good evening everyone i'm arne eisen the chancellor of jts and i'm happy to welcome you here this evening this is the point where anyone with a cell phone that is not silent should please uh take it out and silence it in a minute i'm going to be introducing uh shai held whose book abraham joshua hessel the call of transcendence we're here to celebrate and inquire into this evening i want to let you know now that at the conclusion of the program shai is going to be signing books in the lobby which are for sale out there we invite you to join him i want to also issue a couple of thank yous as we start the first is to rabbi ali khan for executive director of makon hadar for his assistance with this event mahon hadar is co-sponsoring this evening's program several years ago i had the pleasure of dialoguing with ellie about his book and we're very happy to get to do that with shy held this evening i also want to take this opportunity to thank in advance ms amy meckler for interpreting tonight's program in american sign language and we want to thank the uga federation of new york for making that service available this evening let me now take a few seconds to introduce rabbi scheiheld a 1999 graduate of jts's medical school and graduate school who co-founder dean and chair of jewish thought at macho and hadar before serving in that role shai served for six years as a scholar in residence at kehillah tadar in new york city and taught both theology and halacha at jts he has served as director of education at harvard hillel a renowned lecturer and educator rabbi held earned a phd in religion from harvard university and as a 2001 recipient of the covenant award for excellence in jewish education he has served in the past on the faculty of both the wexner foundation and the shalom hartman institute and i'm really pleased to say that during this spring semester rabbi held is serving as an adjunct instructor of professional and pastoral skills at jts and teaching our students heschel and a whole lot else following our dialogue for the next 40 minutes or so there will be ample time for audience questions please when the time comes step up to the microphone and make your questions as succinct as you can and shia and i will try to be succinct in answering them the format is that i'm going to be a something in between an interviewer and a full partner to this dialogue i share private conversations with shai in which i rejoice we are friends and if i might say so sort of soul mates and theological conversation partners for several years now we're both looking forward to doing this in public the spotlight tonight is going to be on shai but i'm not simply going to ask him questions he's going to ask me questions and we're going to engage in some dialogue about abraham joshua heschel who is to both of us a figure of let's say intellectual interests of the first order but also great great personal transcendent concern i wouldn't be the person i am without abraham joshua heschel's writings and the one chance i had in my life to meet him in this building in 1971 and shy i just wanted to begin there with uh sort of personalize it where a question to you about this and about the book so you you chose heschel as a dissertation topic out of all the things you could have written about you chose to write about abraham joshua heschel and he chose to write about a particular set of topics and abraham joshua heschel how how did he grab you and why did he grab you for this particular purpose okay first of all thank you everyone for being here and thank you arnie for this conversation and many others i will say that it is a special privilege for me to talk about this book in this place for two totally separate reasons one one this being a place where heschel spent many decades of his life but two there are many people in this institution friends colleagues students teachers um who have believed in this project during its many many many years of gestation and i feel a profound debt to a lot of people in this institution and in this room so so thank you um when i think about why i wrote this book um sometimes i think that that question is two questions why i wrote this book and why i wrote this book and i actually think that on some level there are different questions the reason i wrote this book the way that i've been thinking about this a lot lately is that i had a moment when i was a freshman in college i was sitting in a seminar on maimonides taught by the late professor isa ortorsky my first academic jewish studies professor who was a very stern man and did not share much about himself to say the least and yet late in the semester all of a sudden in this moment of utter candor he said you have to understand the rambam has been my life's companion and it was such a disarming moment i might always like to say when i was 19 i had no idea what he was talking about i was thinking about life companions they were not the rhombum um and in fact i felt like it was a waste of time i should be out looking for a life companion um 17 years later i found one um now um but you know 15 years later i had a moment in which that moment came back to me and i realized i know exactly what he's talking about because heschel has been that in my life i have been inspired provoked infuriated motivated disappointed by my relationship with this person this thinker this writer in ways that are i mean hard to describe more so than any other human being who has ever written anything which is quite a statement and on some level at the risk of descending into psychobabble i wrote this book so that he and i could work this out so that i could figure out on some level first of all what he was really saying second of all one of those things that he was saying i thought remained compelling and maybe even personally meaningful but the truth is there's another piece of it which is at the end of the day i'm not really that interested in the more obscure side of academic projects and i knew very well going in that i could only actually finish this project if i wrote about someone who even after a day where i had been poking holes and everything he said at the end of the day i would know that i was writing about someone who was a giant um that was sort of very important to me i wanted to write about someone who made me feel small i often remember a moment another jewish academic moment where professor avi rivitsky of the hebrew university said to me in this moment of like so moving very out of character for him also he said um i'll say this in hebrew and then translate it just sort of in a conversation right i am not a student of rough cook not by a long shot a valid right right but if raf cook walked into the room right now i would dive under the nearest table out of sheer awe and i never stopped feeling that way about heshel and if the only reason i could ever have written this book let alone finished it and as a result if i could say this you wrote a book that is a very generous book in other words you're not uncritical we talked about this and i counted up the times when shai offers serious critiques officials i think there are about a dozen such occasions in the book but over and over again you go out of your way to be generous to the man you're not here to poke holes you're not here to to score points