are one-sided. When hungry we are in need of food, yet food is not in need of being consumed. Things of beauty attract our minds; we feel the need of perceiving them, yet they are not in need of being perceived by us....Religion begins with the certainty that something is asked of us, that these are ends which are in need of us."   Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty. The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the Prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey:  that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,  Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity 

Abraham Joshua Heschel was shocked when he read that man was defined as a composite of iron, phosphorus and other chemicals in a Nazi Germany textbook.  It indicated that a human being was only worth a few dollars. It was then easy to understand that they were on the road to dehumanizing people. A human being is of infinite value. It cannot be gauged by weight, minerals or even money. We are all far deeper, more complex. We are the creations of the Almighty.

The focus of prayer is not myself; I turn away from myself to God in the act of prayer. We go hopelessly astray if we think of prayer as a selfish endeavor to persuade or inveigle or beg God to do us a favor, or win us a battle, or even help us when we are in pain. God is no bellhop or housemaid who jumps when we press a button or ring a bell. God does not come to us, but we to God. Prayer does not change God, but changes the person who prays. Our prayers are answered not when we are given what we ask, but when we are challenged to be what we can be. If I recite what I want, it is not to remind You of my wants, O God, but only to make myself aware that things are not always in my hands alone. True worship is not a petition to God for favors: it is a speaking and a summons to ourselves. By being benevolent, people rise to a height, they approach God. Therefore, the beginning of all true prayer is doing good. Who rises from prayer a better person has had an an...

Several years before Abraham Joshua Heschel died his friend, Sam, visited him.  This is what he recalled: He had gotten out of bed for the first time to greet me and he was sitting in the living room when I arrived, looking weak and pale. He spoke slowly and with some effort, almost in a whisper. I strained to hear his words. ”Sam”, he said, “When I regained consciousness, my first feeling was not of despair or of anger. I felt only gratitude to God for my life, for every moment I have a lift. I was ready to depart, if need be. ‘Take me,  O Lord,’ I thought.  ‘I have seen so many miracles in my lifetime.’"  Exhausted by the effort, he paused, and then added: “This is what I meant when I wrote in the preface to my book of poems: I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And You gave it to me.” - Rabbi Jack Reimer

  “There is a difference between entertainment and celebration.  Entertainment is easy.  All you have to do is relax in a chair and turn a little knob as indicated.  I do nothing and I wonder why it doesn’t add anything to my existence…. Celebrating an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation.  To be entertained is a passive state; it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel Judaism is all about celebration; an active, participatory life.

The reaction of silence to the presence of God is behind the old Buddhist proverb, "Those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know."  Abraham Joshua Heschel taught about Jewish prayer that, "our liturgy is a higher form of silence."