The Role of the Secular in Heschel's Theology

8/13/2019 The Role of the Secular in Heschel's Theology

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Shaul Magid

THE ROLE OF THE SECULAR IN ABRAHAMJOSHUA HESCHELS THEOLOGY:

(RE)READING HESCHEL AFTER 9/11

The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular.Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of EternityBefore religion can humanize man, man must humanize religion.Mordecai Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood

Abraham Joshua Heschel is known as one of the most inspiring andinfluential Jewish theologians in America in the second half of thetwentieth century. A refugee from war-torn Europe, Heschel arrived

in the United States via England in 1940. He immediately began anacademic career at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati andmoved to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1946, where he taughtuntil his death in December 1972.1 His political activism in the CivilRights and anti-Vietnam War movements made him a familiar voiceamong many in the American counter-culture of the 1960s.2 Hispolitical activism resulted in the popularity of his theological writingsbeyond his progressive American Jewish audience, becoming a sourceof inspiration for Protestant and Catholic American theologians to

this day.3

In this essay, I engage the notion of the secular in Heschelsthinking and ask whether, in fact, the very particular Cold War contextof his major theological works can stand the scrutiny of a post-9/11reading where the religious/secular divide has arguably becomesignificantly altered. Heschel lived in a world infused with the ideathat secularism (communism, fascism, and materialism) was under-mining the moral fiber of western civilization, and religion, in theform of belief and practice, could renew humanitys sense of morality

and responsibility.4

I assume here that 9/11 has shifted the focusof the worlds moral crisis questioning the notion that religion is, bydefinition a positi e moral force


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a world not dissimilar to his. By that I mean most scholars writing onHeschel in the 1970s through the 1990s shared with him the globalcontext of the Cold War as their political and existential point of

reference and with that the problem of secularism as the great threatto religious tradition and society. This will not be true for the nextgeneration and, in fact, it is not true even now. The Khomeinirevolution in 1979, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall,and the rise of religious radicalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islamin the past two decades has resulted in a significant shift in theparameters of theological discourse among liberal and progressivetheologians. Whether we call it, with Peter Berger, the desecular-ization of the world, or from the religious perspective the resancti-

fication of the world, something has changed that requires revisitingthe religious/secular dichotomy of the past half century.5 BruceLincolns Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 is butone of many books that have begun to reframe the theologicaldiscourse for the next generation.6 In light of the rise of religiousradicalism with its rejection of secularism as a constructive and evennecessary component to religious life, scholars such as Talal Asadand Jose Casanova, among many others, have begun to rethink old(negative) constructions of the secular that were formed, in part, in

response to communism, as a way of thinking about how this notionof the secular can be reframed in response to a new religiouschallenge.7

My claim in this essay is that the notion of the secular in Heschelswritings needs to be examined in order to understand what role,if any, it can play in Heschels theology in a newly desecularized world,a world far from Heschels own social and theological context. And,if we determine that the secular plays no positive role in Heschelsthought, we must ask ourselves how much his theology can offer a

generation no longer threatened by the secular but, in fact, threatenedby religion. This query, then, begins with an understanding that allthinking is situational and a product of ones subjective relation to theworld in which he or she lives. Heschel is in full agreement with thisidea. In Who is Man?he writes, Authentic thinking originates in anencounter with the world. We think not only in concepts; we thinkin the world. Thinking echoes mans total relationship to the world.8

The medieval notion of a decontextualized theology or the modernanalytic or realist idea that truth can be discovered distinct from

ones subjective stance is something that thinkers like Heschel,influenced by existentialism and phenomenology, never tooki l 9

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War Ias it was for Buber, Scholem, and a whole generation ofZionism theologians10and arguably not even the Holocaust, even asthe Holocaust surely played a role in his thinking. Even though he was

trained in Europe and remained wed to continental thinking, onecould argue that his intellectual contextthat is, the situation in whichand to which he wrote his theologywas not really Europe at all butrather the rise of communism and secularism refracted through anAmerica lens. Like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, Heschel wasa transitional theologian, trained in Europe yet situated in America.It may be true that Heschels theology was born in interwar Polandand developed in the literary circles in Vilna and finally in WeimarGermany. But his mature theological writings, perhaps best articulated

in Man is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and Who is Man? areproducts of an American context of religious pluralism and theoptimistic spirit of ecumenicism. While it is true that Heschelstheocentric turn to find a transcendent source for meaning may be aproduct of his own independent vision of Hasidism (perhaps alreadysomewhat Americanized), one could argue that his theology wasmore a direct product of his conversations (real and imagined) withthe liberal Christian theologians of postwar America. The AmericanProtestant tradition, infused with an often curious combination of

pietism and tolerance (Heschels work resembles this dichotomy aswell) was a world where the secular and the sacred had a complexrelationship. This may be especially true in the African-Americanchurches whose piety and progressive social activism (in civil rightsand other matters) deeply impressed Heschel.11 This is the theater ofmuch of Heschels theological work.12

AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA

While it is a fact that Heschel never devoted a separate study to theHolocaust, scholars continue to debate the extent to which his entireoeuvre is framed by that event.13 Edward Kaplan, Morris Faierstein, andRobert Eisen all attempt, in different yet largely compatible ways, toshow how Heschels work was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, eventhough he never confronted it in any sustained study. While I amsympathetic to these approaches, none of them address the exampleswhere Heschel links the Holocaust and Hiroshima as twin events

pointing to the descent of humanity in the twentieth century. There arenumerous cases where Heschels mention of the Holocaust is coupledith Hi hi F l i Wh i M ? h it Phil h

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become all the more striking as our people have borne the NaziHolocaust and humanity has entered the nuclear age.14

The juxtapositions of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the Holocaust

and the nuclear age are curious for someone who suffered so tragicallyin the Holocaust. It appears that for him both the Holocaust andHiroshima represent different dimensions of radical evil: the first anevil in the human that seeks to destroy others and the ability of acivilization to justify and even celebrate such genocide; the second beingthe evil that justifies using human ingenuity to destroy the planet.Faierstein may be correct that it is in Heschels Yiddish writings(obviously written for a Jewish and even Holocaust survivor audience)where he exhibits his most explicit engagement with the Holocaust,

and Robert Eisen may be correct that Heschel refracts the Holocaustinto the first-century theology of Rabbi Akiva in his Hebrew work onrabbinic theology, Torah min ha-Shamayim. I suggest that the linkage ofAuschwitz and Hiroshima points to yet another dimension of Heschelsuse of the Holocaust in his writings that may inform his understandingof the secular as the cause of human depravity and immorality.

