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Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Call of Transcendence
By Shai Held Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Shai Held
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01130-5
CHAPTER 1
WONDER, INTUITION, AND THE PATH TO GOD
Abraham Joshua Heschel begins his discussion of wonder in God in Search of Man by declaring that "among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder." This opening sentence ends with something of a surprise: one might have expected Heschel to invoke a legacy of "fidelity," "commitment," or "piety." But wonder? Can a sense of wonder be passed from generation to generation? Can one, in fact, inherit a "legacy of wonder"? This perhaps counter-intuitive sentence can serve as an interpretive key to one of Heschel's primary projects as a religious writer: he seeks to subvert the views of those, like Martin Buber, who insist on an inherent tension between spontaneous religious expression and received tradition.
In one of his most famous early lectures, Buber paints a stark contrast between "religion" and "religiosity." Religiosity, Buber writes, is "man's sense of wonder and adoration ... an ever anew [sic] articulation and formulation of his feeling that, transcending his conditioned being yet bursting from its very core, there is something that is unconditioned." Religion, in contrast, is "the sum total of the customs and teachings articulated and formulated by the religiosity of a certain epoch in a people's life." Although Buber recognizes that religion and religiosity can in theory go hand in hand, his profound skepticism about the former, and its potentially deadening effects on the latter, are evident throughout. Thus Paul Mendes-Flohr, Buber's foremost contemporary commentator, can write that, for the latter, "Religion is antithetical to religiosity." Religion, Buber tells us, is governed by "rigidly determined ... prescriptions and dogmas," and in thwarting authentic religiosity, it all too readily becomes "uncreative and untrue." In a rather dramatic formulation, Buber writes: "Religiosity induces sons, who want to find their own God, to rebel against their fathers; religion induces fathers to reject their sons, who will not let their fathers' God be forced upon them. Religion means preservation; religiosity, renewal." Now, Heschel is well aware that religion can serve to undermine and even destroy authentic religious devotion and practice. He does, after all, polemicize against the stultifying state of the American synagogue, at one point even asking whether "the temple [has] become the graveyard where prayer is buried." Moreover, he evinces an ongoing fascination with the Hasidic master R. Menahem Mendl of Kotzk, who was nothing if not suspicious of the role of habit and imitation in religion as it is all too often practiced. But Heschel insists whole-heartedly that far from constituting an inevitable consequence of religion, the suppression of religiosity is, instead, the result of the dilution and falsification thereof. In fact, much of Heschel's work is an attempt to revitalize what he regards as the fruitful polarity of qeva and kavvanah, or fixed practice and inner devotion. As he puts it in consecutive chapter titles in Man's Quest for God, "Spontaneity is the goal ... Continuity is the way." If for Buber, modern man needs to break free from the shackles of inherited tradition, for Heschel, in stark contrast, he needs to be saved from the "callousness" induced by modernity—and his salvation may be found precisely in inherited tradition, and the commitment to wonder and responsiveness it transmits. According to Heschel, in other words, religious tradition holds out a legacy of wonder that can elicit and awaken our own. It is on this possibility, as we shall see, that he thinks the very future of humanity depends.
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According to Heschel, all human beings have a natural proclivity to wonder, a sense of "unmitigated innate surprise." A sense of wonder, of amazement and appreciation, is constitutive of who we are as human beings. Wonder, for Heschel, is not merely an emotion or an experience. It is more like an existential posture, a fundamental orientation to the world. All religious awareness and insight are rooted in wonder. As Heschel writes, "Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted." Indeed, "The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted."
And yet routinization is like spiritual poison: "This is the tragedy of every man: 'to dim all wonder by indifference.' Life is routine, and routine is resistance to the wonder." One of the crucial tasks of religion, Heschel therefore insists, is to struggle against the anesthetizing effects of our over-familiarization with life and reality, and to instill in us a sense of "perpetual surprise," a willingness to encounter the world again and again as if for the first time. The fact that the sense of wonder can be so difficult to maintain renders the need for regular worship all the more urgent: "Every evening we recite: 'He creates light and makes the dark.' Twice a day we say: 'He is One.' What is the meaning of such repetition? A scientific theory, once it is announced and accepted, does not have to be repeated twice a day. The insights of wonder must be constantly kept alive. Since there is a need for daily wonder, there is a need for daily worship." Heschel contends, in other words, that "all worship and ritual are essentially attempts to remove our callousness to the mystery of our own existence and pursuits," and that "the main function of observance is in keeping us spiritually perceptive."