you're here to really understand him and you're here to really understand them because you think he's of more than academic interest he's of great personal interest to you and you think he should be of great personal interest to your readers if i'm right right i mean you know on a certain level i wrote this book so that question about why i wrote this book as opposed to why i wrote it right you know people talk all the time about the ways that heschel has gone very far on his eloquence right on his just unbelievable ability to turn a sentence in his fourth language learned in his late twenties right which is just mind-boggling to think about um but the truth is in many ways heschel has also been the victim of his own eloquence in really profound ways because it has allowed all kinds of people to say about heschel he is merely a poet now i think keshel would be quick to say anyone who's willing to apply the adverb merely to poet is actually admitting their own impoverishment but he is also not only a poet and in fact one of the things i try to argue in the book which we could maybe talk about later is i think in many ways he's a poet precisely because of his philosophical and theological project um now about being generous it's sort of striking the ways in which heschel largely is the recipient either of derision or of worship um in the context of academic jewish studies jewish philosophy heschel is often sort of written off as not a serious figure i remember giving a lecture about heschel at an ivy league school not so long ago i believe university in which professor came up to me afterwards and said why can't you just admit that heschel was a public intellectual which was not a compliment right um so that that tendency and then on the other hand the heschel was you know a demigod and on some level i really wanted to treat him with more respect than either the derision or the worship gives him right to actually take him seriously as what he wanted to be um a philosopher of religion and theologian an interpreter of the jewish tradition and a modern critic of modernity all of those roles were very important to him and i think he has enormously important things to say and i wanted to respect him more than either writing him off or bowing down to him if that i mean that crudely but to really engage him in a philosophical conversation yeah you and i share this pre-election that you don't do a great thinker any favor by just passing by their faults i mean that's not what we're here to do that you have to you have to believe that we make them stronger as it were we make that we make them better appreciated by seeing the things that don't quite hold water and therefore you have much more credibility and standing up for all those things that's that really stand i mean he's he's a much greater thinker than a mere mere public intellectual or poet but but don't you think you you lose this point so why don't we pick this up right now that he he he wrote a kind of he wrote a kind of prose poem he wrote a kind of lyrical set of pieces because he thought there's a part of the self that needs to be awakened that rational philosophy is not going to get to so his method completely suited his feeling he believed there's some other faculty in us aside from aside from cognition there's something in us that's that's even deeper you might say for that metaphor than than reason alone and he's got to help us get to it and he can't awaken it through logical argument he's got to touch it somehow through poetry right and so that's he's got to call us to do the segway here he's got to call us to self-transcend us he's got to get us out of our usual boundaries he's got to take us past our comfort zone right yeah so i think that i would say this in the following way you know it's funny there's a phrase in heschel that i have to admit did not really register to me when i wrote the book i've only been thinking about it since which is one of his definitions of wonder is a sense of unmitigated innate surprise and it's only recently that i have come to really understand how important the word innate is in that phrase because what that means is that his job as a religious writer is not to give us something that we do not already have but rather to tear the calluses off so that what is already there inside becomes available to us again and that's one of the reasons that poetry is so important to him because at the end of the day if any of you have ever studied academic philosophy it is very rare that at step 37a of an analytic philosophy essay all of a sudden you think my heart is open to the transcendent right it's not what happens and on some level i think he thinks that the poetic mode is what he needs in order to fight what modernity has done right modern people in all kinds of ways have been closed off to the possibility of the transcendent we can call that different things a disenchanted world an imminent frame all these different terms that get bandied about and if heschel wants to open us to the possibility of the transcendent that is also cognitive but it is not merely cognitive and maybe is not even primarily cognitive it is about opening our being not just opening our minds and that's not done by a 13-step argument right so the poetry is really in service of an analysis of what is needed right right and that is on some level to tear open a certain kind of shut downness that is part of the modern condition and and the weakness of it is either as you say at some point you either get it or you don't and heschel kind of assumes that you're going to get it because he's got it or you should get it because we all have it and there's that well-known passage at the end of chapter nine of man is not alone where he said kind of you should be ashamed right if your heart doesn't i you remember the exact quote i don't have it in front of me but you should you should pray for for for feeling of shame right if you've been awakened then you turn away from it right how is he somehow responsible for this right so i would say two things about this one is um you know on one level it's a very generous move for a religious thinker to assume that at bottom if you peel enough layers away everyone has a kind of attachment to god it may be an unavoidable claim for a religious maker to make on some level the problem philosophically is when you build a worldview that is so rooted in intuition you have a very hard time dealing with people who insist you up and down that their primary intuitions are different and i think some of the weakest points in heschl's writing are when he insists if you dig deeper you'll find you have my intuition i think he does that over and over again however i do i want to say one other thing about this which is those moments when he attacks non-believers it took me a while to actually sort of get this but i realized at a certain point that one should distinguish between what a thinker does in a rhetorical mode and what they might say over coffee at starbucks meaning it is very hard for me to believe that a thinker who talks about a blackout of god in the modern world would actually say in a discursive mode talking one-on-one right any lack of belief is on some level a character failure there's no such thing as non-culpable non-belief right it is a rhetorical