MUST READ

No Religion is an Island – Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Image from www.thepeoplesvoice.org

Image from www.thepeoplesvoice.org

[First posted  2012.  “AJH”— Abraham Joshua Heschel—as you must have already noticed from the frequency we feature his writings—is a favorite resource person of ours, whose words we quoted in our Statement of Faith.  That quote is the opening of his essay, the title of which is the title of this article.  Being a proponent of interfaith dialogue, he was invited to give a key speech at a congress of Catholic theologians on which he wrote another essay included in the collection of essays his daughter Susanah Heschel published, among our MUST OWN valued library collection.

 

 No Religion is an Island is a whole section of that collection, truly a MUST READ for people of all faiths. Essays included in this section are:  Choose Life!, On Prayer, The God of Israel and Christian Renewal, What Ecumenism Is, What We Might Do Together, and Reinhold Niebuhr. We can only select excerpts here from his inaugural lecture in 1965 when he was visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary ; notice the year, and realize the relevance of his words that rings across over 50 years hence, into the 2nd decade of our 21st century and spiritual and real condition of our world and times.  Sequels to this post as well as other writings of AJH featured here are:

Reformatting, images and highlights added.—Admin 1.]

 

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I speak as a member of a congregation whose founder was Abraham, 

and the name of my rabbi is Moses.

 

I speak as a person who is often afraid and terribly alarmed lest God has turned away from us in disgust and even deprived us of the power to understand His word.  In the words of Isaiah perceived in his vision (6:9-10)

 

Then I said, “Here I am!  Send me.” And he said, “Go, and say to this people: Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.  Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.

 

Some of us are like patients in the state of final agony—who scream in delirium: The doctor is dead, the doctor is dead.

 

I speak as a person who is convinced that the fate of the Jewish people and the fate of the Hebrew Bible are intertwined.  The recognition of our status as Jews, the legitimacy of our survival, is possible only in a world in which the God of Abraham is revered.

 

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 Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the consciousness of the Western world goes on.  It is on the issue of saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the minds of man that Jews and Christians are called upon to work together.  None of us can do it alone.  Both of us must realize that in our age anti-Semitism is anti-Christianity and that anti-Christianity is anti-Semitism.

 

Image from www.sodahead.com

Image from www.sodahead.com

. . . Is Judaism, is Christianity, ready to face the challenge?  When I speak about the radiance of the Bible in the minds of man, I do not mean its being a theme for information, Please but rather an openness to God’s presence in the Bible, the continuous ongoing effort for a breakthrough in the soul of man, the guarding of the precarious position of being human, even a little higher than human, despite defiance and in the face of despair.

 

The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian—but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and expectation of the living God. . .  Jews must realize that the spokesmen of the Enlightenment who attacked Christianity were no less negative in their attitude toward Judaism.  They often blamed Judaism for the misdeeds of the daughter religion. The casualties of the devastation caused by the continuous onslaughts on biblical religion in modern times are to be found among Jews as well as among Christians.

 

On the other hand, the community of Israel must always be mindful of the mystery of aloneness and uniqueness of its own being.

 

 “There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:19), says the Gentile prophet Balaam.  

 

Is it not safer for us to remain in isolation and to refrain from sharing perplexities and certainties with Christians?

 

Our era marks the end of complacency, the end of evasion, the end of self-reliance.  Jews and Christians share the perils and the fears; we stand on the brink of the abyss together.  Interdependence of political and economic conditions all over the world is a basic fact of our situation.  Disorder in a small obscure country in any part of the world evokes anxiety in people all over the world.

 

Parochialism has become untenable. . . The religions of the world are no more self-sufficient, no more independent, no more isolated than individuals or nations.  Energies, experiences, and ideas that come to life outside the boundaries of a particular religion or all religions continue to challenge and to affect every religion.

 

Horizons are wider, dangers are greater . . . No religion is an island. We are all involved with one another.  Spiritual betrayal on the part of one affects the faith of all of us.  Views adopted in one community have an impact on other communities.  Today religious isolationism is a myth.  For all the profound differences in perspective and substance, Judaism is sooner or later affected by the intellectual, moral, and spiritual events within the Christian society, and vice versa.

 

We ail to realize that while different exponents of faith in the world of religion continue to be wary of the ecumenical movement, there is another ecumenical movement, worldwide in extent and influence:  nihilism.  We must choose between interfaith and internihilism.  Cynicism is not parochial.  Should religions insist upon the illusion of complete isolation?  Should we refuse to be on speaking terms with one another and hope for each other’s failure?  Or should we pray for each other’s health and help one another in preserving one’s respective legacy, in preserving a common legacy?