There are two other examples of this same juxtaposition that mayhelp unpack Heschels less explicit comment on the matter. EdithWyschogrod opens her 1985 book Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger,

and Man Made Mass Death with a similar sentiment: Among theaccumulated horrors left so deep a wound as nuclear annihilationand the creation of the concentration camp as an institutional form.These phenomena are epitomized in the names Hiroshima andAuschwitz. 15 The juxtaposition of these two world-historical eventsthat almost unbelievably occurred in the same decade on differentcontinents become philosophical tropes for both Wyschogrod andHeschel, each one constructing a response to mass death and thehuman condition that they bring into existence. Heschel, somewhatuncharacteristic for his time, does not dwell on the exceptionalistclaim about the Holocaust as sui generis, a claim that became the basisfor most post-Holocaust theologians beginning in the 1960s.16 Perhapsthis may be one reason why he chose not to compose any sustainedresponse to the post-Holocaust theologies of Richard Rubenstein andEmile Fackenheim which appeared in his lifetime.17

A second example of a similar juxtaposition comes from thecontemporary Jewish theologian Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. On thetwin themes of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Schachter-Shalomi (also arefugee from the Holocaust who spent time in displaced persons campsin France after the war) who was deeply influenced by Heschel, writes:



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two great events that occurred within a single generation, the firstheralding destruction, the second holding out the possibility ofredemption. We witnessed the first event in the atomic mushroomcloud rising above the New Mexican desert . . . Hiroshima, Nagasaki,

and the arms race followed. Terrible as the Holocaust was, thenuclear arms race threatened a Holocaust a thousand times bigger.For the first time in history we were faced with the possibility that allpeoples, not just ours, might be annihilated.18

This description constitutes the first event. The second event forSchachter-Shalomi was the first view of planet earth from outer space.He continues, To me, the sight of our Earth from outer space is notonly a scientific triumph but todays most potent religious icon as well.More than I want to talk about avodat ha-shem, serving God, I want to

talk about serving the planet.19 I wonder whether, in fact, Heschelwould share Wyschogrod and Schachter-Shalomis sentiment of view-ing Hiroshima and the Holocaust as one pan-event as the greatmodern rupture of modern human civilization. For Wyschogrod theseevents both point to mass death; for Schachter-Shalomi they bothindicate the human capacity to destroy the planet.20 According toboth renderings these twin events moved humanity to the precipicewhere, as Heschel puts it, human thinking can never be the same.(philosophy cannot be the same after Hiroshima and Auschwitz.)Why Auschwitz and Hiroshima? The very linkage of the Holocaust toanother event (historical or contemporary) would be unacceptable formost post-Holocaust theologians. Perhaps for Heschel both represent,in different ways, the erasure of the religious dimension of humanexistence by a loosely defined notion of the secular understood as thehuman erasure of God (and thus the good) from the world.21

For Heschel, surely during his seminal work in the late 1940s and1950s, the problem with humanity was that it had lost its sense of

divine calling; the secular had snuffed out the religious consciousnessendemic to humanitys moral purpose. Robert Eisen captures thiswhen he writes, In a number of places in his writings in the 1940sand 1950s, Heschel intimates that responsibility for the Holocaust lieswith human beings, not with God . . . and [that] the Holocaust was aninevitable outcome of this process of deterioration.22 For Heschelthere was not enough God in the world (a common trope among ColdWar theologians) because human beings exiled God from their world.It was not that God stopped seeking human beings but that human

beings stopped seeking God in their quest to see themselves as thecenter of their own existence. This is one way Heschel understandsthe secular as we will see below The problem then was not as

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puts it, God is not silent, he has been silenced.24 Thus the crisis ofevil is less theological than anthropological.25 This is one way Heschelunderstands the rebuke of the Hebrew Prophets. Only the radical

subjectification of the self whereby the human is a solitary individualwhose responsibility lies solely in his own being (i.e., ontology)could produce the Nazi death camps and Americas choice to kill tensof thousands of innocent civilians in Japan. By turning away fromGod, the human has turned away from, and thus against, his/herfellow human (Schachter-Shalomi would add that this also contri-buted to the human turning against the planet). For the Nazis massdeath was a vehicle of genocide; for the United States mass deathwas justified to end a war.26 By linking Auschwitz to Hiroshima

Heschel ignores (or at least does not focus on) the exceptionalistargument about the Holocaust and, by extension, universalizes theHolocaust without destroying the notion of it being a genocidal waragainst the Jews.27 This is not to say that Heschel equated the eventsof Auschwitz and Hiroshima, far from it. However, in my readingI curiously found that he refused to overtly make the Holocaust anexceptional case and chose again and again to situate the Holocauston a continuum that included Hiroshima and the more generaldisease of modern humanity.28

The Holocaust and Hiroshima represent mass death and radicalevilthey are two different ways we witness the dehumanization ofthe human by the human who has stopped seeking God. Both areproducts of a world that has pushed God out in order for the humanto flourish.

ETHICS AND/AS GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS

Throughout his corpus Heschel argues that the experience of radicalamazement and wonder, or more broadly God-consciousness, willlead to acts of piety and moralityand that there is a direct line, evena logical link, between the secularized West and totalitarianism. Thisrhetoric reflects the liberal Protestantism of Niebuhr and Tillichand the Lutheran Protestantism of Barth.29 The Godless Empire ofcommunism and the disestablishment clause in America created twosocieties (the USSR and the United States) where God seemed

obsolete or anachronistic, disconnecting the humanism of traditionfrom the human edifice we call western civilization.30 It is worthnoting that such theology gave birth to the antisecularist construct in



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anti-Semitism, for example, in the sermons of Father Charles Coughlinamong others.31

For the new generation of Heschel readers, I submit this assess-

ment is outdated and the Judeo-Christian idea is not the driving forceit once was in mid-century. Perhaps it is no longer needed becauseChristian Americas fight against the secularization of the Americanlandscape has been so successful.32 Yet the problem with our worldmay arguably be not the lack of God but too much God. Has the risein radical religion itself become the enemy of freedom and tolerance?The problem may not be the radical secularism of communism andfree-market capitalism but the desecularization of western civilizationin the form of radical religion.