move and so the question becomes why does someone say that and i think one of the things he's trying to do is to jolt the reader the reader who on some level shares in his in his understanding of modernity irreducibly secular assumptions unshakably secularist assumptions what he wants to do with those sentences i think are actually grab you and shake you um and i think you know one of the things i try to do in the book when i when i sort of began to understand this is i went off and started reading all kinds of literary theory on the use of hyperbole because i was trying to understand what is he doing and one of the things that i found really interesting is that theorists of hyperbole all say hyperbole works when someone shares at least some of your assumption but it seems ridiculous when they have no idea what you're saying and i think it's an interesting way to think about the passages in hedgehog that work for some people some people would say yeah those passages shook me out of my slumber right and other people are like you know famously arthur cohen these are just offensive passages right they simply don't take unbelief seriously and all the reasons for it and that's when i think the hyperbole reaches too far for many people but i don't think we should read heshala simply saying right there's no such you know every unbelief is a character failure i'm not sure he would actually argue that as a sort of discursive claim as opposed to a listen reader right listen reader who lives in you know an iron cage that is completely closed off to any incursion of anything greater than it i will rattle this cage that's what he's trying to do right so let's let's focus in a little bit on the on the topic which you make your theme that the self transcendence and i heschel is trying to save us in a certain way i mean he really believes that we are trapped as you said ourselves are stunted we are focused on things that are false we are missing an immense amount of possibility which is open to us which is in us which is standing before us and we just can't get it we don't even know we don't even want it because we don't know about it and he's challenging some really fundamental things about the modern self right so he's got to shake us up because he thinks that we are more trapped than any previous culture was like it's almost better to have idolatry and have lots of gods because at least there are gods and he he would almost say so our god is ourselves our god is the self and unless we transcend this and get beyond the self we miss it right we just miss it we not quite live in vain that would be too strong but we miss something we should be living for and with yeah i think there's maybe a couple ways to come at the point you're making one is that one of the most important dichotomies in heschel's thought is between what he calls the way of wonder on the one hand the way of expediency on the other um and it took me a while to understand what the way of expediency was because it's one of those words um i sort of think every person has a bunch of words that they use that at a certain moment in their life they realize they actually have no idea what the word means right no i mean that quite seriously right and expediency was one of those words for me i kept reading hashem saying the problem with modernity is that people are all focused on expediency and somebody realized i have no idea what that means and you know beyond looking at dictionaries i started trying to reread every passage national where he talks about expediency and i realized that on some level you could see that as one of the interpretive keys of his whole project because expediency is heschel's way of talking about a life in which the only question that orients my life is the question of how can i use this right what we might call the instrumentalization of the world everything is about how can this serve my own ends right so everything including crucially religion and god right you can think about the discourse of american spirituality how can religion serve you right or the discourse of american yoga practice which right many traditional yogis would be sort of appalled by give yourself a gift right the discourse of the lululemonization of yoga right what that means um where everything becomes everything becomes everything becomes a tool right ultimately people right also become tools everything is for my own purpose the way of wonder in contrast is about essentially the realization that i did not create the world or myself and that being the most primal awareness there is and the moment i realize that the world is a gift my life is a gift my life in the world is a gift within a gift that's my formulation not hessles but i think you would endorse that when you when you actually come alive to that as a foundational formative awareness all of a sudden your question becomes i owe something how can i serve and the the reorientation that heschel is interested in the move from the culture of expediency the culture of wonder is moving from how can i ser sorry moving from how can i use this to how can i serve that is what makes possible the project of self transcendence self transcendence is a term which basically as far as i can tell every philosopher and every psychologist who uses this term uses it somewhat differently which makes it very elusive and if i were to try to define for heschel at least i don't think these are the only ways to define it but two maybe just very short useful ways of thinking about what this means in heschl one is very simply self-transcendence consists of may even simply be equal to the project of what he calls transitive concern and transit of concern is really just a fancy way of saying caring about selves other than me right where actually the well-being of other things and other beings than me is truly fundamental and matters to me in profound ways that's the opposite another famous hecelian dichotomy reflexive concern is the focus on me transit of concern is the care about you and as he famously puts it you cannot be an organic being who is alive without reflexive concern and yet you cannot be fully human without the project of cultivating transit of concern where selves other than you really matter to you and the fundamental question in encountering them is how can i use you how can you help me um that's one way of thinking about the definition another which i think is very useful is the attempt to overcome the illusion that my ego and my consciousness are the center of the universe and i i want to say this is you know in my own language not his i don't think he would talk this way but i think it's important to acknowledge how hard that is because all of us have a consciousness that presents itself that way what do you mean my conscience is not the center of the universe i perceive everything through the center of the universe which is my consciousness right and on some level all religious traditions are engaged i don't mean to relativize them i don't think they're all the same but all religious traditions are on some level attempts to overcome the illusion that that perception is somehow a metaphysical truth right in fact my consciousness is no more the center of the universe than yours is or yours his or yours is and in fact for heschel gods is the