1.....Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (d.1972) and his martini came to mind as I read this “On Faith” assignment: “We know what ‘Jewish identity’ has meant in the past. What will it mean in the future? How does a minority religion retain its roots and embrace change?"
Of all the Jews I have known, Abe Heschel best represents the Jewish mind in its affirmation of roots, exploration of range, and adjustment to change. A master of Judaism’s formative literature, he lived a profound spirituality through his Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative periods, had more Christian readers than any other rabbi of his time, and was a vigorous proponent of justice in ecumenical and political life.
2.....His martini? My sharpest memory of him is not the public image of his marching at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. It was of a cocktail party. We were in close conversation, both of us leaning on the curve of a Steinway. When I mentioned the name of the then-President of the United States, Richard Nixon, Heschel so trembled with rage that, fearing its spilling, he set his martini down on the piano. (Also, so that he could use both hands to talk.) Of Selma, he later said “My feet were praying.” Of that experience at an authors’ Manhattan party, he could have said “My hand trembled.” (As for Nixon, a few years later, in his last interview with David Frost, he confessed that he had betrayed everyone and everything he ever loved.)
3.....Rage is the emotional form INTEGRITY takes at the thought of fraud, as “wrath” is the form God’s love takes in the presence of sin. As a theologian, Heschel is remembered for favoring anthropopathism over anthropomorphism: we should be concerned not with the form of God but with his feelings. (Here, God's wrath and Abe's rage.) (Heschel was both scholar and saint, and on both scores I hate to disagree with him. But we Christians are concerned with God’s form as well as his feelings. As the Son in the Holy Trinity, Jesus was in God’s “form,” but to redeem humanity he “took the form of a slave”: Philippians 2:5-11.)
4.....I use “the American mind” in the full sense in which here I speak of “the Jewish mind.” The past (the roots) is present in decision-making, so that the future (the fruits) will have continuity, integrity, with the origins; and so that change does not destroy IDENTITY, as it does when a people become amnesiac about their roots. This reality about tradition and community applies alike to majorities and minorities.
5.....If it’s integrity we most want in the next president of the United States, maybe we shouldn’t limit our search for models to past presidents. Integrity means having it all together in the interest of TRUTH and LOVE, not of self and power. Because God made us free, integrity is optional. Because the God of Truth and Love made us “in his image,” we sin against him, violate our own being, and fail our responsibilities if we center our decision-making in self-interested power. In this, there is little difference between faithful Jews and faithful Christians.
6.....I must add two notes on “MINDS.” Heschel’s mind was compounded of four minds. (1) The Hebrew mind. (He was master of the language and literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we Christians call the Old Testament.) (2) The Jewish mind, the continuance of the Hebrew mind. (He was a double descendant of eminent rabbis.) (3) The mind of “the West,” compounded of the Bible (Old Testament + New Testament) and the Enlightenment. (After high achievement in Jewish education, he earned a PhD at the University of Berlin.) (4) The American mind, the mind of the West in its particular shaping in the 17th and 18th centuries along the western shores of the north Atlantic—its distinctive contribution to governance being that the institutional management of law and religion are never to be in the same hands. (Escaping from Hitler, he became an American.)
7.....While minds (3) and (4) are predominantly Christian, the very fact that the “Bible” (a Christian term) binds together the Hebrew and Christian formative literatures evidences that in the Biblical mind, the Jewish and Christian minds are in inseparable dialectical relationship. No one should have been surprised when Abraham Joshua Heschel, longtime walking companion of Reinhold Niebuhr, preached at the funeral of that great Christian public intellectual.
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