Abraham Joshua Heschel
Polish-born American Jewish theologian, philosopher, prophetic writer, and civil rights leader whose books — The Sabbath (1951), Man Is Not Alone (1951), God in Search of Man (1955), The Prophets (1962), Who Is Man? (1965), and many others — established him as one of the most influential Jewish religious voices of the twentieth century, and whose famous statement that he 'felt his legs were praying' as he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma in 1965 became one of the iconic moments of religious witness in the American civil rights movement. Born 1907 in Warsaw to a long Hasidic dynasty (descended from the Rebbes of Apt and Mezhybizh), Heschel received both a traditional yeshiva education and a doctorate from the University of Berlin. He escaped Nazi Europe in 1939, lost his mother and three sisters in the Holocaust, and made his life and career in the United States — first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, then for thirty years at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He died in 1972. His writing combines deep Hasidic mysticism with phenomenological rigor and a fierce moral voice on race, war, and the prophetic vocation of all faiths.
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Quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel
113 quotes“Unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.”
“The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement.”
“Seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise.”
“Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.”
“You must endow it with a sense of beauty, sense of purpose.”
“You are a beautiful thing.”
“Awe is the beginning of wisdom.”
“Awe precedes faith. Faith precedes love. Love precedes knowledge.”
“This is the order.”
“Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a marketplace for you.”
“Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.”
“To sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance.”
“To feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”
“What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
“Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.”
“Religion declines not because it has been refuted, but because it has become irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”
“When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit.”
“When the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past.”
“When faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain.”
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