Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in 1907 in Poland. He came from a Hasidic family that was extremely faithful to its religion. The podcast under analysis informs about different aspects of Heschel’s life and gives an objective account of his work and his attitude towards world religions and his own religion as such. It can be understood from The Spiritual Audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that Heschel was a theologian and a philosopher who valued his life and who has written a variety of books in theology in which he expressed the brightest of his ideas.
Above all, Abraham Heschel should be appreciated as a person who valued life. Throughout his life, Heschel fought for peace and equality, which can be proven by his fame as a provocative leader who fought against the war in Vietnam and eagerly expressed his negative opinion towards racial discrimination and interreligious discords. His philosophic attitude towards life can be expressed infamous words of his: “An individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again” (The Spiritual Audacity). Thus, the life of this person was saturated with the most diverse events and he valued each of them equally strong and loved life despite all its difficulties and obstacles.
Moreover, the work that Heschel has done during his life proves that he was a worthy person wishing to leave a trace in history. His ideas and beliefs are incorporated into numerous published work the most famous of which is God in Search of Man, The Prophets, The Sabbath, Man Is Not Alone, and many other. At this, The Prophets, a doctoral dissertation was life-changing for him. When writing this work, he has understood that “God needs us to help God make this world better” (The Spiritual Audacity) and this idea served as a starting point for many of his other works and contributed to his understanding of the world and religion. Therefore, Heschel’s work is valuable not only for the subsequent generations; he himself learned much from what he taught.
Finally, one of the most interesting facts about Abraham Heschel is that he has not only been faithful to his beliefs and ideas throughout his life but behaved in correspondence with them. One of their most important ideas of his was that “people of different faiths need one another” (The Spiritual Audacity). He showed that friendship and communication between such people are possible through his relations with Martin Luther King Jr. with who he was of different faiths. Not only have they become close friends, but they had much in common. This serves as a validation of the idea that God speaks through people of various religions and expresses his concern for all of them, another idea that Heschel promoted throughout his life and work.
In this way, The Spiritual Audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel shapes the listeners’ ideas about this person. It was more than interesting to discover about Heschel’s attitude towards life, the value of his works for humanity, and the ideas that he expressed throughout his life from people who knew him and who considered him not only a brilliant philosopher and theologian but a wonderful person whose teachings changed the lives of other people but and led to the alteration of his own life.
References
Tipett, Krista. “The Spiritual Audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Speaking of Faith. 2008. American Public Media.