For Peter Berger and others, the resurgence of religion in theform of fundamentalism is not a response to the failure of the secularper se but more specifically the failure of liberal religions creationof a symbiosis of God and the secular that includes the former in thecontext of the latter.33 This new generation has a right to ask,and those of us who remember the Cold War should be compelledto consider, what is left to salvage of a Cold War theology in a God-intoxicated world where human murder, oppression, and discrimina-tion occur regularly in the name of Hashem, Jesus, or Allah. And what

relationship do these divinities have to the Creator of the universewho was supposed to lead us all, in Heschels estimation, to acts ofloving-kindness? Heschel writes that, Existence without transcen-dence is a way of living where things become idols and idols becomemonsters.34 Yes, but we know too well that transcendence canproduce its own idols and monsters. Heschel knew this too as he wasan astute student of the Middle Ages, but he never had to confront itin this particular way.

Some Cold War theologians responded to the corrosiveness of the

secular by attempting to slowly and deliberately dismantle the opaquewall excluding religion from the public sphere. Whether Heschel wasin favor of such an exercise I do not know. However, at the conclusionof Quest for God, originally published in 1954, Heschel writes:

God will return to us when we shall be willing to let Him in intoour banks and factories, into our Congress and clubs, into our courtsand investigating committees, into our homes and theaters. For Godis everywhere or nowhere, the Father of all men or no men,concerned with everything or nothing. Only in His presence shall welearn that the glory of man is not in his will to power, but in thepower of compassion.35

Gi th t t t f ff i i th ld I fi d th d

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someone who believes religion and God are the answer to all humantravail and that religion should be part of, perhaps even dominate, thepublic sphere. Heschels sympathetic readers from the Cold War and

post-Cold War period seem to share Heschels confidence on thismatterGod-consciousness will save the planet from destruction.Standing here in 2009, who can be that sure?

In order to try to see how Hescheland his receptionfits into thisCold-War context, it may be worthwhile to acknowledge that Heschelsreaders have congealed into two distinct communities. Not unlikeHegels right and left disciples, those devoted to a more orthodoxcommitment to his metaphysical project and those devoted to theapplied Hegelianism of dialectical materialism, Heschel produced

students who interpreted his teachings as a call for the reinfusionof religion in the public sphere to battle secularism and those whofocused more on his liberal activism in his later life as an indicationthat Heschel understood religion as playing a role, but not necessarilythe dominant role, in social change.36 For those on the right Heschelstood as a traditionalist. In this context, Martin Kavka defines him,at least in his early work, as theoconservative.37 For those on the leftHeschel espoused a notion of sacred humanism that served asa progressive antidote to traditionalism.38 Both these communities

have legitimate claims to Heschels legacy as he opened himself to beread both as a conservative and as a liberal.

For example, the community of postcritical Radical Orthodoxytheologians led by John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas would loveHeschels call to bring God back into the classroom, the banks, andCongress.39 Would Heschel welcome this company? Unclear. It alldepends, I suppose, on how strongly we consider context whenreading his work from the late 1940s and 1950s. The left Hescheleansfocus more on his work in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Heschel

supported liberal issues such as Civil Rights, the anti-Vietnam Warmovement, and feminism. One could argue that his liberal readerstoo easily conflate his earlier theoconservative perspective throughthe lens of his activism later in his career. The same can be said, inreverse, of his more conservative readers. Did Heschel, in fact, changehis mind from his more conservative theological views in the 1950sto his celebration of liberal causes in the 1960s? If so, what may haveprecipitated this? Was it context, culture or, perhaps, that he beganto see some problematic dimensions of his own earlier thought in

relation to the circumstances of the 1960s?. Left Hescheleans arguethat there is a direct link between his theological work in the 1950sd hi liti l ti i i th 1960 I t ki h th



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of his earlier work, beginning with his dissertation Die Prophetie publi-shed in 1936, to examine whether this theory holds.

Some Right Hescheleans argue that, in fact, his political activism

was not connected to his theological program which espoused a moreconservative ideology. They like to note that Heschel became involvedin Civil Rights and the antiwar movement only after being asked,and even then somewhat reluctantly in the beginning.40 While it iscertainly true that he quickly became passionately committed to both,it is not obvious that his earlier theological work made his activist turnnecessary. Let it be clear that I am not staking a position on thismatter. I am simply suggesting that both positions need to be arguedfrom his written corpus during these two periods.

I conclude this point with what I find to be a useful liberal readingof Heschels call for theology in the public sphere. It is a reading I donot know Heschel would agree with but one that can begin to makehis liberal voice relevant today. In his essay, The Meaning of thatHour, Martin Kavka writes:

I conclude that readers can justify Heschels statements about acovenanted polity only if they understand them as implying thefollowing two points. First, the boundary between the secular and thesacred is authentically dismantled only when religion divests itself

of self-certainty regarding its norms. Second, religion can seek toverify its claims only by embedding itself in the evidence given by theintersubjective world, where norms can be tested and altered.41

As I understand him, Kavka is arguing that Heschels categories, suchas wonder and the ineffable, cannot serve as authoritative withoutbeing subjected to human analysis and evaluation; that is, wonderas an operative category in the public sphere is only valid as it passesthrough, and survives, intersubjective analysis, that is, the realm of thesecular. In a world where God is not the solution but arguably the

problem, the secular may serve as the realm that tempers theologicalclaims by forcing them to be justified through our intersubjectiveworld. Claims that originate in the transcendent realm can have notraction in the public sphere unless they can be justified through thehuman. Faith itself is value-free, neither good nor bad, holy norprofane. The work this caveat does for the left is deflect the RadicalOrthodox notion of rejecting secular reason in favor of a theologicalperspective founded on the notion of a transcendence that is not firsttested by the intersubjective world. This is not simply the reasoning

of these transcendent claims but, as I understand it, subjecting theseclaims to the full array of the human experience: historical, rational,h l i l d ti l S h t h t J

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but also humanists (perhaps even secular humanists of a radical kind)advocating a pure human sphere where society can, and must, nego-tiate its ethical parameters?

