Abraham Joshua Heschel

He was born in Warsaw into a family that had produced rebbes on both sides, named for the Hasidic master of Apt who was his father's great-grandfather, and expected to inherit that office. His father died of influenza in 1916, when he was nine. A Gerrer Hasid tutored him and put the fierce, unconsoling Menachem Mendel of Kotzk into his hands, an argument he was still having with himself 50 years later. He took a yeshiva education and Orthodox ordination, then went to Berlin for a doctorate and to the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums for a second ordination, and stayed on to teach Talmud there. He also joined a Yiddish poetry circle and published a book of poems in 1933, dedicated to his father.

The Gestapo took him out of a rented room in Frankfurt in late October 1938 and pushed him over the Polish border. He lectured in Warsaw for ten months and got out to London six weeks before the German invasion, on a visa made possible because a colleague quietly rewrote his ordination certificate to satisfy American rules. He reached New York in March 1940, taught five years at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and in 1946 moved to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he remained until he died. The books came steadily: Man Is Not Alone and The Sabbath in 1951, God in Search of Man in 1955, The Prophets and the first volumes of Torah min HaShamayim in 1962. Then Rome, Selma, and the war in Vietnam.

He got out. His mother did not. Nazis broke into her flat in the Warsaw Ghetto and killed her. His sister Esther died in the German bombing of Warsaw, his sister Gittel in the ghetto, his sister Devorah at Auschwitz after being deported from Vienna. He never set foot in Germany, Austria or Poland again, and wrote that every stone and every tree there would remind him of children killed and of mothers burned alive. The seminary that housed him for 26 years never quite knew what to do with him. Colleagues who prized critical text study found him more interested in spirituality than in scholarship. He went years without a graduate assistant and was kept largely out of the academic graduate program, teaching instead in the education and rabbinical schools.

He died in New York on December 23, 1972, at 65. What outran the books was a sentence: when I marched in Selma, my feet were praying. It has been quoted at more demonstrations than his readers could count. Martin Luther King Jr., to whom he handed a peace award in December 1965, called him a truly great prophet. Five schools carry his name. Missouri named a stretch of highway for him in 2009 to spoil a neo-Nazi group's adopt-a-highway stunt, and his daughter Susannah, a scholar herself, objected to that use. In 2022 a Catholic university in Lublin, in the country he would not re-enter, opened a Heschel center for Catholic-Jewish relations with the pope's blessing.

Abraham Joshua Heschel's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Der Shem Hamefoyrosh: Mentsch book
  Yiddish poems, dedicated to the father who died when he was nine 1933
• The Earth Is the Lord's book
  The inner world of the Jews of Eastern Europe, written just after it was destroyed 1949
• The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man book
  Judaism as a religion of time rather than space 1951
• God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism book
  The companion to Man Is Not Alone, on revelation as an event 1955
• The Prophets book
  Grown out of his German doctoral thesis. God as having human feeling, not human form 1962
• Torah min HaShamayim be-Aspaklariya shel ha-Dorot book
  Three volumes on rabbinic theology, the last published after his death 1962

• 1916 aged ~9 His father dies of influenza Heschel was nine, and the youngest of six children.
• 1933 aged ~26 Publishes a book of Yiddish poems in Berlin
• October 1938 aged 31 The Gestapo arrests him in Frankfurt and deports him to Poland He was one of thousands expelled in the Polenaktion.
• 1939 aged ~32 Escapes Warsaw for London six weeks before the German invasion A colleague rewrote his ordination certificate so the visa would clear.
• March 1940 aged 33 Arrives in New York
• December 10, 1946 aged 39 Marries the pianist Sylvia Straus and joins the Jewish Theological Seminary
• March 1965 aged 58 Marches from Selma to Montgomery with King and John Lewis He later wrote that when he marched in Selma, his feet were praying.
• October 1965 aged 58 The Second Vatican Council revises what the Church says about Jews Heschel represented American Jews in the negotiations over liturgy calling for their conversion.
• December 23, 1972 aged 65 Dies in New York at 65

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. marched with
• John Lewis 1940–2020
  Freedom Rider and congressman whose activism was central to the civil-rights movement and voting-rights legislation. marched with
• Reinhold Niebuhr 1892–1971
  Theologian whose Christian realism influenced American foreign policy, civil rights, and public ethics. fellow theologian in public life
• Thomas Merton 1915–1968
  Trappist monk and writer whose books popularized contemplative spirituality, social criticism, and interfaith dialogue. ally against the war
• Dorothy Day 1897–1980
  Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, combining religious faith with radical commitments to peace and the poor. ally against the war