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II. The Question of God in the Struggle for Racial Justice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2021
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In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?
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References
44 Kaplan, Edward K., Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2019), 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Heschel's works in the following are taken from Kaplan, and retain the noninclusive language of the original. Recipient of the National Jewish Book Award, Kaplan is far more than a “biographer,” lucidly interpreting Heschel's literary and theological legacy in the context of broad movements in Jewish life and thought and catastrophic political events of the twentieth century.
45 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 133.
46 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 105, citing Henry Corbin, from his preface to excerpts from Heschel's The Prophets in a French journal in 1939. Corbin had enlisted Heschel and other essayists from Christian and Islamic perspectives to counter moral relativism and nihilism from the vantage point of the Abrahamic religions.
47 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 120.
48 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 126, from Heschel's 1942 essay, “An Analysis of Piety.”
49 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 85, from Heschel's 1937 biography of Jewish statesman Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1509).
50 See Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, chap. 2–5.
51 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 195, from Heschel's 1954 treatise on prayer, Man's Quest for God.
52 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 120, from Heschel's 1940 essay, “God's Religion or Religion of the Good?”
53 I know of few more devastating critiques of the gap “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ” than one finds in the appendix that concludes Douglass’ Narrative. “Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.” Douglass, Frederick, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Gates, Henry Louis (New York: Signet, 2012), 299–403Google Scholar, at 397–98.
54 As I write these lines, images of a mob storming the American capitol cross my screen, some carrying the Confederate flag, others bearing flags emblazoned with the names of “Trump” and “Jesus.” The events of January 6, 2021, writes one journalist, are “evidence that Donald Trump has bent elements of American Christianity to his will, and that many Christians have obligingly remade their faith in his image. Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’ banner to implement God's will to keep Trump in the White House.” See Emma Green, “A Christian Insurrection,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2021. “What we saw today is a clear declaration that many white people would rather live in a white dictatorship than in a multiracial democracy.” See Bryan N. Massingale, “The Racist Attack on Our Nation's Capitol,” America, January 6, 2021.
55 To be sure, the “feel for God,” as we will see in the following, is shaped by certain narratives and images of God in the Bible, especially the Exodus story and the manner of life, teachings, death, and Resurrection of Jesus.
56 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 89. “It is customary to blame secular science and antireligious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” Heschel, Abraham Joshua, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 3Google Scholar.
57 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Scribner's, 1954), xivGoogle Scholar.
58 In his 1950 book Man Is Not Alone, Heschel develops what Kaplan calls his “blueprint for a theological revolution,” a bold “paradigm shift,” partly a response to neo-Kantian or Cartesian epistemological frameworks, characterized by “the re-centering of human thinking from the self to God as Subject” (173). With students, I often use chapter 5, “Knowledge as Appreciation,” and chapter 9, “In the Presence of God,” to introduce a notion of faith rooted not in conceptual notions of the divine but in wonder and the ineffable dimensions of human experience.
59 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 133, from “The Meaning of This War.”
60 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 133.
61 The major figures treated in the course are (I) Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs; (II) W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells; (III) Howard Thurman; and (IV) Maya Angelou and Jacqueline Woodson, supplemented throughout by select works from Black writers, poets, and artists such as Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Bobby McFerrin, and Toni Morrison.
62 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 316. This and limited material from the “Seeds of Wonder” section and the section titled “Seeds of Hope” were initially developed in Pramuk, Christopher, “Proximity, Disruption, and Grace: Notes for a Pedagogy of Racial Justice and Reconciliation,” in You Say You Want a Revolution? 1968–2018 in Theological Perspective, eds. Babka, Susie Paulik, Procario-Foley, Elena, and Yocum, Sandra (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2019), 135–57Google Scholar.
63 See Metz, Johann Baptist, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. Ashley, J. Matthew (New York: Paulist, 1998), 142–43Google Scholar.
64 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 139.
65 See Pramuk, Christopher, “Black Suffering/White Revelation,” Theological Studies 67 (2006): 345–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such questions link Metz's European political theology, shadowed by the memory of Auschwitz, with North American Black liberation theology, haunted by the history and enduring effects of slavery. Both trajectories interrogate Western theology's historical amnesia with respect to what Metz calls the “unreconciled dead.”
66 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 167, citing a 1949 essay by Will Herberg, “the first prominent Jewish intellectual to recognize Heschel's significance.”
67 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 318–19.
68 Tracy, David, on the impact of “the classic,” in The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 102Google Scholar; citing Dorothy Van Ghent.
69 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 306.
70 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 358–59.
71 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 359–61. The praying person is “heroic,” says Heschel, for “intentionally or not, he puts his life in danger. He surrenders himself to the One to whom his being and essence belong; he makes a decision, he accuses God, gives notice, confesses himself, makes a vow, … and seals a covenant” (Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 106, from a 1939 essay). And again: “In no other act does man experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer.…What the word can no longer yield, man achieves through the fullness of powerlessness” (Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 199, from Man's Quest for God). In all such passages, Heschel stresses “the inseparability of ethics and inwardness” (199). Prayer, thought, and action become one.
72 Rev. Alonzo Johnson, in “The Ring Shout and the Birth of African American Religion,” from the documentary Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (PBS: Blackside, 1987).
73 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 138.
74 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 134.
75 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 135.
76 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), 68–69Google Scholar.
77 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 89.
