Panel Discussion: The Spiritual Audacity of Dr. Abraham Heschel

films mr martin doblemeyer uh he is the director of spiritual audacity the abraham heschel story martin welcome thank you so much for joining us thank you willie pleasure to be back with you uh we're also honored to have with us rabbi dan levin he is the senior rabbi of temple beth l in boca raton florida he is also a senior rabbinic fellow with the shalom hartmann institute rabbi welcome it's honored to be here with everybody good afternoon thank you so much for joining us and being a part of this panel conversation i believe we also have with us uh right now um uh we we also have with us right now uh vanessa coradera uh she is she serves as associate professor of english and chair uh of the uh department of english uh at andrews university uh vanessa welcome thank you for inviting me uh we also have with us miss kayla carmona she is working on a dual degree uh she's a graduate student working on her dual degree with master master of social work and m.a in youth and young adult ministry uh kayla we welcome you thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me uh and last but certainly not least we have with us also dr jacques dukhan he is professor of hebrew and old testament exegesis emeritus and director of the institute of jewish christian studies at andrews university this is our panel group that will be serving us today but as we get started we want to start with a word of prayer and then we'll get right into everything please join me if you will uh dear lord we thank you so much uh for everything that we have seen so far and we thank you even now uh for the life and ministry of rabbi heschel for this next hour that we spend together we pray that we will be enlightened even more informed even more and inspired all the more to serve you even as rabbi heschel did these things we pray amen um i'd like for us to get started uh by asking mr doblemeyer to speak to us and uh if you don't mind just take a little bit of time and tell us what was your inspiration for pursuing uh this documentary what was it that inspired you about rabbi heschel and um what does his life uh his teachings what do they say to you uh today in 2021 well thank you willie it's nice to be part of this conversation and and thanks to because we had this this is actually essentially a premiere of the film that we had this afternoon for uh for andrews i'm delighted that was able to happen so um a little background on the story i've been doing documentary films uh on only on subjects of religion faith and spirituality now for about 35 years and so i had always admired rabbi heschel and a number of years ago i did a documentary film on the great american public theologian his name was reinhold niebuhr and in making that film um i had the chance to interview susannah heschel who i've known for many years when i made the film on bonhoeffer i met susannah heschel and when we got talking after the interview finished she said when you finish with this film on um reinhold niebuhr would you be open to doing a film about my father and i said i'm very touched but um let me finish the film on reinhold niebuhr first and see how you like it and if you're okay about it then we can start to talk about that later and the film finished and we were very pleased she was pleased with the film and we were pleased with the way the film went and so i put that into the mix and what i actually did was made a decision that i would take a look at a number of but people that we consider to be prophetic voices of the 20th century people who were deeply grounded in their faith tradition and from that grounding were able to take it out and transform the world so reinhold never became the first story in that series the second one i talked about today in the presentation was on uh howard thurman third one was on the catholic social activist dorothy day and this last one the fourth in the series is on rabbi abraham joshua heschel and as you saw susannah heschel i thought played a wonderful role in the film she's both a a wonderful scholar of the time period because she's done her own studies on the churches in germany at the time of the build-up of adolf hitler and the national socialists but of course she can share stories about her father and family life that all only she could only she could share so this is very difficult not only for her but for everybody involved with this i mean i think one of the lines if i'm you know now the film is just literally just finished in the last couple of weeks so it's still very fresh uh for all of us and we're still trying to process how we're going to look at the film and talk to people i'm going to be listening i'll be very interested today to hear how people respond what they saw in the film what um but one of the things that i think keeps coming up for me um is that line that i wanted to have at the very beginning of the film where heschel says that i am an optimist against my better judgment uh and i believe in god and that he will have and convince that he'll have pity and mercy on us more than we deserve now this is coming from a man who lost three members of his family uh who had seen had seen for he was there in the 1930s during the rise of adolf hitler he saw what was happening and yet he still wants to be an optimist we can talk a little later about where that all comes from but i think that says that this man was able to live out of a value of hope understood exactly what it meant to be able to stand up against depression to speak truth to power and to do so with authority and i i think i the more i studied heschel uh and in preparation for making the film the more i really admired him i just admired him and uh his words his language keeps coming back again and again and again i mean he it's almost as if he was able to to look forward and think that we're going to now in the 20th 21st century be speaking in like 20 and 30 second little clips little bumper sticker isms and and and heischel could do that he could sort of condense major notions into uh into ways that all of us could get get our arms around and i think that's one of the reason why he continues to endure um you know the idea that he says some are some are guilty but all are responsible and and i think that's really uh a key key concept because we're all a part of this that that reverberates down through martin luther king jr it reverberates through the civil rights movement it's the notion that we all have to participate in identifying what's going on with with evil and do something about it uh one of the people that i really admire that comes out of that second world war period um was a man by the name of martin niemuller and nimrullah was a famed u-boat a submarine german submarine captain in world war one and therefore he was really on the the list of the favorites of adolf hitler in the 1930s as hitler's growing in power but by the middle of the 1930s neymar who's a pastor a german pastor and a brilliant man he was one of the people involved in the confessing church he said that i can't have any part of this and he resisted adolf hitler and in in the end he winds up spending seven years of his life really right through the second world war uh in prison and he was identified and put in prison and then afterwards he realized what was at stake here what had failed to happen at the beginning of the rise of adolf hitler and he said it in a succinct way that still i think reverberates now decades and decades afterwards he said when they came for the socialists i was not a socialist so i did nothing about it when they came for the union workers the trade union workers i was