TWO EXAMPLES OF JUDAISM AND THE SECULAR: DAVID NOVAK ANDGERSHOM SCHOLEM

I want to illustrate the need for the secular in religious discourse intwo examples; one from the contemporary theologian and philosopherDavid Novak (a student of Heschels) and the second from thepreeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.

David Novak readily acknowledges that his theological thinkingis deeply influenced by his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel.43 WhileNovaks philosophical and theological work does not often mentionHeschel, Heschelean sentiment arguably exists throughout. In hisbook, The Jewish Social Contract, Novak makes a suggestive distinctionbetween secularism and secularity that may be useful in trying toascertain the secular in Heschels theology.44 Novak defines secularityas the realm of interhuman, multicultural interaction that does notlook to any unique community with its singular historical revelation

and special tradition as the exclusive source of social legitimization.Secularism, on the other hand, is the idea that human beings canand should constitute their corporate life only with reference totheir capacity for social construction.45 In other words, secularityis the interface between transcendent claimsseparated from theirhistorical/exclusivist originsand the human construction of society.Secularity functions best when the sacred limits the profane andthe profane is not reduced to the sacred.46 In some way this is theinverse of Jeffrey Stouts claim in Democracy and Tradition about

religion in the public sphere. Stout argues that the secular can allowreligion to have a voice at the table as long as religion agrees to abideby the rules constituted by the secular.47 Novak claims that the realmof the secular can have a voice in religious communities (this allrevolves around his lengthy analysis of the talmudic category dinade-malkhuta dinathe law of the land is the law) but not determinethe terms of the discourse.48 Whether, indeed, Heschels thinkingcan sustain this move, and even contribute to it, would require a closeexamination of the concept of the secular that Heschel does not

himself develop. Stout and Novak may be good lenses for such ananalysis.49

G h S h l l ti hi t th l i it diff t



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the secular as the very foundation of modern Jewish existence and thevery condition for its revitalization.50 Scholem maintained that thesecular undermined the authority of tradition (i.e. Orthodoxy) that

intentionally suppressed many Jewish texts that Scholem believedcontained the most creative expressions of Judaism. It is well knownthat Scholem accused the nineteenth-century Jewish historians ofintentionally erasing Kabbala from their reconstructions of Jewishcivilization. Less known in his belief that Orthodoxy, as the hegemonicpower over tradition, was guilty of the same thing. It is, of course,also well known that contemporary Jewish traditionalism is filled withKabbala and Hasidism. Scholems point is more nuanced. He arguesthat it is not only the existence of Kabbala that is at stake but also

how it is being read and interpreted and how the heretical or quasi-heretical dimensions of Kabbala have been suppressed because theirinterpretation has been dominated by Orthodox hegemony curtailingthe free thinking that the secular provides. While Scholem acknowl-edges the inherent conservative nature of tradition, he writes, Thereare domains of the tradition that are hidden under the debris ofcenturies that lie waiting to be discovered and turned into gooduse.51 This debris, according to Scholem, is in part due to theselective way Orthodoxy included and excluded that which it deemed

appropriate for mass consumption.52

For Scholem, the secular is part of the dialectic of Jewish existence.In fact, he argues that the secular as an ideology that rejects the nomosand dogma of tradition is embedded in tradition itself. Thus to rejectthe secular is to reject tradition and to prevent traditions completeunfolding.53 This idea is encapsulated in Scholems professed religiousanarchism. While he maintains that Kabbala itself contains the seedsof religious anarchy, kabbalism rarely becomes anarchistic (except incases like Sabbateanism which is central to Scholems work and, in

his mind, the beginning of Jewish modernity), because the dogmas oftradition and lawto which Kabbala is committedprevent it fromtaking its own doctrines to what may be their logical conclusion.54 Thusthere is always a dimension of Kabbala that remains concealed.

For Scholem modernity provides the conditions for the disclosureof this dimension of Kabbala. This is because modernity underminesthe dogmatic element of tradition enabling these subterranean dimen-sions to emerge no longer suppressed by the authority of tradition.55

Thus the scholar of Kabbala (Scholem consistently distinguishes the

professor of Kabbala from the Kabbalist, yet views both as essential)plays a primary role in this dialectic as he or she, through secularhi t i h di d di l th hidd di i f

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Scholem makes a remarkably Sabbatean claim related to his contem-porary world: Perhaps the disappearance of God into a point ofnothingness has a higher purpose and only in a world which has been

totally emptied of him will be where his kingdom is revealed.57

It should be noted, however, that Scholem believed secularismwas only a part of the dialectic and not its culmination. Hence, it toowill be overcome. It was his belief, in fact, that the discovery anddisclosure of these lost kabbalistic traditions, some of which exhibitedlatent or even overt heresy, would contribute to the overcoming of thesecular and the birth of another manifestation of Jewish tradition.58

This would not yield a return to some traditional kabbalism butsomething new and yet unknown. But as he states in the oft-cited final

paragraph of his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, such speculation isnot the vocation of the professor of Kabbala.59

If we juxtapose Scholems notion of the necessity of the secularto assure the continued creativity of tradition and Novaks theory ofsecularity as that which constructively limits the profane throughinteraction with the sacred and prevents the profane from beingreduced to the sacred, we see two examples where tradition or the sacredis preserved by its opposite. And, for both Novak and Scholem, thesecular is embedded in the sacred. In Novaks case, it is done through the

rabbinic legislation of the law of the land is the law; for Scholemit is through the inherent antinomian tendencies in Kabbala that arelargely tempered by tradition that, in modernity and through secularhistoriography, are allowed to emerge and found the next stage of Jewishhistory. In what follows I will argue that there may also be a realm of thesecular that informs, and mediates, Heschels theology of pathos.