78 Edward K. Kaplan, introduction, in Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, poems translated from the Yiddish by Morton M. Leifman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 15. Against critics who rejected Heschel's “stubborn piety,” claiming that it “did not give meaning to the suffering and death of innocent people,” Heschel “maintained that compassion for God's suffering (his theology of God in exile) could incite responsible citizens to act and thus avoid another Holocaust” (151). Heschel, for his part, was often stung by his Jewish critics. “They called me a mystic, not a realist. I had no influence on the Jewish leaders” (Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 132).
79 Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings, selected with an introduction by Susannah Heschel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 173.
80 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 139.
81 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 139.
82 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 199, citing Heschel's 1954 treatise on prayer, Man's Quest for God.
83 Office of African American Catholic Ministries, Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Tracing Your Catholic Roots: 1990–2009, https://resources.catholicaoc.org/offices/african-american-pastoral-ministries.
84 Office of African American Catholic Ministries, Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Tracing Your Catholic Roots: 1990–2009, 100–01.
85 On the history of anti-Black racism within Catholic women's religious orders and the courageous resistance of Black religious women against it, see Shannen Dee Williams, Subversive Habits: The Untold Story of Black Catholic Nuns in the United States (pub. forthcoming), and articles by Dr. Williams in America magazine.
86 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 365–66.
87 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 330–31.
88 I recognize the risk of projecting theological meaning on to such a dehumanizing scene, and do so tentatively. For a theological interpretation of women's Holocaust literature (and a sensitive navigation of its risks), see Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Christopher Pramuk, “Making Sanctuary for the Divine: Exploring Melissa Raphael's Holocaust Theology,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 12:1 (2017): 1–16.
89 Cornel West, “The Radical Heschel,” Jewish Currents, December 23, 2020, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-radical-heschel/.
90 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 89. Today, we can and must extend these questions to the suffering Earth and its nonhuman creatures, finding new narratives and reclaiming ancient and indigenous ones that reorient the human imagination in relation to the whole of creation.
91 See Pramuk, “Proximity, Disruption, and Grace.”
92 See Christopher Pramuk, The Artist Alive: Explorations in Music, Art, and Theology (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2019).
93 Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” 323–24.
94 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955), 115.
95 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994; orig. McClurg, 1903), 156.
96 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 162.
97 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 102. “‘There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the second level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into song.’ True prayer is song” (Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 161, from Heschel's Man's Quest for God). An elderly Black man from Charleston, South Carolina, puts it this way: “I think singing is the key that opens the heavenly door.” See “The Ring Shout and the Birth of African American Religion,” from Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (PBS: Blackside, 1987).
98 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 103.
99 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 176. Again, the “faith” of others can and often does extend well beyond formal religious affiliation. See, for example, Hebbah H. Farag, “The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors,” Religion Dispatches, June 24, 2015, www.religiondispatches.org.
100 Walter Brueggemann, Disruptive Grace: Reflections on God, Scripture and the Church, ed. Carolyn J. Sharp (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 153.
101 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 165.
102 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 253–64.
103 Metz, A Passion for God; Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 158. It is significant that Metz, in describing the Ignatian mysticism of his teacher Karl Rahner, employs the phrase “pathos for God,” the passion “for a God who is near, but yet in his most intimate nearness still hidden and thus easy to overlook” (A Passion for God, 98–99).
104 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 35.
105 John F. Deane, “A Conversation with Rowan Williams,” Image (80), https://imagejournal.org/article/conversation-rowan-williams/.
106 “Fred Moten on James Baldwin's ‘Letter from a Region of My Mind,’” https://vimeo.com/261362341. Here Moten refers to the final lines of Baldwin's 1963 collection, The Fire Next Time: “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
107 I am indebted to my colleague Jason Taylor at Regis University for helping me think through and formulate these insights on teaching. Taylor further links Moten's commentary with the four recently promulgated Universal Apostolic Priorities advanced by the Jesuits, especially the third, “Accompanying Youth in the Creation of a Hope-Filled Future.” See https://www.jesuits.global/uap/introduction/.
108 Pope Francis speaks of the search for truth and common flourishing as inclusive of the desire to “name people with their real name, as the Lord names them, before categorizing them,” the latter being the danger of surrendering to the “culture of the adjective.” See Pramuk, “Proximity, Disruption, and Grace,” 148–50.
109 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 176, citing philosopher Shmuel Hugo Bergman's 1951 review of Man Is Not Alone.
110 Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 173, from Man Is Not Alone.
111 See Metz, A Passion for God, 163, on a “mysticism of open eyes,” a “God-mysticism with an increased readiness for perceiving”; see 54–71, on “suffering unto God,” or biblical Israel's incapacity “to distance itself from the contradictions, the terrors, and the chasms in its life,” its “incessant turning of its questions” back to God; and thus, their yes to God, or what Metz also calls poverty of spirit, “does not express shallow or infantile regression.”
112 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 68–69. Although Heschel did not himself use the term “spirituality,” a term that gained wide provenance in later years, Kaplan employs it to describe the heart of Heschel's concerns. In the 1940s Heschel described his goal as a “systematology,” a phenomenology of prophetic insight, or, even more intriguingly, “Prophecy after the Cessation of Prophecy,” as he titled a 1944 essay. Meanwhile a number of early reviewers critiqued Heschel's “poetico-mystical approach” as difficult to follow. Much later, at the height of his literary maturity, Heschel coined the term “depth theology,” which seems to me right on the mark. “Theology is like sculpture, depth theology like music. Theology is in the books; depth theology is in the hearts. The former is doctrine, the latter an event. Theologies divide us; depth theology unites us.” See Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 115–26.