not a trade worker so i did nothing to stop it when they came for the jews i was not a jew and so i did nothing to stop it and then when they came for me there was nobody there to stop it and i think those kinds of thoughts nicely packed together for all of us to remember and carry with us were really the the things that that i think really reverberated through that period of post-world war ii how could this possibly happen why did this happen where did we fail where did we not see this and of course all of us now want to take those ideas and apply them to what's going on to our current moment in history so i think um i i made the decision to make these four documentary films on these biographical characters heschl being the last one and i think the reason is is clear that we in each and every case we have something that we can draw that really applies to us in our conflicts today thank you so much for sharing that um as the documentary began it started with some film clips of bloody sunday many of us are so very familiar with that other elements of the civil rights movement and throughout there were images of the civil rights movement and discussion about events in the 1960s i'd like to ask this question to all of the panelists but i would especially appreciate it uh rabbi levin if you could be the first one to jump in concerning this to all of you i asked this question what are your thoughts on rabbi heschel regarding his contributions to the civil rights movement that took place in the 1950s and 1960s so first of all thank you and it was an incredible blessing to see this extraordinarily well done documentary i had such a privilege uh reviewing it uh in advance of our panel today and i kept looking for notes to find things to make sure that oh i could plug this in about something that maybe the filmmaker missed he didn't miss anything he did such a magnificent job in really sharing with us the life of this brilliant extraordinary teacher uh so uh thank you so much i look forward hopefully to screening this in my congregation uh what's amazing is that in that period of the late 1950s and 1960s there was if in the jewish community and i think the budding civil rights community a sense of shared common purpose in the deep south it was not an uncommon thing to see signs on public accommodations that would say no jews blacks or dogs allowed and so for many in the jewish community who certainly had it easier without question than those in the black community the sting of prejudice and intolerance uh that the african-american community was made to suffer in the deep south was something with which we could find common cause and common purpose though at the same time there was a sense that the jewish community had some ways in which they could help uh the budding civil rights community so for example uh there's an organization in washington dc called the religious action center of reformed judaism their headquarters which is on dupont circle uh was founded by a rabbi named dick hirsch dick was very close friends with reverend dr martin luther king jr and a mentor to him in some ways and so when uh snick was looking for a headquarters or office space in washington dick said why don't you use space in my building and so the original headquarters of some of those early civil rights movement organizations were in a jewish building the voting rights act was drafted on the conference room table of that building there was a group of reform rabbis uh before the the march in selma that went down to saint augustine to try to lend support there also at not insignificant risk to their own safety but what rabbi heshel had which was so well i think articulated in the movie was this prophetic presence by virtue not only of his biography but by of his eloquence and i just to give you a sense of the the brilliance of this man you read his prose and it reads like poetry and english was his fourth language he grew up speaking yiddish and polish he learned german obviously and then when he came to the united states was when he learned english and you think about the eloquence that you find in any of his writing it's really almost overwhelming but he had this capacity to be a symbolic leader because of his presence uh and that was not i'm sorry the the the if i don't move my lights turn off in my office but uh and there we go let there be light uh but uh what rabbi heshel was able to bring was a national prominence uh to the work and so his presence like on bloody sunday or in other moments in the civil rights movement brought a national appreciation more than some of the other jewish figures that collaborated in the early civil rights movement i'd love to hear from others also on this panel what are your thoughts concerning rabbi heschel concerning his contributions to the civil rights movement i first of all thank you so much for this extraordinary film it was such a pleasure and privilege to be able to watch it um and i i would just say that there are two pieces that i think are really important connecting it to today and first i think he becomes an this really great example of what it looks like and what it means to be an ally so he's willing to carry burdens for others right his daughter talks about he had this heart condition um and yet he stands at the front but not standing at the front so that his voice overpowers but so that he helps keep attention so that um he brings that sort of uh solidarity that needed to be seen right that this wasn't just a southern issue that this wasn't just an issue for african americans it was an american issue and a moral issue and i think is just such an excellent example to those of us who want to stand up for what it's right um but who need to also make sure that we're carrying the burden not just the shine of what it means to be involved in social justice efforts and i also think that the other thing that he really exemplifies is a multi-faceted approach i think in this world where news is 24 7 and it pings on my watch and my phone and you know um it can be really overwhelming and and that's okay to feel overwhelmed uh but he didn't just have one cause right and that's what he tells dr king he says i need your voice to speak back against the war in vietnam and so he's he's he's thinking about what it means to practice judaism in a particular way and in what he feels is a more um scripture-oriented way right that's his personal professional life he's speaking back against the war in vietnam he it talked about he was reminding people not to turn away from the plight of um jewish individuals in russia right and then he's fighting the good fight on the civil rights movement and it just shows that it is exhausting but it is important to take a multifaceted approach too right that we need to speak up for all of those who need a voice because we can commit ourselves so much it's like i don't have time and energy for that and of course we don't we can't all do all things um but he gave as much as he possibly could and i think that's also just another amazing model it's aspirational it's an aspirational model for each and every one of us if i could add on to what's already been said um first the the documentary was beautiful and it really shined a light on the need to know right the background information um to a lot of these stories that we hear because there's so much more information that shines the light so i think another thing um that rabbi hasho was able to bring was this awareness of your spiritual life cannot be disconnected from your life that happens during the rest of the week right of what you do during your times of worship on the weekend right god literally expects us