JUDAISM, THE BIBLE, AND THE SECULAR IN HESCHEL

These two examples of the place of the secular (or in Novaks locution,secularity) in contemporary Jewish theology then brings me to themain point of this exerciseto explore the realm of the secular inHeschels thought in light of the work presently being done to rethinkthe secular as a category for, and against, theology, and more speci-fically, as a category necessary for new forms of political theology.Heschel mentions the secular in passing numerous times in hiswritings (almost always pejoratively) but never develops what he

means by it. His fleeting definition of the secular as Godless, and thussomething to avoid, raises the question as to its relevance today.J ff St t k th ti it i tl Wh if t ll d



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where political discussion has been secularized.60 Does radicalamazement contribute to secular morality or supplant it? One cannottake a stand on Heschels thinking on this issue until we develop

how Heschel would understand secular morality.Let me briefly return to Heschels comment cited above con-

cerning bringing God into the banks, Congress, the courtsin a word,to diffuse the secular sphere or, perhaps better, infuse it with God-consciousness. In his Formations of the Secular Talal Asad suggeststhat the modern nation-state, as an affirmation of collective solidarity,may in fact serve as a kind of secular religion (that is, nation-statesprovide things that religions provided before the nation-state).61 Butwhat happens when traditional religion becomes the rule of law

in such a nation-state? Does not religion then become secularizedprecisely as it is politicized? To use Yeshuyahu Leibowitzs somewhatprovocative, if polemical, locution, if there is an Israeli law prohibitingdriving on the Sabbath is it not the case that driving on the Sabbathis no longer a religious transgression but a traffic violation? Leibowitzadvocated the privatization of religion in Israel not to protect thesecular state from religion but to protect religion from the secularstate.62 For Leibowitz, and perhaps for Assad, there is a need tomaintain the secular as a space that enables religion to function at all

if we lose the secular, we secularize religion.63

I agree that Heschels notion of bringing God into the publicsphere is not about creating a theocracy. And yet, in order not tocollapse the theological and the political (something that someadvocates of religion would like, here and elsewhere), we mustinvestigate the distinctions between God-consciousness, what I wouldcall in Heschel, sacred humanism, and religion, the manifest faithpractices and faith-based transcendental claims in the public sphere.The notion of sacred humanism (a locution never used explicitly by

Heschel) is perhaps best captured when he writes, The heart of therelationship between God and human beings is reciprocity, inter-dependence. The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify [butnot erase, my addition] the secular.64 In his mind, the unhumanizedsacred and the desanctified secular are both guilty of the same thingthey are both void of human compassion. The first leads to religiousfundamentalism (being intoxicated with God), the latter to ontology(being intoxicated with the self). For the remainder of this essayI would like to suggest that Heschels notion of God-consciousness

(radical amazement, the ineffable, etc.) may be, in fact, thegroundwork for a secular theology. I will illustrate this by examiningf b i f f hi 1963 St f d L t bli h d

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In A Sacred Canopy Peter Berger argues that the Bible is the originof the secular.65 By that he means that the Bibles war against idolatryis really a battle against the fusion of nature and God. In the Bible,

at least according to Berger, God was transcendent and thus theworld was something other than divine. This other is an early formof a space sometimes called profane (not-holy as opposed toun-holy) and much later called the secular.

I mention this only as a frame into which I read Who is Man?These lectures constitute a meditation on a philosophical questionthat occupied, among others, Martin Heidegger. In these lectures,Heschel critically evaluates the concept of ontology or Heideggersquestion, what is man? For Heschel, as I read him, ontology serves

as a modern correlate of the paganism the prophets contested. Forhim, the main problem with ontology is that it erases the transcendentas a place of meaning and makes of it the theater of being. ForHeidegger, like Spinoza, everything that is, resides in itself only.A crucial difference between Heidegger and Spinoza, one that mayenable Heschel to be sympathetic to the latter and not the former,is that for Heidegger being is, by definition, temporal, yielding aradical immanentist position that rejects transcendence as a categoryof thinking.66

Heschel puts it somewhat differently, A major difference betweenontological and biblical thinking is that the first seeks to relate thehuman being to a transcendence called being as such; whereas thesecond, realizing that human being is more than being, seeks to relateman to divine living, to a transcendence called the living God.67

Heschel was acutely aware that ontology as a substitute for theologyis dangerous the same way romantic mysticism is dangerous as asubstitute for reason.68 Both collapse the categories of transcendenceand immanence: mysticism through unio mystica and ontology by

making man the sole carrier of being. Mysticism effaces the humanfor God, ontology God for the human. Biblical man, argues Heschel,does not ask the ontological question what am I?that is, what is thenature of my existencebut rather who am I?that is, what is thenature of my relation, and obligation, to an other.69 For Heschel,ontological man is solipsistic (what am I?), while biblical man is,by definition, always looking beyond himself because he is asking adifferent question.

The coherence of Heschels critique of ontology is not at issue

here. As is often the case in his writings he, perhaps too easily,allows himself schematic assertions in order to drive home rhetoricall ti ft d ti ll Wh t i t t i th t



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a temporary bracketing of the transcendent. There needs to be a placewhere the human qua human as sovereign can enter into a relation.On this point, it is worth noting that Heschel was strongly influenced

by Edmund Husserls phenomenological method that may contributeto the place of the bracketing of the transcendent in his theology.70

Heschels sacred humanism is as much a rejection of unio mysticaas it is of ontology. To reject unio mystica and ontology, two categoriesthat arguably collapse the distinction between immanence and trans-cendence, Heschel creates space for the human as distinct from Godyet not alone in the world. This may be a category we might call thesecular dimension of his theology. By collapsing the transcendentinto the human, what Heschel considers to be the tragic move of

ontology, this space disappears and with it relation, the key to sacredhumanism. For biblical man, however, the space without God (thesecular?) is where the human lives and where he experiences God.71

It is not simply that we bring God into this space, make God present,or even discover Gods presence in this space, but rather that we livethere with an understanding that this space is given in order to liveresponsibly in it.

