Heschel Archives | The Cinch Review

June 29, 2015February 23, 2022

Inspirational Thought of the Day

Today while re-reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s great work The Prophets, I came across this passage which put me in a “nothing-ever-changes” frame of mind:

Assyria has often been called the most ruthless nation of antiquity. For ages she plundered all peoples within her reach, like a lion which “filled his caves with prey and his dens with torn flesh” (Nah. 2:12 [H. 2:13]). Her warfare abounded in atrocities; cutting off the heads of conquered peoples was a common procedure. The kings of Assyria boasted of towns destroyed, dismantled or burned, leveled as if by a hurricane or reduced to a heap of rubble. The victors took away everything they could carry. Upon capturing a city …

And here Heschel quotes from a book of history by Georges Contenau:

… the king’s throne would be set up before the gates of the city and the prisoners would be paraded before him, led by the monarch of the captured town, who would undergo the most agonizing torture, such as having his eyes put out or confinement in a cage […] Sargon had the defeated king of Damascus burned alive before his eyes. The wives and daughters … were destined for the Assyrian harems and those who were not of noble blood were condemned to slavery. Meanwhile the soldiery had been massacring the population, and brought the heads of their victims into the king’s presence, where they were counted up by the scribes.

(And there’s more on the famous neighborliness of the ancient Assyrians at this link.)

Heschel goes on:

A few decades later, after the downfall of Assyria, it was Babylonia whose might and splendor held many nations in her spell. A state of intoxication, a voluntary madness, overcame the world, eager to join and to aid the destroyer, accessories to aggression.

As someone once said, there’s nothing new under the sun. We think we’ve gotten far beyond the point where cutting off someone’s head and waving it around is an effective way to win friends and influence people, and yet here we are well into the 21st century, and it’s an approach that is earning dividends and disciples in the age of Twitter and Instagram.

Well, at least, in this ever-changing world, there are some things we can still rely upon.

July 28, 2013May 21, 2023

On Prayer: Heschel, Ysabella, etc.

Prayer would seem to be a very simple thing, a straightforward concept that the devout and the atheistic alike easily understand. “Please God, do this for me; make that right; fix this problem.” Yet the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to believe that the beating heart of prayer is actually something far simpler that I ever comprehended as a young person, loaded as I was with the ideas and traditions to which I happened to be exposed. And it is the simplicity on the far side of complexity (as per Oliver Wendell Holmes) that is most to be desired.

Some of what seems to me to be great and ultimately simple wisdom on the nature of prayer is below from Abraham Joshua Heschel:

The true source of prayer […] is not an emotion but an insight. It is the insight into the mystery of reality, the sense of the ineffable, that enables us to pray. As long as we refuse to take notice of what is beyond our sight, beyond our reason; as long as we are blind to the mystery of being, the way to prayer is closed to us. If the rise of the sun is but a daily routine of nature, there is no reason to say, In mercy Thou givest light to the earth and to those that dwell on it … every day constantly. If bread is nothing but flour moistened, kneaded, baked and then brought forth from the oven, it is meaningless to say, Blessed art Thou … who bringest forth bread from the earth.

The way to prayer leads through acts of wonder and radical amazement. The illusion of total intelligibility, the indifference to the mystery that is everywhere, the foolishness of ultimate self-reliance are serious obstacles on the way. It is in moments of our being faced with the mystery of living and dying, of knowing and not-knowing, of love and the inability of love—that we pray, that we address ourselves to Him who is beyond the mystery.

That’s from Heschel’s book titled Man’s Quest For God.

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Continue reading “On Prayer: Heschel, Ysabella, etc.”

September 28, 2012September 18, 2023

Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Who Is Man?”

I’ve become a big aficionado in recent years of the writing of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great philosopher and a Jewish theologian (1907 – 1972). Most recently I got a copy of his book Who Is Man? Considering its focus, it probably would have made ideal reading in advance of reading Heschel’s great (though earlier) works Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man, but no matter.

Like Heschel’s work generally, it’s very rich, at times quasi-poetic, and rewards enormous reflection on each page. Following is a short section on what Heschel characterizes as man’s inherent “nonfinality.” (In using the word “man,” of-course, Heschel is referring to humankind, both on the general level and the individual, and is not trying to disrespect the ladies.)

Nonfinality (pg 40)

Where is man? At what stage of his life and in what situation of his existence do we meet him as he really is? He is variable, fickle, appearing in different roles. Is he the same as father or mother as he is as salesman or soldier? Does he remain the same from the cradle to the grave, from the cave to the rocket?

All the definitions cited above have a ring of finality and presume to be definitive. However, there is no such entity as man in his permanent and final form. Man is rarely to be found in a definitive edition. A salient characteristic of being human is inconstancy both in behavior and in self-understanding, inability to remain what he is once and for all. Finality and humanity seem to be mutually exclusive. Man is caught in the polarity of being both tentative, undecided, unsettled as well as final, fixed, determined.

Anything is possible. The ambiguity of his traits and the ambivalence of his actions are such that his consistency involves inner contradiction. Man has many faces. Which is canonical and which is apocryphal?

To understand his being it is not enough to see him as he acts here and now, for example, as conditioned by our industrial society. Man is a being in flux. Yielding to a particular pattern of living he remains both compliant and restive, conforming and rebellious, captive and insurgent.
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To claim to be what I am not is a pretension. To insist that I must be only what I am now is a restriction which human nature must abhor. The being of a person is never completed, final. The status of a person is a status nascendi. The choice is made moment by moment. There is no standing still.

I think that’s all true, and yet these are things we rarely stop to examine in our own selves, and probably even less so with regard to others.

It also struck me as something worthy of filing in my “Dylanosophy” section. If you’re a Dylan fan you may already know why. It’s because all of this reflection on the ever-changing nature of man sounds a lot like some scholarly (or at least rock-criticly) writing I’ve read about Bob Dylan in the past. In fact, you could substitute “Bob Dylan” for “man” in the text above and come out with something that would seem to fit the portrait so many have painted of Dylan in their effort to get their heads around his work.

Don’t believe me? Let’s try it:

However, there is no such entity as [Bob Dylan] in his permanent and final form. [Bob Dylan] is rarely to be found in a definitive edition. A salient characteristic of being [Bob Dylan] is inconstancy both in behavior and in self-understanding, inability to remain what he is once and for all. Finality and [being Bob Dylan] seem to be mutually exclusive. [Bob Dylan] is caught in the polarity of being both tentative, undecided, unsettled as well as final, fixed, determined.

Anything is possible. The ambiguity of his traits and the ambivalence of his actions are such that his consistency involves inner contradiction. [Bob Dylan] has many faces. Which is canonical and which is apocryphal?

Ha! Write it up, print it out, send it in, and you may just win yourself a Pulitzer. A new, great interpreter of Bob Dylan is born!

Yet, the amusing thing, obviously, is that Heschel is writing about all men, all humans; he’s writing about humanity, about what it means to be human.

That writers and critics are always singling Bob Dylan out for traits that seem common to all of us might tell you a few things.

However, today I’m not going to belabor any of those things. I’m just putting it out there.

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