to carry that out during the week specifically when it pertains to people who are suffering and people who are oppressed right those his example and his brilliant mind brought to the forefront that those two things aren't distant but rather god expects them to be hand in hand um and that doesn't just apply right to those who are directly affected to that pain right if you believe in god then right and therefore you should be connected to this um so his impact and bringing that to the forefront i feel brought a lot a lot of other people to this fight of justice and to speak out and say hey my faith is not disconnected from my my viewing of suffering and pain so yeah let's consider this then um as we stated when dr king called people to come together to march in selma from selma to montgomery he called together individuals of various faith communities and all of this was in an effort to bring about some level of healing as it relates to the divisions among the races uh what in your opinions would uh rabbi heschel say to faith communities today uh as it relates to their role in effecting healing uh among the races yes uh dr ducan please yeah i'm sorry i joined a little later can you hear me yes thank you thank you so much for joining us i wasn't able to join europe from the very beginning uh i must say how much i was moved to watch the uh this little document uh especially in those days today i mean it is so uh relevant and uh i i felt as if uh as if uh really the prophet was speaking to us through him so that was my first personal uh emotion i i received uh as you know i sensed as i watched this movie i just wanted to say something there and perhaps if you allow me uh i i just want to answer your first question yes from from actually uh something i heard i i i read you know from from abraham heschel he was he he was a philosopher and and also a prophet i mean it has been said that even in the document making the two uh the two uh persons together two voices together and what is interesting is uh and what he said somewhere in his writing is he was comparing the two the two voices the voice of the philosopher and the voice of the prophet and he said that the the philosopher mischief makes you think which is very important right we have to think but the prophet makes you commit be involved may be alive in history uh and i i felt that as i was watching the movie uh this document that's precisely what abram shall did he was not just a philosophy many philosophers and especially in the context of the holocaust and the doc in the context of the you know of this particular event there were many philosophers even before the holocaust german philosophers who were experts in in thinking but they great thinkers actually but they did not want to be involved they remained they thought as philosophers they had nothing to do with nothing to say about uh about you know the events and this is precisely where uh abraham is different was different he was not just a philosopher a thinker but he was also you know committed involved in action to see him on the front of the march this is so this is so engaging this is so moving this is so important and this is what i i received from him again now perhaps if i may uh you know to perhaps say something about the second question which i feel is the most important at least for me what i it's perhaps the most important thought i learned from member embarrassment he said somewhere the secret and he was talking to religious people he said the secret is to be human and holy and if there is something that religious people churches you know synagogues most could understand should understand is the the beauty the value of that tension many religious people they are experts in being holy but by being holy they miss to be human and what abraham michel is teaching to us is that you cannot be holy if you are not human and in a way also you cannot be human if you are not holy and to bring these two together to churches to synagogues to even countries where you have two ideals opposed to each other you know an ideal of god of the transcendence in a position in conflict with the ideal of relating to humans this is a voice which we need to hear today more than perhaps in any other time so that's the lesson i learned from abraham that's that's the thing i would i would like to to share and to to read with you know only that particular context to your question thank you uh rabbi levin so i i'm grateful for those those comments and also uh what miss cordero and miss carmona shared earlier this idea of what does it mean to be an ally you know if you take the sort of the two elements of uh dr heschel's life and experience on the one hand he's a deeply religious man he comes out of this hasidic world where it's not just about embracing the letter of the law it's about embracing the spirit of the law and allowing that spirit to animate your spirit to be driven by more than just a legalistic did i check the right box at the right time in the right way but to allow that spirit to infuse your the fullness of every moment of every day this idea that you see in hasidic judaism of pan sacramentalism this idea that everything and everyone and every moment is holiness potential and that it's our duty to activate that potential so heschel in his theology comes at this uh place of moral awareness through a lens of grandeur of what he calls the embarrassment of living and from that place of humility of just how extraordinary it is to be a human being in a particular moment in history what does that drive you in terms of duty so if you take a look at the prophet par excellence in the uh the hebrew scriptures the the the being of moses in that moment of meeting between the holy one and moses uh before the burning bush god says to moses in five separate ways i'm aware of the suffering of the israelites the suffering of the israelites those enslaved people has come before me and i feel compelled to act now moses says who am i that i should go before pharaoh and egypt and the most amazing element of that passage is that god doesn't really answer the question god just says i will be with you sorry for my office light but what is being suggested there is this idea of divine partnership that it's not up to the divine to complete the repair of the brokenness in the world it's up to us to be the partners that god needs and that that partnership is not exclusively through a jewish lens it's not exclusively through a jewish path and as you are articulated so well in the documentary when he was working through vatican ii on nostra tate he was saying don't denigrate my path even as i recognize that you can have your path while i have mine uh i think that that sense of embrace of the prophetic tradition was one that married this idea of wonder to action and that that sense of living one's faith was was paramount which really drove him from the academy later in his career onto literally the front lines of the social issues of the day at a time as you suggested that not every academic saw that to be compelling and when you consider his experience of uh of the holocaust he survived because people were willing to take action literally as he would say a brand plucked from the fire he and other uh academics and rabbinic students were literally rescued from germany and brought here to be able to fulfill their lives and he recognized that not for someone who stood up who acted as you suggested earlier that moral challenges are not met or solved uh and i think that's really really crucial to the way that he would look at inter-religious partnership in our world today i was also going to add um i that's a good point but i was