This fear of the collapse of the human (in mysticism) or of thedivine (in ontology) may also speak to the realm of the political.

Are we dealing with a similar danger if we follow one version ofneoconservative ideology (and also some progressive spiritualism) thatseeks to collapse, or at least diminish, the separation between theprivate and public realm when it comes to religion? Given Heschelspassionate polemic against such a collapse in the theological andphilosophical realms, would he, could he, support such a politicalmove? On the one hand, a neoconservative or spiritually progressivereader could point to Heschels comment cited above about bringingGod into our banks and factories, into our Congress and clubs,

into our courts and investigating committees, into our homes andtheaters. Perhaps this statement needs to be contextualized as aproduct of a certain time and place that is no more, a time whentheologians felt that religion was being marginalized in Americansociety. More generally, and especially in Who is Man? where hisnotion of sacred humanism is most clearly developed, Heschel advo-cates for the realm of the human as a sovereign (secular) space thatexists in relation to its transcendent source. In this instance, I wouldconclude that Heschels call to bring God everywhere is simply an

example of time-bound and short-sighted rhetoric (he wrote thosewords in the early 1950s) that needs to be reread in the context of hisl t th ht

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or biblical religion. Could it be that in these lectures in the early 1960sHeschel is not advocating religion at all (at least not in the waywe conventionally understand it). Rather, these lectures are about

inhabiting the secular space the Bible provides, asking us to live inthe secular in a relational and responsible way. That is, can one relateto the other as person and not object, something that is inexhaustiblerather than self-contained.72 Such a posture is not religious per sebut rather biblical, or perhaps secular (here Peter Bergers commentabout the Bible creating the secular is pertinent) because it acknowl-edges a relation other than God yet bases that relation on a feeling ofbeing commanded. It is quite curious that in these lectures Hescheldoes not speak directly about being commanded by God. Rather,

biblical man, according to Heschel, answers the call of obeying thecommandment of creation.73 Who is man? Man is the one whoresponds to the command of creation that proclaims Let there be.

CONCLUSION

This essay is meant to suggest that those of us who believe in the

liberal Heschel (and this is surely not all of us), need to take himout of his Cold War context and in so doing inevitably invalidate aportion of his theology as simply unsalvageable for us. If we do not,I fear important ground is ceded to his more theoconservativereaders who, in my view, have a strong case solely from his earlytheological writings.74 Heschel has always attracted religious readers,those who share his intuitive sense of the transcendent. I argued thatsuch romantic visions of the transcendent are today too easily coupledwith absolutist ideologies when translated into the realm of the

political. One telling, and tragic, example in contemporary Judaismis the Israeli settler movement, a phenomenon Heschel barely hadthe time to witness but likely would have lamented.75

What is needed, then, is to attenuate his religious romanticismwith a human-centered notion of the secular that can mediate andscrutinize all religious claims. In short, we need to desanctify Hescheland (re)read him as someone whose overly spiritualized theologycontains an important secular dimension where the human is notsimply the recipient of the divine command to be a Jew but is also the

arbiter of the universal command to be human. For his progressivereligious readers the war against secularism that served as his frameof reference has shifted To make his work relevant for progressive



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I have argued that his Stanford Lectures published as Who is Man?is perhaps the best place to start as it is there where Heschel, late inhis career, steps out of his role as a Jewish theologian and scholar

and engages the broader questions of ontology, humanism, and theBible as a template for living as a human beingand not only a Jewcreated in the image of God.76

UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA

NOTES

1. See Edward K. Kaplan, Coming to America: Abraham Joshua

Heschel 19401941,Modern Judaism, 27, no. 2 (2007): 129145.2. See Edward K. Kaplan, Heschel and the Vietnam War, Tikkun

Magazine, July/August 2007; and idem. Part II: Heschel on Vietnam,Tikkun Magazine, September/October, 2007, pp. 114116, 68. On CivilRights see Heschel, Religion and Race, The White Man on Trial, inThe Insecurity of Freedom (New York, 1966), pp. 85111.

3. Some of the important studies on Heschel by Christians includeAlfred McBride, Heschel: Religious Educator (New York, 1973); John C.Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought (New York,

1985); Michael Chester, Divine Pathos and Human Being: The Theology ofAbraham Joshua Heschel (New York, London, 2005); and Brenda FitchFairaday, Thomas Mertons Prophetic Voice: Merton, Heschel, andVatican II, in Merton and Judaism: Holiness in Words, ed. Beatrice Bruteau(Louisville, KY, 2003), pp. 269282.

4. Heschel speaks quite openly about the evils of materialismin numerous places. See, for example, Existence and Celebration, in

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York,1996), p. 31.

5. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World

Politics, ed. Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), pp. 118.6. From a Jewish perspective see Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of

Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York, 2003).7. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

(Stanford CA, 2003) and Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the ModernWorld (Chicago, 1994).

8. Heschel, Who is Man?(Stanford, CT, 1965), p. 81.9. Heschel deals with some of these matters parenthetically in an

early two-part essay, The Quest for Certainty in Saadias Philosophy,published in the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1944. For an analysis of this

see Gordon Tucker, A.J. Heschel and the Problem of ReligiousCertainty in this volume. Cf. Heschel, The Quest for Certainty in SaadiasPh l h (N Y k 1944) 1 h h k li i

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10. The impact of the Great War on social theorists and theologiansof all kinds is treated in Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory(New York, 2000), pp. 114154.

11. E-mail correspondence with Susannah Heschel, September 3, 2007.Susannah Heschel notes in that e-mail that her father said, If there ishope for the future of Judaism in America, it lies with the Black church.

12. See Michael Morgan, Interim Judaism, p. 16. Cf. Steven T. Katz,Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hasidism, Journal of Jewish Studies, 31,no. 1 (1980): 82104 and Jon Levenson, The Contradictions ofA.J. Heschel, Commentary, 106, no. 1 (1998): 3438.

