"The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen"
I am awed by the writing of Jonathan Mark. Lately I've been wondering about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. On The Jewish Week's blog I discovered Mark on Heschel. For your convenience I'm pasting the essay as the first comment here.
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 8:37 PM
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Heschel And The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen / Jonathan Mark in New York
For all the flurry of recent articles, in The Jewish Week, The New York Times, and elsewhere, celebrating what would have been the centennial of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and wondering where "the next Heschel" is, the problem is that to be the "next Heschel" one would have to have his chasidic training and sensibility. That's the kind of training that you can't get today in any of the mainstream seminaries. You're more likely to find it in Chabad seminaries but if you graduated there you might have to take a lifetime pulpit in Estonia.
At one December conference last month in Manhattan, various speakers, including representatives of Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, all admitted that Heschel was never completely at home in those schools. He wasn't at home, they admitted, because the crux of their rabbinic training and approach is a rational, skeptical approach to text, whereas Heschel, with his old school European chasidic training, was more inclined to the poetic and the mystical.
It should be no surprise, then, that two of Heschel's friends at the University of Berlin, in the late 1920s, were not "rational" liberal or progressive Jews but Menachem Mendel Schneerson, future rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, future centerpiece of the Yeshiva University rabbinic program, who studied with a Chabad teacher as a child. Both Schneerson and Soloveitchik were radical thinkers and, interestingly enough, neither Schneerson nor Soloveitchik was replaced within their movements anymore than Heschel was within his.
You can be sure that when these heavyweights were sitting at a Shabbos table, Heschel didn't crack a joke that they think is so funny at the Jewish Theological Seminary: "Hey, what's the closest religion to Judaism? Lubavitch, get it? Uh, Menachem, pass me some challah." Heschel's wit was better than that. Pity the fool at that Shabbos table. This was a league of extraordinary gentlemen.
The pivotal event in Heschel's life, at least for those infatuated with his activism, is, of course, his marching alongside Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights movement. This was the photo-op that just about every liberal rabbi would die for. But one of the things that attracted photojournalists to Heschel was his great beard, his prophetic demeanor. There were plenty of other Jews who marched with King but they didn't have beards, at least not a beard like his.
If you were a photographer covering Selma-to-Montgomery what white guy - and there were plenty of Jewish white guys who marched -- would you be taking a picture of? You don't think that King's people knew what they were doing when they put Heschel in the front row of the marchers? If Heschel didn't have that beautiful beard he'd be one more clean-shaven Upper West Side Jew among the dozens and dozens of clean-shaven Upper West Side Jews who went down south in those holy summers.
Much as we dislike judging by appearances, there's a reason why newspapers, when looking for a Rosh Hashanah photo, invariably choose a picture of Jews with beards by the river at Tashlich.
Those Jews look Jewish. Clean-shaven Jews with magnificent souls go to Tashlich just the same, but they don't make for the same photograph. Years ago, Jimmy Breslin did a memorable column on Tashlich and where did he go to do it? The Williamsburg Bridge. The people there looked Jewish and they talked Jewish. Jews from Williamsburg can go five sentences explaining any Jewish holiday without bringing up Darfur, illegal immigration or Global Warming.
These are topics worthy of discussion but there has to be more to religious Judaism than editorials in The Nation. Heschel understood that.
Heschel didn't just "pray with his feet." He prayed three times a day. Soloveitchik, Schneerson and Heschel envisioned Jewish leadership as something more than just waving a placard for the cause de jour.
Heschel had a serious Jewish background. These days, we have rabbinical candidates whose greatest pre-seminary exposure to Jewish life was a summer in Camp Ramah and a Debbie Friedman concert, delightful as that may be. You can be sure, back at the University of Berlin, that Heschel, Soloveitchik and Schneerson did more than play foosball, listen to the Klezmatics and imagine themselves as Bolsheviks. (Let's remember, back in the 1920s, tens of thousands of liberal Jews, the kind that now pine for a new Heschel, were convinced that there was no surer path to "social justice" than supporting Stalin).
Heschel didn't define social justice as everyone's cause but his own. Heschel, friend of the future Lubavitcher rebbe, would have marched in Crown Heights in 1991 when it was burning and crowds were yelling "Kill the Jews" just blocks from Schneerson's apartment - a time when most liberal Jews, who now yearn for Heschel, took the week off.
If suddenly thousands of rockets further ravaged Darfur, you can bet the black-Jewish alliance that yearns for Heschel would take to the streets. And while it's one thing not to care if someone kills a mean ol' West Bank settler, has anyone noticed that the self-described heirs to Heschel, with all their vaunted "alliances" and "dialogues," have not been able to get those alliances to show up for the non-settler, non-European, working class Jews of Sderot?
Where is the next Heschel, anyway?
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