This beautifully illustrated biography introduces Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — the most important Jewish leader in the United States in the quarter century after the Holocaust — to readers of all backgrounds. The contents cover the essentials of Heschel’s biography and influence and without academic jargon. In fact, the writing could be easily read and discussed by high-school students.
Brief chapters and black-and-white photographs portray the stages of Heschel’s life. A few key documents are also pictured on thick, slightly glossy pages, including a telegram sent by Heschel to John F. Kennedy in June 1963 urging the President to insist religious leaders become personally involved in the fight for civil rights for Black Americans. “Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it,” the telegram proclaims.
This was two months before the famous March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. By that time, Heschel and King were friends and colleagues. This book tells that story as well as the story of Heschel’s childhood in the Jewish community of Warsaw, Poland, the lineage of famous rabbis from which he came, his emergence first as a poet and then a scholar, his escape from the Nazis, living in America and writing famous books of spirituality such as The Sabbath and The Prophets, and teaching in Cincinnati and then New York.
This is all framed by the story of Heschel’s outreach to leaders of other religions (uncommon for a Jewish leader in the 1950s and ‘60s), and his passion for justice and mercy as essential work of all people, revealed most powerfully in leadership during the Civil Rights movement.
The book’s title comes from a remark Heschel made after marching with Dr. King. On March 21, 1965, King led 8,000 protesters on a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where, just two weeks earlier, he and others had been assaulted by the Alabama state police while attempting to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The authors of this book write poignantly: “As Heschel walked arm-in-arm with his colleagues [pictured on the cover of this book], he was easy to spot in the crowd: He was a short, stocky man with flowing white hair, a bushy beard, who wore a dark yarmulke (Jewish head covering). Like the prophets of old, Heschel believed that standing up for others — particularly the most vulnerable members of society — is a sacred obligation. As he wrote, the religious person must seek to hold God and humankind ‘in one thought at one time,’ suffering ‘harm done to others,’ making ‘compassion’ one’s ‘greatest passion.’ ” And Heschel said, when asked what he was doing, marching, that day: “My legs were praying.”
A glossary of “Key Hebrew and Yiddish Terms” at the back, plus a timeline of Heschel’s life, suggestions for further reading, and an index of names and topics, make this an ideal work for use with students and in interfaith settings. Highly recommended.