13. Heschels essay, The Meaning of this War, is probably the closestwe have to an essay on the Holocaust. The essay was originally deliveredto a Quaker group in Frankfurt in 1938 under the title, Versuch einer

Deutung, and then translated, revised, and published as The Meaningof this War in The Hebrew Union College Bulletin in 1943. As was Heschelsway, this essay went through various transformations and was publishedseveral times afterward. The 1944 version that appeared in Liberal

Judaism is reprinted as, The Meaning of This War (World War II), inMoral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pp. 209212. For a history of theessay, see Martin Kavka, The Meaning of That Hour: Prophecy,Phenomenology and the Public Sphere in the Early Writings of AbrahamJoshua Heschel, in Religions and the Secular in a Violent World: Politics,Terror, Ruin, ed. Clayton Crockett (Charlottesville, 2006), pp. 108136.Cf. Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America(New Haven, London, 2007), pp. 4548. For the best studies see EdwardK. Kaplan, Confronting the Holocaust, in Holiness in Words (AlbanyNY, 1996), pp. 115133; Morris Faierstein, Heschel and the Holocaust,

Modern Judaism, 19, no. 3 (1999): 255275; Zachary Braiterman, (God)After Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ, 1998), pp. 6771; and Robert Eisen,A.J. Heschels Rabbinic Theology as a Response to the Holocaust,

Modern Judaism, 23, no. 3 (2003): 211225.14. Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York, 1973), p. 210. See also

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling (New York, 2005), p. 151.15. Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-MadeMass Death (New Haven, London, 1985), p. ix.

16. On the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust see EmilFackenheim, Gods Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical

Reflections (New York, 1970). Most post-Holocaust theology subsequent toFackenheims programmatic analysis assume, in one way or another, theunprecedented nature of the Holocaust. See Eliezer Berkowitz, Faith afterthe Holocaust (Hoboken NJ, 1973), pp. 86113 and Braiterman,(God) After

Auschwitz, pp. 112133.

17. Richard Rubensteins After Auschwitz: Radical Theology andContemporary Judaism first appeared in 1966. And Fackenheims, GodsP i Hi t bli h d i 1970 H h l i t th l J i h



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others who lived into the period of post-Holocaust theology yet chose notto contribute to its growing discourse. See Zachary Braiterman, (God) After

Auschwitz, pp. 6284, 87.

18. Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling, p. 151.19. Ibid., p. 152.20. It is interesting to note that Heschel spoke quite despairingly over

the moon landing in 1969, invoking Psalms 115:17: The heavens are theLords and the earth he gave to humankind. He apparently viewed themoon landing as an act of hubris.

21. Another example of linking Auschwitz to a modern tragedythusquestioning the sui generis nature of the Holocaust historicallycan befound in Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans.Michael Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York, 1998), p. 241.

22. Robert Eisen, A.J. Heschels Rabbinic Theology, p. 212. Cf.Kaplan, Holiness in Words, pp. 115123.

23. See Berkowitz, Faith after the Holocaust, esp. pp. 86113.24. Heschel, Man is Not Alone (New York, 1951), p. 152.25. See, for example, in Heschel, A Passion for Truth, pp. 298300.

There Heschel seems to deflect the notion of theodicy to a question ofhuman complicity to evil. I would like to acknowledge Shai Held for hishelpful comments on this dimension of Heschels theology.

26. I do not mean to suggest Heschel equated Nazism with theU.S. decision to use the atomic bomb. However, I simply do not find

in Heschels writings any real attempt to argue for the sui generis natureof the Holocaust from a theological perspective. In terms of its historicaluniqueness, this was something that did not seem to interest him.

27. This is not to say that for Heschel the Holocaust was not a sourceof unbearable pain. See Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Heschels

Israel: An Echo of Eternity (Woodstock, VT, 1995), p. xxvi.28. See Heschel, Who is Man?p.13.29. On possible correlations between Barth and Heschel see David

Novak, Divine Revelation, in Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide, eds.N. de Lange and M. Freud-Kendal (New York, 2005), pp. 278, 279 andDavid Novaks essay in this volume. It should be noted that Heschel wasdeeply troubled by the fact that some, or many, of his Protestant teachersduring his ten years in Germany combined their religious pietywith politics to throw their support to the Nazi regime. I want to thankSusannah Heschel for this observation. This appears to be a more generalphenomenon. See Mark Lilla, Gods Politics, The New York Times

Magazine, August 19, 2007, p. 35. While Heschel was a bit young to beamong those in Germany during World War I, the dismay among thestudent body reached into his generation as well.

30. It is somewhat ironic that theologians, such as Heschel saw thenegative side of the separation of church and state even as this veryseparation greatly contributed to Judaisms flourishing in America See

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On church-state separation in the public sphere, see David Novak,Covenental Rights (Princeton, 2000).

31. See Steven Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God became a

National Icon (New York, 2004), p. 258.32. The very notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition may still havesome currency in the popular political realm, but it has lost much of itsforce in the theological realm. On its centrality among Jewish theologiansin the 1950s and 1960s, see Arthur A. Cohens collected essays on thesubject, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (New York, 1957).

33. For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon see Mark Lilla,Gods Politics, The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007, p. 35.Cf. Lilla,The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West(New York,2007).

34. Heschel, Who is Man?, p. 86.35. Heschel, Quest for God (originally published as Mans Quest for

God), p. 150.36. See, for example, the comments by Edward K. Kaplan in his

Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (New Haven, London,2007), p. xiii.

37. See Martin Kavka, The Meaning of That Hour.38. This resembles Bubers two terms, biblical humanism and

Hebrew humanism, that clearly influenced Heschels thinking. I wantto thank Edward Kaplan for suggesting sacred humanism as a more

precise Heschelean term.39. For example, see the essays in eds. J. Milbank, C. Pickstock, and

G. Ward,Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology(London and New York, 1999)40. This may be true of Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Rights as well.

See, for example, Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: Inconvenient Hero(New York, 1995).