also going to add too that um what i find really inspiring for me uh is that um they they mar because it's martin luther king day i'm thinking about king you know in through the lens of king to heschel and uh this unique friendship that they had i mean they they meet at a conference uh that's set up to talk about religion and race and and uh heschel is there and he and heshel and king become associates to begin with they they recognize as we say in the film this sort of kindred this kindred spirit heschel is really almost like uh almost not quite a father figure he's 22 years older than martin luther king jr and yet you didn't see any professional jealousy in any way at all between the two of them because i think they really recognized in both of them not just their trajectory of study but also the loss the pain that they both were speaking out of that heschel had lost so much already in the second world war in the holocaust and that he recognized the pain that king had suffered over so many years and in that commitment to uh to stay in the civil rights movement and i think heschel also uh heschelen and and king had this real love for their sacred texts they were really scholars in their own way the genuine scholars and so they really met despite the age difference between the two of them they they met in a unique peer level and i think in many ways they could help guide each other in their own spiritual journey we see them as people on this sort of social transformation journey but i think we forget that at the time this is this is all unfolding they were all continuing in their own personal spiritual journey and i think they found that they could take leaps forward together in their own spiritual journeys just by the friendships and the associations last last year we saw movements that many of us in our own lifetimes have not seen now of course there's some who remember um events that took place during the 1960s some of us who are viewing are not able to remember that but when we think back to uh george floyd armard arberry and others going all the way down in time from last year all the way to what happened on the steps of the capitol building in washington dc and inside the capitol building just a couple of weeks ago uh for many of us these have been 9 10 11 12 months like no other months in certainly in our histories uh in light of all of this do you have any reflections on rabbi heschel's words either by pen or by voice that would address uh anything that ranges from civil rights to black lives matter to the events that happened on capitol hill two with two wednesdays ago um what what would be going on in his heart right now if he were alive to see all of these things that are taking place uh i would suggest um a few things uh one of heschel's very famous book is called a passion for truth and uh i think that he would over the last several years have been aghast at the number of people in prominent positions of power in public life who chose not to speak out against falsehood i think that would have inspired him to continue to be if he were here that conscience that voice and the way that dr king was that conscience that voice and i think there are people who i who are bringing that voice but not in the way that dr king was able to bring it um and not on the national stage in the way that he was able to be there i think that would you know heschel wrote at the end of that book truth is alive dwelling somewhere never weary and all of mankind is needed to liberate it and i think he would see it as his fundamental duty to speak out against the massive imposition of falsehood and uh and untruth that we see proliferating and that which came to a head on wednesday the sixth but that we still see reverberating in every corner of the internet today i think that is one element where i'm sure doctor dr heschel would have joined with dr king in trying to speak truth to power emphasis on the truth the second thing is that i believe that dr heschel like dr king truly understood the intrinsic inherent eliminal value of a single human life i think that's what drove his activism against the war in vietnam because it was the suffering of an individual innocent civilian halfway across the world that compelled him to push for us to be as a country immediately disentangled from that conflict he understood that that conflict was imminently more complicated uh than we in america were willing to understand or embrace in particular our inability to even speak the vietnamese language put us at a marked disability to understand the vietnamese people their needs wants and desires and i think that that idea that the soul of an individual person is of you know limitless value and worthy of dignity care and concern by all of humanity would have been a i think a call that he would have said in the wake of the black lives matter movement which is to say that these people who seem to be marginalized these people who seem to be irrelevant are the most relevant people in his uh work when he wrote an essay later about my reasons for involvement in the peace movement he wrote there is immense silent agony in the world and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty so i think he would have seen that plight of the those who have no voice those who are oppressed those who are not understood by virtue of their soul but by what is presented by the outside perhaps because of the amount of melatonin in their skin as being a blight a sin on humanity that needed to be redeemed and atoned yes dr coradera i really appreciate what rabbi levin said about truth because that and the quote early on in the film where he's talking about um you know i teach night every spring and one of the questions in that testimony is where is god right where is god in this camp where is god when all this is happening and uh even though it wasn't the focus of the entire documentary it was a peace there was this moment where it's where is god and and heschl says but my my my approach to that is well god would say where were you right and i think that that connects to this question of truth and this idea of each and every person being having the opportunity to be a prophet not someone who can tell the future but someone who can speak truth and and that makes sense why he and dr king were such good friends because they were both committed to speaking truth to power um at deep cost and deep personal investment um and and and i love how several people here have been interweaving that with their spiritual journeys and i think particularly for uh religious communities whatever they are um this idea of needing to speak truth to power which sometimes is your own community right it is your own religious leaders it can be your parents it can be your teachers it can be your classmates your employers that is really challenging um and you know i i was struck by i think because i'm a professor how he was the outsider professor in his group right he was doing his own thing um and and i'm not saying that that's me i'm just saying i was struck by that i think because i teach too and um you know but that didn't stop him and and i think that that is really profound that this is an embodiment of of one's relationship with the divine it is a form of worship it's what at some point in the comments it's the speaking truth is what gives you the right to worship um because you're pushing back against oppression and you're exposing the nature of god to humanity um and as rabbi levin said in different ways right everyone might take a different path um but these are each different pieces of the puzzle of the ineffable and i thought that that was just absolutely profound