center of the universe and the realization in other words that the consciousness around which the world rotates is the divine consciousness and not my own that's already like the conversation of what self-transcendence could be yeah heschel is onto something deep here about modernity i think you know i spent several years my own graduate school life immersed in the thinking of the great german sociologist and social theorist max weber and for max weber who wrote the process and ethic and the spirit of capitalism and was the great analyst of oh the relationship between science and religion and western bureaucracy the key concept in mark's weber is rationality and max weber's understanding of rationality is precisely what you're calling expediency that i am constantly calculating what he called life chances i decide what my goal is there's no scientific way to establish what a good goal is as opposed to a less good goal we choose our goals for all sorts of reasons and then we spend our lives calculating what the most advantageous ways of pursuing this goal is individuals do this societies do it so the self is really the center of the calculation and that's what rationality is about and heschel is saying you're gonna a sense waste your life if that's your only focus because the world is not about you so the step number one to being an ethical person i think you even put it that way right step number one to being an ethical person is to get beyond yourself and transcend yourself and not act as if you're seeking your own advantage is what life is for right right i mean this would not be his primary argument but he does essentially say especially at the end of god in search of men that in addition to being immoral this way of living is actually self-defeating right people because you can't get what you want because well because people who spend their entire life focused on finding their own happiness almost never find it that on some level happiness depends on a form of self-forgetfulness when you actually serve something that isn't you then on some level that is the meaning of life right can you serve something that is not you there are secular versions of this argument meaning for hashtag it's very close closely tied to god but on some level do we serve ends that are greater than our own do we serve ends that are greater than us that is actually the only um the only path to genuine happiness or joy and also and i think this is actually one of the most interesting things heschel says and he says it really as a throwaway comment he says the you know that on some level again this is my formulation not his the illusion that spontaneity is the same thing as freedom right that freedom equals my ability to do what i want and no one can tell me what i should do as opposed to the freedom not to merely be enslaved to my own impulses but to respond to things to people to a god other than me right that's the only possibility of freedom so what i'm suggesting is it's true it's the only way to live self-transcendence is necessary for ethics for religion but in an interesting way it's also necessary for the very things that people who don't pursue it think they want namely happiness and freedom so one of the interesting moves he makes and now we're going to do a segue here to talk about god a little bit one of the interesting moves he makes is that god also self transcends right and because god self transcends god seeks out human partners and because god seeks out human partners god needs us that is heschel says all this self-transcendence but he's against the obliteration of the self he's against the annihilation of the self he's not calling for selflessness he needs strong human beings right god needs strong human beings to work in the world and it's like it's forbidden for us to turn our backs on the world in the search for pure self-transcendence as it were so you need a certain amount of self and you certainly need to be in the world to fulfill the purposes which the self-transcending god directs you to right so talk a little bit about this really difficult matter of heschel's notions of god right you know it's interesting because it's hard to even ask the question because i could imagine heschel thundering and saying i don't have a notion of god right right but rather i have the reality of god before me a notion of god is for philosophers right i or or in the language of phenomenology i have an understanding of god um he famously you know gives this talk where he says you know i was invited to give a a paper to a bunch of christian theologians and i talked about the paper topic was the god of israel and i forget exactly what he says and they changed it to the idea of god in the writings of israel he's like i don't have an idea of god that's for a certain kind of philosopher that's not what i do right an idea of god you don't you don't ever bow down and worship an idea right to attack on herman cohen i think you don't you don't bow down to an idea so um maybe we'll say it this way you know one of the central projects of heschel's life was to show that as great a figure as he was maimonides did unspeakable damage to the authenticity of jewish belief right this is one of the central projects of heschul's life and i'll explain that it may be in the following way because he says something very provocative actually at the beginning of god in search of a man which no one ever pays attention to because they want to get to the part about wonder so the first two chapters kind of fall away but he says this really fascinating thing he says you know all these people in the middle ages who claim to have achieved synthesis between revelation and philosophy at the end of the day what they achieved was surrender not synthesis because by the time they were done lo and behold the god of the bible was the god of aristotle that's not a synthesis that's a capitulation so in the end what is my modernity's worship right a i'm using this word in the loaded way intentionally a self-involved creator who doesn't notice or have relationship with anything he has created angel says that's the god of the bible right now we obviously can't do a seminar on my mind he's here but if it's true which i think it is if you read book one of the god of perplexed that you can't say god cares and you can't say god loves and you can't say god enters into religion right you can read the guys perplex and count the number of times my mind is using the word covenant if i'm not mistaken you'll have four fingers left over on your first hand it's amazing right if you can't say any of those things in what way are you talking about the god of israel and that argument for heshel essentially depends on the following distinction right the god of maimonides is all reflexive concern right the god of maimonides is off contemplating god's self for all eternity right i'm actually going to say it this way this is my own formulation but i think this is actually a useful way of thinking about this in contrast human beings are a kind of admixture of transitive and reflexive concern right we have reflexive concern necessarily in our better moments we have transitive concern in our few really wonderful moments we have expansive transit of concern the god of israel heshal argues i am not defending this as a great