Shai Held - Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Call of Transcendence

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2014

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

In the popular imagination, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is remembered for his involvement in civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the cause of Soviet Jewry. But, as Rabbi Shai Held demonstrates in his new book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, Rabbi Heschel was first and foremost a theologian and philosopher of religion. What are his core ideas, and what are his main religious insights? How did he develop his views of covenant and love, his fear of the unbounded ego, and his unique interpretation of human and divine agency? How can Rabbi Heschel's thought inspire the Jewish community and challenge religious people everywhere to recapture the wonder that opens them up to God's call?

Listen as Rabbi Dr. Shai Held, cofounder, dean, and chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, discusses Heschel's legacy and situates his work within contemporary Jewish theology and the philosophy of religion. The event was recorded before a live audience on February 25, 2014 at the Tikvah Center in New York City.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I thought I would just begin with a simple question, a basic question.
0:04.2	Who is Abraham Joshua Heschel?
0:07.7	And what are the main currents of his thought?
0:14.6	Wow.
0:15.6	Very expansive question.
0:17.4	Well, I'll start by saying this.
0:19.5	Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the, I guess you
0:23.1	would say, five or six most significant Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, one of the most
0:29.3	significant interpreters of the Jewish tradition for the modern world, and also, I think, really
0:34.1	interestingly, one of the most interesting Jewish critics of modernity,
0:39.3	that which we could say a lot in this conversation.
0:43.3	Some of the main currents of his thought that I think are really quite striking.
0:48.3	The first, this is really in a way the axis of my book, is the notion of self-transcendence. And that's a term that requires some unpacking, because I think in general, philosophers and psychologists who use that term all use it somewhat idiosyncratically. There's no agreed-upon meaning to the term self-transcendence. Heschel, I think, uses it in a variety of ways. And one of the arguments I make in my book is that it is really the core, it is really the red thread that animates almost everything he wrote. And that he was
1:18.3	actually not always so great at articulating that as clearly as he might have. And I'll propose
1:24.6	for now two very simple definitions of self-transcendence that are, I guess you would say, as easy to say as they can be hard to live out.
1:33.3	The first is that straightforward as they get.
1:36.4	Self-transcendence for Heschel is about the cultivation of what he calls transitive concern.
1:42.0	And transitive concern is really just his sort of philosophical idiom for genuine
1:46.9	concern for other people. The pair in Heschel, the juxtaposition, is transitive concern on the one
1:52.0	hand and reflexive concern on the other. And Heschel's argument is that in order to function as
1:56.8	organic life, one needs to have reflexive concern. We have to worry about things like food and
2:02.3	sustenance and a roof over our heads. But one does not fully become human unless one also
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