Heschel in the Context of Modern Jewish Religious Thought

Abstract

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) hailed from a Hasidic family which numbered among its members the Rebbe of Apt, after whom he was named, and the Maggid (Preacher) of Mezhirichi (Mezhirech, in Volhynia, Ukraine), a prominent Hasidic leader in the generation following the Baal Shem Tov.1 The Judaism he first knew and mastered in his native Poland was that of Talmud, Kabbala and Bible as read and as lived in the Hasidic tradition. Throughout his life he retained the sense of the constant presence of God and of the holiness of creation which he had imbibed in the intense, inwardlooking world of his youth, and he sought to capture its spirit for posterity in works such as The Earth is the Lord’s and A Passion for Truth (his comparative spiritual biography of the Kotzker Rebbe and the Protestant theologian Søren Kierkegaard).