reading of tanach but the god of israel is all transit of concern god has no care for god's self if we went on the room we could point to passages in tanakh which seemed that seems less persuasive right here might have been better off to say the god of tanakh is mostly transit of concern right um but heschel's understanding of the god of tanach is right what does god really care about widows and orphans one of my favorite lines in heschla is this passing comment i'm going to get it a little bit wrong and man is not alone where he says it's like my it's just such an amazing line zeus loves women but god loves widows it's so powerful actually it's a great right say that in your fourth language right um but but here's the thing in other words if the god of maimonides is all reflexive concern and human beings are reflexive and transitive concern mixed together in this kind of constantly jostling way and the god of the bible is all transit of concern then the god of maimonides is less than a human being and not more that is heschel's assault on the rambam right you know what's different between me and the rambam god sometimes i care about widows rambam's god never cares about widows or anything else so the argument is right i have to rescue the authentic god of the bible and put that again at the center of jewish philosophy now that matters because heschel really cares about metaphysical truth right but it also matters for another reason it took me a while to sort of understand this about him i think that he is animated by a very passionate assumption that the god you worship cannot but impact how you imagine an ideal human life looks and so if you worship a god who is totally indifferent on some level you will come to valorize to celebrate what he derisively calls homo apatheticos right the human being who is unmoved i find it interesting i think it's a bad reading of the rambam but i find it interesting and heschel would i think find this interesting support that a contemporary scholar of the rambam fairly well known writes an essay in which he says yes the rambam's human ideal is a person who is completely devoid of emotion by the way he's wrong but that doesn't matter right i think kesha's point is if that is a hava amina if that is a thought you could have about what judaism wants your theology is off the deep end right and in contrast right if you worship a god who loves widows and orphans and i want to underline here worship a god not go to shul not just you know go through but if you worship a god would that any of us a few moments in our life actually do that if you worship a god who loves widows and orphans then on some level you cannot but work on the project of loving widows and orphans right because on some level what theology becomes is god saying back to you you want to love me love who i love by the way at the risk of actually saying this in front of actual bible scholars i think that's also the logic of deuteronomy 10. deuteronomy 10 18 god loves the stranger deuteronomy 10 19 you should love the stranger it's a form of matatio day right of the imitation of god god loves the vulnerable that's your project too that's what it means to talk about god for him and how can heshel be so sure that he's right about this right well how can nashville be so sure of a lot of things right i mean so i think um well here's what i would say about this for what it's worth and then we could you know spend the rest of our life having angst about it um i think it is unquestionably the case that heschel is right about the god of the canonical jewish tradition i think the interesting question is whether the god he's talking about is metaphysically believable in this day and age right to me the question is not whether he's a better reader of tanakh than the rambam i mean i would say here shita of course he's a better reader of the canon than the rambam and he's right the rambam does violence to the canon i mean of course that's true the question is right you know what does it mean to say that in a world of such unimaginable suffering that is so pervasive and unabated what does that mean right and that's the deep question um that's where i think the challenge really comes but that he's he's right to understand himself as defending the tradition that i i think is obviously right by the way another way of putting this if this is useful as a frame this is also something i really i think i don't remember if this is in the book actually um if you had asked maimonides what is the enemy that you're fighting against without a question my monitors would have said idolatry and it's worth saying maimonides would have said i know you think i'm attacking moses but i'm not moses spent his life destroying all of the external pictures of god that the israelites had i am destroying all the internal pictures they had right i am the second moshe i am fulfilling the my the mosaic project that's what i'm doing right i am stamping out the idols why is it so much better today i would never have an idol but i'm going to picture a big old guy and dive into him why is that so much better so i want to do away with that too right so he didn't think he was assaulting moses and yet right what's left is very little um now if you had asked heschel what is the enemy that you're struggling with without question hashem would have said the enemy is indifference the enemy is that we live in a time in which we have internalized so profoundly that at the end of the day human beings big adol you know writ large are to use a favorite phrase of his callous to catastrophes we don't care right what line should fill us with bitter irony more than never again what the hell are we talking about come on we need to go on saying that so he says if the problem is indifference how can you actually then worship a god whose fundamental attribute is indifference that god will never help you overcome indifference but how do you make credible the god that he's telling us to worship right so a god who gets angry this is a god who's supposed to be there who's not there so what are you going to do with this guy well so by the way the anger piece is fascinating you know one of the i think most interesting things that heschel says in the prophets that is usually kind of ignored um is that people often dismiss or are derisive of the bible because so they say the god of the old testament is angry national says you know for those of us who lived through what we lived through i am extraordinarily grateful and religiously uplifted by the fact that there is a god who gets angry because it means that somewhere in the universe the murder of children matters human history shows no evidence that that actually makes a difference but if you believe in revelation well you know that's the core claim now how do you make it credible i think that heschel had a project now i understand he can lose people at every step of the way the project is the following if i can convince you that to quote from saint augustine i did not create myself and therefore i owe something that question probably is the sentence that heschel writes more than any other over the course of his career is the sentence something is asked of us if i can convince you or better to go back to where we started illicit in you the sense that something is asked