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Heschel, Abraham Joshua : ANALYSIS OF PIETY

Place Of Publication Not Identified], 1942

Off Print. Original Paper Wrappers. 8vo. [293]-307 pages ; 24 cm. Reprinted from “The Review of Religion, ” in February 1942. In English. This is this first piece of scholarly writing that Abraham Joshua Heschel published in America, as well as the first that he published in English, seven years before his landmark publications of “The Sabbath” and “Man Is Not Alone” (He also produced, for private use at HUC by his students, “A Concise Dictionary of Hebrew Philosophical Terms” in 1941) . Martin Luther King, jr. , and Heschel "initially bonded over the prophets. King was drawn to Heschel’s intimate knowledge of the topic (Heschel’s masterwork, in a body of masterworks, was his book The Prophets) , and Heschel in turn admired King’s devotion to the Exodus story of Moses and the Israelites, adapted to the narrative of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s....Heschel...can also be considered a kind of prophet himself. The main job of the prophets of the Bible, after all, is to hold their people’s feet to the fire. Moses railed at the weak and foolish Israelites who strayed from the path the minute their leader ascended to the mountaintop to commune with God. King fulminated against the war in Southeast Asia as well as against the injustices rampant in white American culture toward those whom it had enslaved for hundreds of years. Heschel supported both these causes, incurring the disapproval of some Jewish leaders when he did not hesitate to vigorously excoriate U. S. Involvement in Vietnam, preaching widely on the subject, writing letters to presidents, and being a spokesman for other religious leaders in meetings with high-level military strategists like Secretary of State Dean Rusk...Heschel, like King, had the charisma a prophet needs. He was impossible to dismiss, even when his message stung. The consummate gadfly, he shined a bright light on the ills of American society and also on those of American Judaism in the mid-20th century, which he saw as stultifying, airless, soulless, moribund. He was an outlier on one crisis we face today: how to make Judaism not only appealing but actually indispensable for Jews of future generations. His words were bracing and his exhortations powerful, but, rendered in such breathtakingly poetic language (as well as expressed verbally in his disarming Polish accent) , they seem like a loving gift from a benevolent elder, not a rebuke: He even warned warmly. He was a Jew who had suffered and seen too much suffering, and who, unlike the rest of us, was capable of vision on a greater scale, the prophetic scale. He knew what he was talking about, and, like King, he believed people could rise up, be their best selves, and behave with righteousness and even with holiness. Heschel died in 1972, four years after his friend King was shot dead. It’s a long time ago now. The prophets we have today don’t speak in King’s mellifluous rhetoric or write in Heschel’s enchanting prose. Maybe we have murdered or hounded to death those with the capacity to make our hearts soar with their words of justice and compassion; we’ve gotten pretty cynical, maybe too cynical for those kinds of voices" (Sian Gibby in Tablet Magazine, 2016) . Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century....In late October 1938, when Heschel was living in a rented room in the home of a Jewish family in Frankfurt, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. He spent ten months lecturing on Jewish philosophy and Torah at Warsaw's Institute for Jewish Studies. Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe....Heschel believed the teachings of the Hebrew prophets were a clarion call for social action in the United States and worked for African Americans' civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He also specifically criticized what he called ‘pan-halakhism, ’ or an exclusive focus upon religiously compatible behavior to the neglect of the non-legalistic dimension of rabbinic tradition. Heschel is a widely read Jewish theologian whose most influential works include Man Is Not Alone...At the Vatican Council II, as representative of American Jews, Heschel persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned the Jews, or referred to an expected conversion to Christianity. His theological works argued that religious experience is a fundamentally human impulse, not just a Jewish one. He believed that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth. " (WIkipedia, 2016) . OCLC lists just 5 copies worldwide. Owner’s signature on cover. Tiny tear to bottom corner with no text effected. Overall about very good condition. (AMR-48-31)

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