41. M. Kavka, The Meaning of That Hour, p. 112.42. See Casanova, Public Religions, p. 5.43. See, for example, the yet unpublished essay by David Novak,

Heschels Phenomenology of Revelation, delivered at a conference onHeschels work in Warsaw in the summer of 2007. I want to thank DavidNovak for sending me his essay.

44. David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in PoliticalTheology (Princeton, 2005).

45. Ibid., p. 121.46. Ibid., p. 122. For another distinction between secular and secu-

larity in contemporary Jewish theology see Arthur A. Cohen, The Jew,Secularity, and Christian Culture, in The Myth of the Judeo-ChristianTradition, pp. 173188.

47. Jeffrey Stout, Tradition and Democracy (Princeton, 2005), esp.pp. 118140.48 See Novak Jewish Social Contract pp 100123 The question as to



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Responses to the Holocaust, in his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley,1993), p. 310. The legal principle, the law of the kingdom is valid lawwhich was quoted by some reformers in the nineteenth century to prove

the priority of state law even in Jewish terms, originally meant theopposite. It pertained to property only and delineated aWiderstandsrecht;only if a ruler acts in accord with the law of the land is one obligated toobey him. See Babylonian Talmud. Nedarim 28a; Gittin 10b; Baba Batra54b55a; and more generally S. Shilo, Dina de-Malkhuta Dina (Jerusalem,1974).

49. For another approach to these issues see Jurgen Habermas, Onthe Relations between the Secular State and Religion, in PoliticalTheologies, eds. H. De Vries and L. Sullivan (New York, 2006), pp. 251260. Another voice that may contribute to Jewish definitions of secularism

is Russian-born Jew Chaim Zhitlowsky (18651943). See Sarna, AmericanJudaism (New Haven, London, 2003), p. 223.

50. See, for example, Avraham Shapira, The Symbolic Plane and itsSecularization into the Spiritual World of Gershom Scholem, Journal of

Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 3 (1994): 331352.51. Gershom Scholem, Israel and the Diaspora, cited in David Biale,

Gershom Scholem: Kabbala and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p. 8.52. This is changing in our contemporary world, both inside and

outside Orthodoxy. The publication of Abraham Abulafias corpus by anultra-Orthodox publisher is one telling example. For more see Boaz Huss,

The New Age of Kabbala: Contemporary Kabbalah, the New Age, andPostmodern Spirituality, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 6, no. 2 (2007):107125; and Jonathan Garb, The Chosen will become Herds: Studies inTwentieth-Century Kabbala [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2005).

53. See Gershom Scholem, Zionism Dialectic of Continuity andRebellion, inUnease in Zion, ed. Ehud ben Ezer (New York, 1974), p. 290and Biale, Kabbala and Counter-History, p. 135.

54. For perhaps the best discussion of Scholems anarchism see EricJacobs, The Metaphysics of the Profane (New York, 2003), pp. 5284.

55. See Gershom Scholem, Secularism and its DialecticalTransformation (1976), in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in OurTime and Other Essays, ed. A. Shapira, trans., J. Chipman (Philadelphia andJerusalem, 1997), pp. 100101.

56. See, for example in his 1937 letter to Salman Schocken publishedin English as A Candid Letter about My Intentions in Studying Kabbala,in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism Today, pp. 35. The letter waswritten in German and was published in Hebrew translation in the Israelidaily Ha-Arez, Erev Pesah, 1981.

57. Biale, Kabbala and Counter-History, p. 153.

58. It might be fruitful to compare Scholems notion of religiousanarchy at the core of his speculations about the future and EmileD rkheims idea of effer escence in his El t F f R li i

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which new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide tohumanity. Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York, 1965), p. 475.I want to thank Nathaniel Berman for this reference to Durkheim.

59. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York,1941), p. 350.60. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, p. 103.61. Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 181201.62. This may underlie early American pietists such as Roger Williams

in their advocacy of the disestablishment clause. See Feldman, Dont Wishme a Merry Christmas, pp. 127131.

63. Scholem would see it a bit differently. For him, if we lose thesecular dimensions of tradition we remain suppressed and thus traditionitself is unfulfilled.

64. Cited in Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Israel: An Echo ofEternity (Woodstock, VT, 1997), p. xxvii.

65. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York, 1967), pp. 114125.66. See Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions in Jewish History, p. 331.67. Heschel, Who is Man?, p. 68.68. It is thus significant that Heschels early work includes a two-part

essay on the notion of certainty in Saadia Gaons philosophy, and a biog-raphy of Moses Maimonides. See, The Quest for Certainty in SaadiasPhilosophy, Jewish Quarterly Review, 33 (1942, 1943): 213264 and

Maimonides (New York, 1983), originally published as Maimonides. Eine

biographie (Berlin, 1935). This suggests, perhaps, that his later work onHasidism and his Hasidic-infused theology is always in dialectical tensionand relation to medieval rationalism. Hence, his sometimes overly roman-tic prose should not be taken as being severed from the rational.

69. Heschel, Who Is Man?, p. 28.70. See David Novak, Heschels Phenomenology of Revelation and

Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschels Idea of Revelation (Atlanta, GA,1989).

71. This may be in agreement with Harvey Cox who argues thatdereligioning can be a good thing because it liberates people from whatcan be confining religious ethical modalities and enables individuals tothink more carefully, and freely, about religious consciousness. See HarveyCox, The Secular City (New York, 1966), pp. 1820. Cf. Robert Wuthnow,

After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley and LosAngeles, 1998), p. 73.

72. Heschel, Who is Man?, p. 28.73. Ibid, p. 97.74. It should be noted that one can sense ambiguity about what Martin

Kavka now calls a theo-conservative position even in his earliest

theological writings. Moreover, as David Novak and Edward Kaplanhave suggested, one can see traces of his social consciousness even beforethe 1960s However even given this point one can surely make a strong



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75. See, for example, S. Heschels preface to Heschel, Israel: An Echo ofEternity.

76. It is a curious fact worth further investigation that Heschels

theological career in English begins with the 1951 Man Is Not Alonesubtitled A Philosophy of Religion and ends with Who is Man? both ofwhich engage questions related, but not limited, to Judaism.

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Documents

The Role of the Secular in Heschel's Theology