of us that is the portal in human experience to the possibility of revelation being interesting to you because if you have this sense as a human being of what do i owe what is asked of me and by whom what is asked of me and by whom then all of a sudden the bible matters the clue to this is heschel famously says right the bible is an answer but the question has gone out of the world so the project of the first part of god in church of man is to rediscover the question to which the bible is an answer right what does the lord your god ask of you now there are a lot of steps here which we could take apart where you're going to lose some people at each step you take but i don't think he thinks he can make the god of the bible credible without first awakening a kind of dormant spiritual hunger that says oh how can i serve or in a great formulation of his what we own we owe right that realization of what we own we owe the sense say that in jewish language the sense of an existential sense of obligation right that's the window that's the portal and he look he bet correctly on where the culture was going in other words this is a time for existentialism and the bible with this way is a very existentialist book the bible gives us human beings as they are they're not in a realm of perfection they're in a realm of great inadequacy they express doubt all the time a book of the bible that has psalm 44 is an amazing religious document and therefore is credible to us in a way it wouldn't have been if it was a book speaking about uh perfections and omniscience and omnipotence and all that sort of thing so heschel had the right language i think for the time he bet correctly his intuitions were right and and there's a piece here i just want to highlight he wants to empower us to be interpreters in other words he knows that he has to save the bible from false readings to which the bible itself is prone the bible itself allows you to tear the bible apart and he famously proclaims that judaism is a religion with a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation right he depends on that maximum interpretation that's where save the bible from its own faults or to prevent people from doing cheap shots or you know and not just do this terrible stuff there and he has to enable us to save the bible as we're to make the bible a living document for people by using the bible to critique the passages in the bible which don't work right and so he's got to empower us in that way and he believes he's there so i think one of the most rhetorically genius it's not english a moment of utter rhetorical genius in asheville is this one sentence in the 27th chapter of god in search of man where he says when we critique the bible for it's what he calls harsh passages we should always remember that the conscience that leads us to critique it was itself shaped by the bible and what i think he's doing there is genius because it does two things at once at one at the same time it defends the bible against its attackers and empowers those who want to read it resistantly at certain moments by saying you are reading with the conscience that the bible itself instilled in you right so it disarms a certain mode of criticism and empowers a certain mode of activist religious reading right it's a totally brilliant kind of rhetorical in one sentence right once you remember that now it's easy to say oh the bible shaped your conscious so shut up or oh the bible is horrible you can choose one paul but he specifically wants to do the opposite to say oh you're offended by this passage that's because the bible was the first document in the history of the world that made a radical claim about human equality right so you are critiquing the bible from a perspective that the bible itself makes possible and here i think he's you know theoretically very radical that is to say i think he really makes the possibility um he he makes real the possibility of a kind of rebellious reading of scripture that is when done in a certain frame of mind not a form of rebellion but a deeper form of fidelity and he makes that possible but he won't take advantage of it himself well he you know i think someone will one day write a book about why some of the most interesting 20th century jewish thinkers who cared about halacha never wrote chuva right someone wanted their writing argue why it's screaming david hartman never wrote a chuba in their life right why not possibly and why not decide how logically the orthodoxy that you want heschel was not that and he does not give us an essay in sort of a projected hermeneutic here's how you should read but i think he is trying very hard to speak to people who determine jewish law not just them but also them saying what are the values that should animate you right what is the project that you're doing and i would i mean i would say i mean this goes without saying i hope it is anti-formalistic in the extreme right it is not about just interpreting a set of rules within an internal system right it's got ethical ends to serve ethical theological ends it's about a constant attempt to instantiate certain values in the world through law that's right but doesn't this go along with this refusal not let's not say absolute refusal but he's very reluctant to express doubt right so this he opens the door for you to doubt there's a whole chapter of man that's not alone chapter 10 right after the climactic page about an experience of god the next chapter turn the page it's called doubt but heschel rarely steps through that door he won't do it right um i think one of the things i'll tell you just speak very personally when i was first reading heschel i found this enormously moving and as i've gotten older i find it once moving and disappointing and that is essentially that heschel treats all moments of metaphysical doubt as relational rupture meaning any time you begin to doubt the reality of god pray um that by the way has i mean i think that's actually i don't know if this was conscious that's actually the fundamental strategy for example of rabbi nachman and liquid mohran every time you begin to wonder davin right that's you know um so shout down the doubt it's well i don't know if it's shouted down i think it's actually shouted to god so here's one of the most amazing things i discovered about heschl's corpus that and this was just you know after reading it over and over again i realized every time he begins to talk about questions about god i mean every last time until the last book every last time he immediately shifts to the second person and in the middle of a book of philosophy begins to speak to god it's amazing right it's what i would call sort of the sort of liturgical preemption of philosophy right i i don't i'm not i'm not going to do that now that this that's a dead end for me so i'm going to pray now the problem is it takes a tremendous leap in all those moments to believe that prayer is the answer um right as opposed to actually wondering whether all this is plausible um you know one of the things i tried to argue in the book this is sort of one of the sort of revisionist arguments i make people often say that heschel's approach to the sho ah is to believe that at the end of the day he has solved the problem of the by talking about how radical the freedom that god