how we are part of the divine's mission here on this earth that we get to be prophets that we're given the privilege of participating but we have to do the difficult work especially when we see george floyd when we see what happened at the capitol where is god what is happening where are we right and how can we be tools to speak truth to the negative powers that are pushing back against us yes uh uh if if i can hear from uh miss carmon and then dr dutton okay thank you so um when i think about how abraham hatcher would have responded to all that's happened and so much has happened in the past year um i i went after watching the documentary and looked up his his speech at the conference in illinois in 1963 and and uh something he said stuck out to me he said equality as a religious commitment goes beyond the principle of equality before the law equality as a religious commandment means personal involvement fellowship mutual reverence and concern it means my being hurt when a negro is offended it means that i am bereaved whenever a negro is disenfranchised and so when i when i think about his what his response would have been right to all that's happened i think he would have been deeply saddened by all that happened last year but i think also in the response of the black lives matter movement last year i think he would have been heartened by that right the documentary spent a lot of time speaking about how he wanted to to to show that indifference caught would cause a lot of hurt and would cause more oppression and so the the global response to the deaths of ahmad aubrey um george floyd brianna taylor right that response of the bro saying this is not okay this is not all right i think had he been here he would have been at the forefront right along with him saying they are right these young people and people from across the globe from different cultures and religious backgrounds this is what i think his life life's work was working towards and so i think while he would have been deeply saddened he would have been very hurt to see that there is this movement of people who who will not sit by and watch while people are hurt but they will feel deeply the pain of others and will stand up and say this is enough i can't sit by and watch this happen um so yeah dr duke i think that the phrase black matter contains the whole thinking in the whole program in the whole project which actually could have uh triggered something in in abraham heschel it's by the way it's a little humbling to imagine what abraham hessel would have you know would would think but as far as this question is concerned it's not very difficult because when you affirm when you make that particular statement black lives matter you suggest that perhaps it doesn't matter and this is something which would have certainly you know challenged and triggered some kind of revolt on the part of of abraham heschel because if his life doesn't matter my life doesn't matter human life doesn't matter there is a big problem there and i think this is where abraham is would have you know how he would have responded he would have responded with with anger with revolt and with personal personal answer because if this life doesn't matter that means he is also himself threatened if he the other who is also another myself is threatened i am threatened and this is why by the way you know the experience of the holocaust and well which ibrahim is emphasizing very often you know the reason why they had the holocaust is because it did not matter and it did not matter for them you know this is what we should learn if it doesn't matter for them it doesn't matter for me if he is threatened i am threatened so there is a personal a personal response a personal cord here a it has to do even with the survival i mean i would not be able to survive in a place where uh another myself you know life would not matter so that's you know the kind of uh you know comment which i think would have uh be in the in the in the mouth and in thinking way behind myself thank you so much i don't know if we have any questions from our viewing audience but if we do i'd like to come to that in just a moment but dr duke and you just brought up something about uh the holocaust and of course any uh any event such as that is usually preceded by some type of political discourse and historically we understand that there was political discourse that took place that led up to that in the same way the political discourse has led up to some of the things that you all have been talking about here in this conversation um would rabbi heschel consider it fair or unfair and i'm tossing this question out uh to to whoever wishes to address it would he consider it fair or unfair to draw uh comparisons between the time of the preceding the holocaust as it relates to political discourse and uh political discourse that takes place uh in our times here in the 21st century may just make a little a little note here a very quick answer uh there is someone i don't remember his name right now but it's very important writer he said if you forget history you are condemned to repeat it and so uh if we forget the lessons of the holocaust we you are condemned to repeat it so so i feel uh i think your question is uh is certainly a valuable one we should not forget you know unless less we repeat it so that would be perhaps uh something to say you know introduction to that kind of you know to that discussion thank you anyone else and then we want to take some time if there are any questions from our audience and by the way nothing a program such as this cannot take place without people uh that you do not see on the screen making it possible so i just have to give a shout out to those that you don't see uh who are making this very possible right now uh any of our other panelists would you like to uh address uh that that question and thank you again dr dukhan for that very insightful statement that you just shared so i i think that um the jewish community often gets a little defensive around comparisons to the holocaust because it was such a unique event uh in human history and because i think there is no need to necessarily get into competitive suffering uh was my genocide as good as your genocide i don't know that that ever is a conversation that gets us anywhere i think each individual uh historic epoch when you see humanity's inhumanity uh has its own tenor and shape to it uh certainly in the united states uh the oppression of black and brown people for centuries has its own unique place in history and should be understood and remedied for itself not in comparison or distinction to uh to other events that said uh i think that there is without question a sensitivity when you see certain kinds of fascist behaviors replicated in modern times when you know what the trajectory of that kind of behavior can lead toward one of the things that i always admired about dr heschel was his profound humility despite his towering eminence as a scholar and as a public figure in his later years uh in his book a passion uh for truth uh he is reminded of um a passage by uh the the german playwright and thinker guthold lessing who writes if god should held enclosed in his right hand all truth and in his left hand only the ever active impulse after truth although with the condition that i must always and forever air i would with humility turn to his left hand and say father give me this pure truth is for thee alone and i think that that was really what i think heschel understood was that no matter how enlightened we become none of us are possessors of a monopoly on the truth that the truth is an asymptote toward which we are always