In reading Heschel's writings, one often gets the impression that wonder and radical amazement are essentially synonyms; indeed, we have already seen Heschel speak of "wonder or radical amazement" as if the two were merely different terms for the same approach to reality. But at other times, it is clear that they are not completely overlapping categories. In an essay "On Prayer," Heschel writes that "we begin with a sense of wonder and arrive at radical amazement." In general, I think, the distinction between them is that whereas wonder is essentially a state of surprise, radical amazement is reflexive wonder, or wonder turned in upon itself and thereby intensified. "Radical amazement," Heschel writes, "has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see." Or, to put it somewhat differently, "Even our ability to wonder fills us with amazement." In other words, for Heschel, all moments of radical amazement are also experiences of wonder, but not all experiences of wonder are moments of radical amazement. I suspect that Heschel would say that while the cultivation of a perpetual sense of wonder is the goal of much of ritual and worship, a continual sense of radical amazement, by contrast, is both impossible and undesirable, because it would lead, ultimately, to paralysis. While wonder is a form of thinking that ought to accompany all our acts of perception, radical amazement is more like a high-intensity religious experience, and is therefore necessarily both consuming and fleeting.
Heschel writes:
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted, regarding events as a natural course to things. To find an approximate cause of a phenomenon is no answer to his ultimate wonder. He knows that there are laws that regulate the course of natural processes; he is aware of the regularity and pattern of things. However, such knowledge fails to mitigate his sense of perpetual surprise at the fact that there are facts at all. Looking at the world he would say, "This is the Lord's doing, it is marvelous in our eyes" (Psalms 118:23).
According to Heschel, then, wonder is not a question in search of an answer; it is not "the same as curiosity," but a "form of thinking ... an attitude that never ceases." Religion thus has nothing to fear from science. The latter, Heschel writes, "extends rather than limits the scope of the ineffable, and our radical amazement is enhanced rather than reduced by the advancement of knowledge." In light of this, Heschel warns that "the sense of wonder and transcendence must not become 'a cushion for the lazy intellect.' It must not be a substitute for analysis where analysis is possible; it must not stifle doubt where doubt is legitimate. It must, however, remain a constant awareness if man is to remain true to the dignity of God's creation, because such awareness is the spring of all creative thinking." Here, of course, Heschel is concerned to combat the spurious contention that religious passions are dependent upon a lack of intellectual sophistication, as if wonder were merely the refuge of naive, underdeveloped minds. Science, he insists, is not inherently dangerous to religion, and the latter's well-being is in no way contingent upon the fear and eschewal of the former. Heschel seeks to demolish the assumption, ironically often shared both by religion's most vitriolic critics and some of its most spirited defenders, that wonder depends upon—or worse, is synonymous with—ignorance of science.
Implicit in all this, of course, is that Heschel's theology is not a search for "the God of the gaps"; God is not imagined to dwell in the lacunae of contemporary scientific understanding. It is not so much specific facts that fill one with wonder, but rather, as Heschel puts it, "the fact that there are facts at all." In more philosophical terms, for Heschel, religious awareness begins with a sense of the sheer contingency of being. God is to be discerned, in other words, not primarily in interruptions of the natural order, but in the astounding fact that the natural order exists at all. "To the Biblical mind," Heschel writes, "nature, order are not an answer but a problem: why is there order, being, at all?" At the root of Heschel's sense of wonder, then, is a preoccupation with this question: Why is there something rather than nothing? "We are amazed," he writes, "at seeing anything at all; amazed not only at particular values and things but at the unexpectedness of being as such, at the fact that there is being at all." But in the very question of why there is something rather than nothing, Denys Turner argues, there is already an implicit assertion: "It is a state of affairs which might not have been, that's the sort of world we have: that it exists at all has been brought about." For Turner, then, as for Heschel, in the very experience of wonder, one is already "beginning to say" that the world is created, that "existence comes to us as pure gift." Or, as Heschel puts it, "Our question is in essence ... an answer in disguise." The notion that existence is a Russellian "brute fact" would be simply incomprehensible to Heschel; for him, existence is an irreducible mystery, and, as we shall see, all that exists alludes to its transcendent source.
Another way to think about wonder, according to Heschel, is as "our response to the sublime." Crucially, however, for Heschel, the sublime is not to be identified with the vast or the terrible. On the contrary, "the sublime may be sensed in every grain of sand, in every drop of water." But what is it, exactly? The sublime, for Heschel, is "that which we see and are unable to convey. It is the silent allusion of things to a meaning greater than themselves. It is that which all things ultimately stand for." This sense that all being is somehow allusive to inexpressible transcendent meaning is a pivotal piece of Heschel's conception of wonder; we can already see that according to Heschel, wonder necessarily involves sensitivity to transcendence.