gives us is um it's a mistake i think that that's totally wrong um because as i just mentioned there are all these moments where he begins to do a theodicy and then the second person question of god begins the most amazing moment of that is chapter 16 of man is not alone which is fascinating right it begins with an answer here is why the world has been allowed to run amok god allows us radical freedom we blame god even though we are the ones who have done it wrong and then almost entirely without transition he stops and presents psalm 44 as a whole i'm full yeah in full end of chapter what is psalm 44 the most wild text in tanakh what the great um protestant bible scholar parenthesis and no lover of the jews franz daelich called the nash for the national version of the book of job psalm 44 ura lamatishan adonai wake up god why are you sleeping right now if eshel really thought he had solved the problem of the showa he would begin by asking why are you hiding your face and then give you the answers but instead what he does is give you the answer and then scream the question and everyone misses that about him now again that's not saying it's interesting he won't say it in his own words but that's a moment of you know what god i can talk about a thrust a general direction of how to understand why the world is allowed to be the abyss that it so often is but i don't for one second think i've gotten you off the hook right i recently realized that there's a sentence where he says this very powerfully um and i somehow missed this in writing the book he says something like we are responsible for our actions but god is responsible for our freedom it's a very profound sentence right in other words god is the one who created us with the capacity for right um the capacity for unimagined brutality and on some level what we do is a reflection on the one who give the free world defense is ultimately not a defense right it may be the direction of a defense but it as i like to say it inculpates god it doesn't exculpate god right god gets pulled in and so i think there is that in heschl now would some readers be able to connect asheville more if he said a sentence like some nights i wake up in the middle of the night and think that being a theist has got to be the biggest delusion in the whole universe probably but he also as you have written about assumed a certain persona i actually think that at a certain moment of history that was one of heschel's forms of self-transcendence he thought you know what the jewish people have more than enough people who can articulate their doubt i'm going to defend the god of israel i'm going to try to make the god of israel plausible in a world where people think it's absurd or worse yet if you're interested in academic philosophy in a time when people think it's not even absurd it's nonsense right it's not it doesn't make any sense even talk about that so on some of i think heschel muted some of his own doubt um partially in service of what he thought his job was in that moment so that's the good segue for me to ask the final question i want to talk about with you for a few minutes before we throw the floor open to the to the audience so you write very convincingly i think that heschel when he wrote about sage's quest for certainty was in a sense writing about heschel's quest for certainty and when heschel wrote about whether rambam believed that rambam was a prophet we wonder the consciousness of heschel about the degree to which heschel understood himself to be a sort of prophet so i want to ask you about shai held writing a book about heschel how much of this is shy this book and what are you doing in this book to teach shai as it were how much of this is shy figuring out shai held as a religious thinker um well i would say to the extent that i was trying to figure myself out as a religious thinker the project failed um i'm not sure about that but um yeah i mean i was on some level i was doing that i mean it goes back to what i said earlier about you know my understanding of professor torski's comment um i felt in that in in writing this book that i was trying to figure out what seemed to me to be philosophically and theologically plausible in nashville's corpus what i could actually embrace on some level when i wrote this book he and i were alone in a room having it out and i meant that i mean quite seriously that's what i was doing um it is also the case you know without being sort of impossibly reductive about this the way some people are especially on the academic left you know people on some level end up discovering the questions that matter most to them and you know i'm totally open to the observation that my insistence that the fundamental question in heschl is about self-transcendence is my own project i think it's very much there but you know as i've thought about what it means to be a religious teacher in our world and what it actually means in a culture that is so obsessed with itself i recently gave a lecture in which afterwards um a a ready rabbi from brooklyn who was there says thank me that was so moving to me some of you heard me quote this before because i talk about it all the time now he came up to me and he said do you think it's a coincidence that all the most desirable items in our culture are things like an ipad an ipod an eye this an ivat you think that that's just random stuff you don't think that's a confession about what this culture has become it's responsible of course it's market research come on exactly so you know you know one of the things i tell students all the time and and to me on some level about this i don't care whether they think they're the firmest of the from the most secular or the secular right the project of can you actually have moments when you realize that i am not the center of the universe if you do not have those moments you have never participated in authentic religion i don't care whether you spend your whole life learning torah it's hard to be in a relationship for very long if you don't have those moments you know that's exactly right no that's exactly right i mean by the way a relationship with god in a relationship with humanity with human beings is enabled by exactly the same thing right which is actually like another form of thinking about self-transcendence for hell is the project of making space that's what god does god makes space and the what philosophers call the meaningful freedom of human life right and what it means to be in a relationship on some levels to do just that um so i think that that's that's right and i know i didn't fully answer your questions to be sure but um on some level you know it's it's i i feel a little bit that i have the same version of the struggle that he had you know in certain settings academic settings i'm willing to talk about yes you know there's this philosophical problem there's that philosophical problem in heschel right they're really i think you know major philosophical holes and yet the fundamental project of a reorientation of human culture i find to be so powerfully expressed more powerfully articulated by heschel than by almost anyone else in the 20th century i don't think it's unique to him i think you know it's a different conversation an awful lot of what's in heschel is in buber in kind of seed form but