striving to better understand but never in complete possession i think that that's what animated the way in which he worked with with faith leaders and i think it was that i think one of the things in modern society that would have plagued heschel was this denigration of expertise and this idea that truth was something that one ought not even bother trying to understand or to hold because to heschel it was that pursuit of the truth that would then animate one's pursuit of justice hand in hand with that uh pursuit and so i think in answer to your question he would see some of the things that are happening in society the allowance for uh untruth the allowance for the denigration of the disempowered and seed those as clarion calls to action as they have been not simply in the 1930s in europe but as they have been really across uh the centuries in history thank you um do we have i'm i'm unable to keep track of this conversation and what's going on uh in the question and answer area uh steve thank you for for joining us here uh do we have a question or two in our time remaining uh from uh our viewing audience yes certainly we do there's been a lot of interest and one listener says first thank you martin doble meyer for the gift of this film and making heschel available to us today and then goes on to ask a question about what do we learn from heschel about how to take up this interfaith work of truth-telling in this deadly time of polarization and on that theme another listener goes on to say that abraham heschel actively engaged with other faith traditions institutions and leaders while remaining devotely faithful to judaism what do you think was key to his success into his approach to ecumenical and intra or interfaith engagements so there's some real interest there in what we can learn from heschel about uh interfaith uh labors yes um can we get uh martin to respond to that then dr ducam i uh i think one of my uh one of the people that i really came to admire in the process of making the film was rabbi shy held he's up in new york and the line that he uses to talk about that particular question is that heschel came to believe that god wanted to be worshipped in different ways and that really resonated for me because i'm always taking it from we're taking it from our position looking from our point of view to god and we look towards each other to say how our religions are and our faith traditions are different this is kind of howard thurman too who wanted to break down those barriers of faith traditions and find the common ground between all of us but the notion that god wants to be worshipped honored and adored uh by in different land certainly in different languages but certainly in different faith traditions i thought was a really different way to turn that and i think that's really what what heschel came to he was committed to this interfaith work but i but i also think that he was he was able to put this notion together that um if we are as faith traditions working together we can actually solve these problems that we're faced that we're facing against commonly and and i think that's really one of the most important things that we as as faith traditions have to say yes there's there's questions why you know why organized institutional religion is facing a decline it was not happening in the 1950s and 60s in fact quite the opposite institutional religion was on the rise in the 1950s and 60s all across america it's not the case now in in 2020 and in our in our time period because the opposite has happened and i think in some ways uh the line the notion that what side of history do you want to be on and i think as we enter this new decade i think it's really important for the faith traditions to decide how what side of history do they want to be on do they want to help take the faith tradition that they believe in so sincerely and turn it towards social and political transformation in their world or do they simply want to sit back and hide within their own enclaves and not do the tough work of hope to make it make a better world for us dr duke this is a very important and certainly in this particular circle uh an interesting question and that can read already behind the question all kinds of things uh i in a way abraham heschel uh has answered that question with just one little statement playing on the word of the poet who was saying no man is an island he took this and turned this into no religion is an island as if there was a connection between the two the two ideas uh if i may reflection on that that would suggest to me that we cannot survive ourselves you know by having just the truth and the other one doesn't have anything to say about the truth the day if sometimes we have we we are tempted to think that we have the truth and the only one we have the truth we have the absolute truth and the other one doesn't have we are missing something very important and i think uh we are missing something about actually a message we need to hear if god does not speak through the other you know we are not hearing him uh you know that's something we we need to learn and uh and in a way you can you can say i have something that you don't have provided that you realize that the other one has also something you don't have so i think uh just by taking that phrase no man no religion you know was myself confused no man and no religion is an island can't develop on that and i think then you may get up to something which is the truth of god you know the truth of god that is not your only truth it's not something you possess you own and there you will be open to the truth of the other you will be open to the truth of the big other and then something will happen uh you know this is unfortunate that uh sometimes religion which is supposed to bring people together in connection to god uh has divided uh he made another another statement which is kind of related he said the reason why we've lost the sense of brotherhood it's because we lost the sense of uh sorry yeah the reason why we lost the sense of brotherhood is because we lost the sense of fatherhood and you know you come back to another really realization that the reason why we have the problem today perhaps it's because people do not realize that they are brothers and when they are realized they are the reason they are not realized because they don't realize that there is someone who is above ourselves who is our common father and so that's a part of the problem you know the ignorance of the transcendence is somehow affecting uh you know our relationship with each other i would uh add to what dr duke on said um so well i think that one of the things that heschel as a jew brings is that judaism was never a universalist kind of a tradition it was a sense that judaism was the way in which jews were supposed to live but it wasn't one that said this is how everybody is supposed to live and i think that part of what made heschel such a compelling figure was that he combined this intensity of passion for his own sense of authentic self with the humility of this is my truth this is not necessarily everyone's truth but what i think he was enamored with with dr king was this idea of how non-violence is the methodology by which we try to understand how much of our own individual truth is really a reflection of truth with a capital t and that it's really only through non-violence as gandhi would have taught that you really ever discover truth because otherwise through violence you only know in the assertion of your own truth uh and i think that's a a big piece of what i think enabled heschel to be successful in that kind of a dialogue was that he was so utterly authentic