 

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We are heirs to a long history of mutual contempt among religions and religious denominations, of religious coercion, strife, and persecutions. . . The psalmist’s great joy is in proclaiming: Truth and mercy have met together (Psalms 85:11).  Yet frequently faith and the lack of mercy enter a union, out of which bigotry is born, the presumption that my faith, my motivation, is pure and holy, while the faith of those who differ in creed—even those in my own community—is impure and unholy.  How can we be cured of bigotry, presumption, and the foolishness of believing that we have been triumphant while we have all been defeated?

 

Is it not clear that in spite of fundamental disagreements there is a convergence of some of our commitments, of some of our views, tasks we have in common, evils we must fight together, goals we share, a predicament afflicting us all?  On what basis do we people of different religious commitments meet one another?

 

  • First and foremost, we meet as human beings who have much in common:  a heart, a face, a voice, the presence of a soul, fears, hope, the ability to trust, a capacity for compassion and understanding, the kinship of being human.
    • My first task in every encounter is to comprehend the personhood of the human being I face, to sense the kinship of being human, solidarity of being. . .
    • The human is a disclosure of the divine, and all men are one in God’s care for man.  Many things on earth are precious, some are holy, humanity is holy of holies.  To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense image of God, the presence of God.

The primary aim of these reflections is to inquire how a Jew out of his commitment and a Christian out of his commitment can find a religious basis for communication and cooperation on matters relevant to their moral and spiritual concern in spite of disagreement.

 

There are 4 dimensions of religious existence:

 

  1. The teaching, the essentials of which are summarized in the form of a creed, which serve as guiding principles in our thinking about matters temporal or eternal, the dimension of the doctrine;
  2. faith, inwardness, the direction of one’s heart, the intimacy of religion, the dimension of privacy;
  3. the law, or the sacred act to be carried out in the sanctuary in society or at home, the dimension of the deed;
  4. the context in which creed, faith, and ritual come to pass, such as the community or the covenant, history, tradition, the dimension of transcendence.

 

I suggest that the most significant basis for meeting of men of different religious traditions is the level of fear and trembling, of humility and contrition, where our individual moments of faith are mere waves in the endless ocean of mankind’s reaching out for God, where all formulations and articulations appear as understatements, where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency of answering God’s commandment, while stripped of pretension and conceit we sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith.

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What divides us?  What unites us?  We disagree in law and creed in commitments which lie at the very heart of our religious existence.  We say no to one another in some doctrines essential and sacred to us.  

 

What unites us?  Our being accountable to God, our being objects of God’s concern, precious in His eyes.  Our conceptions of what ails us may be different, but the anxiety is the same.  The language, the imagination, the concretization of our hopes are different, but the embarrassment is the same, and so is the sigh, the sorrow, and the necessity to obey. . . . . Above all, while dogmas and forms of worship are divergent, God is the same.  

 

What unite us?

  • A commitment to the Hebrew Bible as Holy Scripture.
  • Faith in the Creator, the God of Abraham;
  • commitment to many of His commandments, to justice and mercy;
  • a sense of contrition;
  • sensitivity to the sanctity of life and to the involvement of God in history;
  • the conviction that without the holy the good will be defeated;
  • prayer that history may not end before the end of days; and so much more.

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In conversations with Protestant and Catholic theologians I have more than once come upon an attitude of condescension to Judaism, a sort of pity for those who have not yet seen the light; tolerance instead of reverence.  On the other hand, I cannot forget that when Paul Tillich, Gustave Weigel, and I were invited by the Ford Foundation to speak from the same platform on the religious situation in America, we not only found ourselves in deep accord in disclosing what ails us but, above all, without prior consultation, the three of us confessed that our guides in this critical age are the prophets of Israel, not Aristotle, not Karl Marx, but Amos and Isaiah.

 

The theme of these reflections is not a doctrine or an institution called Christianity but human beings all over the world, both present and past, who worship God as followers of Jesus, and my problem is how I should relate myself to them spiritually.  The issue I am called upon to respond to is not the truth of dogma but the faith and the spiritual power of the commitment of Christians.  In facing the claim and the dogma of the Church, Jews and Christians are strangers and stand in disagreement with one another. Yet there are levels of existence where Jews and Christians meet as sons and brothers.  . . . .

 

 It is not flesh and blood but honor and obedience that save the right of sonship.  We claim brotherhood by being subject to His commandments.  We are sons when we hearken to the Father, when we praise and honor Him.


The recognition that we are sons in obeying God and praising Him is the starting point of my reflection.  I am a companion of all who fear Thee, of those who keep Thy precepts (Psalms 119:63).  I rejoice whenever His name is praised, His presence sensed, His commandment done.

 

 

[Continued in – No Religion is an Island – 2 – “To equate religion and God is idolatry” – AJHeschel.]