that project to me at the end of the day is i mean that's why i do what i do right can we reorient such that the reality of the other makes a claim upon me because if i worship god that god tells me that's what matters see i don't know about you i but for me what what what gave heschel credibility in saying all this was in one sentence that march and selma alabama you know in other words we hear a lot of religious thinkers saying a lot of religious things and a lot of wonderful things a lot of beautiful things and they're talking about transcending ourselves but the fact that the man understood there was a historical moment where he had to put his life on the line as the great representative jewish thinker he was an iconic right with the white beard and the kippah and for our generation he put his life on the line there as a religious jew that for me when i was 16 years old that's what enabled me to take heschel seriously as a religious thinker and forced me to take keshel seriously as a religious thinker and at times i was mad at him because he seemed to be lowering himself through politics like anybody could do politics why is a great religious thinker doing politics but then i recognized that he understood this is what god wants if you're not out there doing it what's the point right so that in turn purchased credibility in my eyes for everything else he had to teach me he got my attention as it were and then so he understood there's something personally for me in my life but there's a historical moment that's calling to us i just want to end this with this one you put the word call on the title not not you know coincidentally it's it's a key word here heschel believes that god is calling to us history's calling to us he's calling to us in a sense you become a transmitter of this call by writing this book right you're calling to us and we kind of put ourselves on the line we better answer the call we're going to call other people we better be there ourselves answering the call what's interesting you know elie schweid has this very interesting elijah one of the most prominent israeli teachers students of the history of jewish thought and jewish thinkers who for the most part his career was totally uninterested in hessel and then writes a chapter about heshel in a wonderful book of his called prophets to their people to humanity and the premise by the way is fascinating right it's about all these 20th century jewish thinkers who have this problem on the one and the tradition definitively states that there are no more prophets on the other hand i think i might be one right it's a whole it's just a fascinating fascinating book and he says this very interesting thing he says you know heschel may not have thought himself a prophet but he thought himself his job was the prophets saw themselves as communicating the will of god and heshel saw himself as communicating the will of the prophets right which is not a claim to prophecy but it is a claim to on some level a divinely sent mission um there is a passage in god in search of man in the end of book one which is really quite striking which i haven't seen anyone pay attention to actually where he says you know some of us have had moments where the illumination is so powerful that we realize we've been guided and how to guide or something if i get exactly information in the book right it's a very powerful moment of of confession for him you know i think maybe i should say in light of what what you said um that you know i talked about his attack on maimonides but there's really another side his relation to my monitors that is really about this so i mean this is something that michael marmer from hebrew union college has written about really beautifully um that as a philosopher maimonides is a kind of anti-hero for heschel but as a person in the kind of life heschel thinks maimonides led which i'll explain in a moment my mom is actually a hero and a role model heschel famously claims and he claims this already from a very young age that as maimonides got older the reason his literary output decreased is that he realized that what a jewish thinker should be doing is spending more time with his patients and i think it's not so crazy to suggest that on some level he's telegraphing the direction of his own life there are certain moments you know he's revising his dissertation on the prophets and on some level he's moved by the claim that you know ammo san avi would not spend his whole life writing a book about navi and by 1962 his great stuff is out pretty much right exactly um um so he decides to move into this moment of service now you know i don't know whether this is a kind of can of worms i want to open up in this moment but you know the the side of you know at the end of the day by temperament heschel was an activist um even in his prose deal right i am not i don't want to compare myself to him but at the end of the day by temperament i'm a philosopher which means that the chapter i didn't write in this book there were two chapters in this book i could have written that i didn't write and maybe in retrospect i ought to one was about his understanding of the relationship between judaism and christianity for which he is often celebrated but which i actually find to be some of the most unphilosophically thought through essays of his and i felt i couldn't talk about that in less than 100 more pages um but also i didn't write about the theology of activism and part of that was because i wasn't sure there was a fully developed theory there and part of it was because i did not feel this was the book in which i wanted to take on the question of at the end of the day is the employment of prophetic rhetoric a good thing for our culture um on the one hand when we look at moments when someone clearly did things that from hindsight we all think we're totally right like yes what a hero for using that language but what if he used that language for politics you find reprehensible um now you could say it's okay to use prophetic rhetoric as long as you're right and that's a position one can stake out i mean i really i'm not even i'm not saying that flipply but i think there's a lot to think about there and i you know something that i talk about a lot that does not win friends for me in some of the places i hang out is i actually think it's very common for sort of liberal american jews to say oh yes the christian right they think they know what god wants really more so than the people on the upper west side i'm not so sure i'm not so sure i think there's a lot of interesting things to think about there and i have a lot of misgivings about this i'm not sure that clean a world in which there is no daylight between my political convictions and rizzo hashem makes me very nervous extremely and so on the one hand like yes he you know he picked issues that i totally celebrate i think he was enormously morally courageous i'm not sure i love some of the rhetoric um how do you tell your friends he told his friends on the vietnam war they weren't just wrong they were evil right they were evil they backed a war that was evil right yeah i you know there's a lot we could say about what was concerned i think this my only point about this is that i think it's far messier than we are often willing to think about this issue