and in possession as the the documentary showed so brilliantly he knew everything he knew uh more than all of the people who ever taught him he had a wonderful friendship with his teacher martin buber the great existentialist german existentialist who also fled nazi germany and made his home in jerusalem in 1960 gave him a gift of a copy of the talmud and dr buber said well thank you so much this i've never had this before even though he was this great jewish uh and secular existential thinker right heschel had it all you know he had this incredible education and mastery of the classics of his own tradition but at the same time understood the western philosophical tradition and at the same time wedded them both in a way that said this is what i know but it's not all and i think by pulling that all together it allowed him to i think as was said earlier so eloquently to be a really effective ally uh with those uh who were different from him but also the lobby for what he knew to be right uh specifically the work that he did at vatican ii as the documentary points out to not have that uh universalist language included in the final document but the respect for jews to be able to continue to live their lives as jews passionate for their own tradition and their own path you can have many lanes in a swimming pool and everyone's swimming right uh even if they're swimming different strokes i if i could just add one more thing we'll take this and then we'll try to get to maybe one more question for you no just really quickly i think it's we can't underestimate the effect of the catholic church the global catholic church making this turn in the in the 1960s that it's going to open it's going to be open to faith traditions it's not just that catholics began to open themselves up to jews in that same document nostra tate they're open to they're talking about the openness to islam and to hinduism and to buddhism um but heschel is there as part of that dialogue but when you have a church that's a one billion people globally and it makes that document say that we you know we're we're no longer we're going to come out of our own shells we're going to say that other faith traditions have value because prior to that i mean the catholic church taught that it was the the only path to heaven was through the catholic spirit experience and many faith traditions were holding on to that notion that only through our church is salvation really possible catholic church made a big break there and hesha was really at the at the core of that transformation of thinking so i think his role in all of this and really the sort of the global movement towards interfaith dialogue and conversation really can't be overstated um steve i believe we have uh one more question that you at least one more question that you want to bring to us in this short amount of time that we have we have a lot of questions but okay uh there's two questions here that kind of converge on the sabbath and i wanted to bring those forward first of all one listener writes heschel wrote beautifully about the sabbath the sabbath speaks profoundly to issues of social justice in heschel's civil rights and social justice work did he apply the sabbath to these issues and then another listener writes how does the concept of tikkun alam repair of the world which heschel promoted relate with the sabbath and how can we make it practical in our own religious observance and our respective faiths dr dukhar i will try and answer to that question but i suppose the rabbi has certainly something to say here important and i'm eager to listen to him you know there is a dimension on the sabbath we know the way related to the preceding question of the truth and everything which is which abraham hessel is bringing to our attention and that is the poetic dimension the mystical dimension sabbath is more than just not sunday by the way and sometimes i have heard some people just focusing on that and they miss something very important it's of course not sunday but it's certainly infinitely more than that and that is what abraham is bringing to that reflection this mystical profound poetic a reflection which takes you uh uh you know to another world in other words another dimension and i i think uh uh if there is something that perhaps uh you know those who you know those christians or or even jews who uh you know could learn from abraham hessel on the sabbath this is a very important contribution that indeed abraham shall brought you know in in his in his book on on the sabbath and that is you know this reflection that you know this this emphasis on time rather than on space the emphasis on on on something which is essential not visible and that is in a way covering all the topics in a way this is a universal topic if you understand it well and this is where abraham michel has something to say which we should listen and again this is something where you know we could say that no religion is an island this is really the place where you learn to be not in line and this is really the place where you learn something about god uh which perhaps uh you know should challenge you and take you uh you know elsewhere in a dream to something else and uh this this attention to the to the space to the visible to the to the to the to to success to material uh to the work which is this is killing the human soul and this is where abrahamicial would have certainly an important contribution to make rabbi uh i'll speak briefly we have two other people on the panel and uh i'm interested in my younger colleagues thoughts on this heschel wrote in the sabbath about how important it was that we used that time to realize that we are not are the masters of ourselves but that we owe a duty to a force and a power that is greater than ourselves he wrote in the sabbath gallantly ceaselessly quietly man must fight for inner liberty to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people there are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty but only very few are not enslaved to things this is our constant problem how to live with people and remain free how to live with things and remain independent and i think that he used the vehicle of the sabbath to talk about this idea of humility of this idea that there are forces in the universe that get to make a claim on us and that those forces can be the forces of time and holiness and and the ineffable and in the different ways that he had that mystical understanding and appreciation for god but also when you get out of your own way and you silence the noise and you are able to sit back and say not what is it about me what are my needs my wants my cares my desires and i shut all that off for one day out of seven i make room in my consciousness for the other and it's only when we make room in our consciousness for the other that we are ever able to create that sense of unity among humanity that will allow us to be one with each other and then one with our god who we say is one there is intrinsic in jewish theology this idea that is when people become one with each other that that's where the special sauce is made that's why the sinai moment is so powerful in jewish tradition that's why that sense i think of the dignity of the individual halfway across the world in vietnam was so compelling for dr heschel because if we can't be one with that anonymous farmer in a rice paddy in southeast asia we will never achieve that sense of redemption for ourselves in our own time and place other comments yes ms carmona and i think dr cordero wants to jump in after that please both of you yeah so i think one of the beauty right one of the beautiful things that we see