Not “Any Tom, Dick, and Harry”

Abstract

Abraham Heschel’s last book includes a critique of Martin Buber, suggesting that Buber insists that God conform to his understanding of what constitutes justice in human history. This article explores whether Heschel’s judgment is justifiable, and whether there is really so much distance between these two prominent modern Jewish philosophers on the topic of theodicy. The conclusion is that Heschel’s critique was both correct and incorrect. At the end of their lives, the Holocaust brought both Jewish philosophers to revolutionary, that is to say, unanticipated and unwanted, insights in their struggle with that Tremendum, which is the Holocaust.