Heschel is careful to distinguish between "the sublime as such," and the sublime as biblical man perceives it: "To him the sublime is but a way in which things react to the presence of God." Thus, biblical man's response to sensing the sublime is not horror, but rather "eagerness to exalt and to praise the Maker of the world." Now, if wonder is the human response to the sublime, then for biblical man, the sense of wonder is already pregnant with perception of the divine. But for human beings more generally, we might say that wonder contains (or perhaps simply is) a perception that all of reality alludes to some transcendent meaning, though that meaning may remain, at least at first, anonymous and mysterious.
In general, I would suggest, for Heschel, wonder constitutes a kind of preapprehension of God. Although one can have a sense of wonder without an attendant conscious, explicit awareness of God, the former is already the first step toward the latter: "Awareness of the divine," Heschel writes, "begins with wonder.... Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is ... a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is." When wonder ripens into a full awareness of God, according to Heschel, we arrive at awe. Thus, we might say that whereas wonder contains implicit reference to God, awe contains explicit reference to Him. Awe is, Heschel writes, "our relationship to God." Like wonder, awe, for Heschel, is not an emotion, but "a way of understanding ... an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves." Again, although Heschel can be less than consistent in his use of terms, I think we can say in general that if, as we have seen, wonder is our response to the sense that reality alludes to something beyond it, awe, in turn, is our response to the realization that it is God to whom reality alludes. "Awe is," Heschel avers, "an intuition for the creaturely dignity of all things and their preciousness to God; a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something absolute. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to Him who is beyond all things."
Connected to the sublime is the reality of mystery. One of the central insights of biblical Wisdom literature, Heschel insists, is the realization that "what is, is more than what you see; what is, is 'far off and deep, exceedingly deep.' Being is mysterious." The existence of the world is a mystery; the Wisdom writers teach that "the world of the known is a world unknown; hiddenness, mystery. What stirred their souls [says Heschel] was neither the hidden nor the apparent, but the hidden in the apparent; not the order but the mystery of the order that prevails in the universe." Heschel is quick to emphasize that the term "mystery" describes not an aspect of human subjectivity, but rather an essential dimension of objective reality itself. "The mystery," Heschel states plainly, "is an ontological category." It is an aspect of the world, in other words, rather than a construct of the perceiving mind. If wonder is a subjective state, the mystery is its objective correlative. Wonder, in other words, is a response to the mystery, which is a fact about the world itself. Indeed, just as wonder is primarily a response to reality as a whole, the mystery, according to Heschel, is not a limited corner of reality, "not an exception but an air that lies all about being, a spiritual setting of reality, not something apart, but a dimension of all existence." Defying the subjectivist challenge, according to which what religion accesses is limited to the human mind, Heschel asserts unequivocally that he is speaking of the world, and not merely of human consciousness:
What the sense of the ineffable perceives is something objective which cannot be conceived by the mind nor captured by imagination or feeling, something real which, by its very essence, is beyond the reach of thought and feeling. What we are primarily aware of is not our self, our inner mood, but a transubjective situation, in regard to which our ability fails. Subjective is the manner, not the matter of our perception. What we perceive is objective in the sense of being independent of and corresponding to our perception. Our radical amazement responds to the mystery, but does not produce it. You and I have not invented the grandeur of the sky nor endowed man with the mystery of birth and death. We do not create the ineffable, we encounter it.
Mystery as such cannot be overcome: "The mysteries of nature and history challenged and often startled the Biblical man," Heschel writes, "but he knew that it was beyond his power to penetrate them." Contra Hegel, who famously proclaimed that with the emergence of Greek religion, "the enigma is solved," Heschel insists that "to the Jewish mind the ultimate enigmas remain inscrutable." Indeed, he writes, "The mystery of God remains for ever sealed to man."
But Heschel wants to avoid a modern paganism which deifies mystery, or which worships a God who is perpetually shrouded in absolute mystery. Thus, he assures his readers that "God is a mystery, but the mystery is not God. He is a revealer of mysteries." In a passage to which we shall have occasion to return later, Heschel writes that although at one level "the extreme hiddenness of God is a fact of constant awareness[,] yet His concern, His guidance, His will, His commandment are revealed to man and capable of being experienced by him." Thus, although we cannot penetrate the mystery, neither do we deify it. Instead, Heschel writes, "We worship Him who in His wisdom surpasses all mysteries."
A central aspect of Heschel's theology begins to emerge here. On the one hand, human beings are capable of wonder, and with it, as we shall see, of profound religious insight. And yet there are limits to what insight alone, no matter how carefully cultivated, can achieve. In order to know the One who is beyond the mystery, we depend on divine assistance. Human beings can achieve first glimmers of the divine, but in order to know more, we need revelation. Now, to be sure, as we shall see in the next chapter, revelation does not solve the mystery, does not give us access to God's essence, but it does nevertheless provide us with both a window on the divine pathos and a path to living in accord with it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Abraham Joshua Heschel by Shai Held. Copyright © 2013 Shai Held. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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