in the sabbath when we look at that fourth commandment right is that god doesn't just say that you right you individually get rest right he says where you have the power and the authority to grant others rest grant them rest right so the the foreigner who's in your land you're made your cattle right so whoever you know you who is in your sphere of influence because you have rest you also need to extend rest to them so i i i think right um a question that dr abraham mishaw would ask is right how can you truly have rest if those around you don't have rest right if they if they don't feel like the lifting of the burden from their shoulder how can you truly have rest right if those around you don't and then if you look at the prophets again and again they would speak to right like you are observing this right the the law right of how to observe the sabbath but you're there are all of these people around you who are oppressed right and and how how would god expect you to respond to these people right so you can't just live to the letter of the sabbath if you don't live to the spirit of the sabbath and so when it comes to the intersection between what we believe and what we live rest is something that that god expects us to to give as freely as we receive um so yeah yes vanessa i was just going to come with the question not as a heschel scholar or theologian but as a lifelong sabbath keeper from a tradition where there is a lot of debate for example i remember one church i went to we had to have a whole debate about whether the i was in chicago and the marathon the breast cancer marathon was coming through and should we be out there giving runners water and snacks and is that an appropriate thing to do on a saturday um just yeah the church decided yes but the fact that there was a debate about this right um and so because it was was that working and and to me that seems like service and and my point is this is heschel what i i just loved at the beginning of the documentary how it made it clear that he approached god differently right he understood a nature and essence of god in a way that absolutely transformed his relationship with his the divine and his relationship with others and there's a question here about what do we tell young people about history and we don't have time to answer that um but i would say that we can tell young people something certainly about the sabbath and about the god they understand and if the god that you see in scripture who in isaiah for example if you're studying the adventist sabbath school lesson says you're giving me sacrifices you're keeping my sabbaths and you're exhausting me says because you're not taking care of the widow and you're not taking care of the orphan and you're not doing this with any spirit and i'm paraphrasing obviously um but if if you understand that god and what that god wants from you then it is up to you like heschel to change your community and maybe that means andrews or your church or your home and it is it is up to you and you have the power to articulate that to others and to be that change um to change what it means then to keep the sabbath so that you're not worrying about am i up to my ankles or to my knees and have i sweat and have i not and you know i mean that what what is that right that's that's thinking only about yourself what am i doing right in this moment right it's not relationship with god or relationship with others and and i just see so many people and i understand why because i share this exhaustion leaving the adventist church and i don't know if there are similar um you know flights in judaism or not with a certain generational flights but you don't have to leave you can transform and it's exhausting it's really hard but that's what he tried to do um and that's why we're still talking about him today and there there's that room for that audacity and that's my hope as as a believer that we continue in that audacious path um because that is the the path that i see reflecting um scripture and reflecting a true understanding of you know what what ms carmona was saying this kind of embodied sabbath um so just kind of speaking to the young people just write be that person be that you know he started when he was young he he was started very very young um you you can be that person too i can't i'm not sure any of us can promise someone's gonna make a documentary about you um but but you can absolutely be that voice and and i hope to see that for for the future of not just say the adventist community but all our communities our interfaith communities and our local and national communities too be oh yes please uh martin i thought you were about to sleep well no i was simply gonna add as a non-adventist i have spent an enormous amount of time in adventist churches all across america and outside and beyond uh and i can't tell you how deeply impressed time and time again i am about how serious and spiritually attracted uh adventists are to the notion of sabbath it's fundamental to what you to your to your sense of how do you relate to god and uh you do have that as a as a way that you connect to the to the to the to the jewish tradition i've always seen that throughout the course of american history how adventists and jews connected and but i just i i come back time and time again telling so many people how adventists take the sabbath seriously and it becomes the anchor and the centeredness for them and i admire that so much before we wrap up this afternoon let me uh let me just say that these last two plus hours have been an absolutely remarkable and fascinating time spent together each with the other i want our viewers to take a look at this panel and express appreciation to the planning committee that worked so diligently to put this stellar group of men and women together to share their thoughts and their reflections on this documentary let me start in order by saying martin doblemeyer thank you thank you thank you for a magnificent documentary this same time last year uh we screened on campus of the howard thurman story and that was magnificent as well and two years in a row uh if i can say it you're two for two thank you thank you so very much to all of our panelists uh rabbi dan levin thank you so much uh we know it's warm where you are and you can you can go and enjoy the rest of that warmth right now as opposed to where some some of the rest of us are uh right now uh dr vanessa coradera thank you thank you so much for being a part of this miss kayla carmona thank you and dr dukhan as always my pleasure to have you a part of any any panel that i'm a part of or anytime i'm in the same presence with you thank you uh so much for sharing and um for those who you don't see we're working so diligently to make all of this work no technical difficulties that i'm aware of yes so they're so good they know how to clean it up and i don't even know what's going on and to all of our viewers thank you so much for taking up your time to participate in this martin luther king day event as we have looked at all of these things that uh that we have looked at we pray that as a result of our time together this afternoon that you have not only not only been informed but you've been inspired uh to be agents of change to make a difference uh to to brighten the corner where you are and to let the good lord use you in every which way that he chooses to see fit until we come together again for another event may the lord bless you and keep you so long

Channel: Andrews University

Views: 1,007

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Id: nYoQu6TOQkE

Length: 74min 40sec (4480 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021