This Shabbat and the 19th of Tevet mark the confluence of a birthday and a yahrzeit. They are the birthday and the yahrzeit of two individuals whose lives were very much intertwined. This weekend is the birthday of Reverend Martin Luther King while the 19th of Tevet is the yahrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Heschel. These two lives were connected in the domain of social justice, or what we call today Tikun Olam. Rabbi Heschel and Martin Luther King actively protested and marched together in the streets of Selma affirming their joint commitment to improve the shabby treatment of “Negroes” and workers, and they marched together to protest the human and politically waste of the American war in Viet Nam. Incidentally, Rabbi Heschel was criticized by his colleagues for devoting so much time to public politics and protests instead of classical academics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Rabbi Heschel responded as only he could “I let my feet do the praying.”
Their lives were so intertwined that Martin Luther King came unannounced to a convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in the Catskills, which I attended as a young man, to celebrate a milestone birthday of Rabbi Heschel (70th ?). This was two weeks before King was assassinated. Rabbi Heschel’s prominence in American Jewish life and in Christian prayer circles was so significant that we have a Heschel School; Heschel awards in USY; and Christians and Jews alike, such as Professor Cornell West at Princeton, still refer to Rabbi Heschel as “my Rabbi.”
Of course, Rabbi Heschel, whose appearance was prophetic-like, a pious Jew, and was saved from destruction in Europe by the Hebrew Union College which first engaged him to teach at its rabbinical school, and eventually found his way to the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary. Rabbi Heschel was from a prominent Hassidic family. But his blend of Western knowledge with classical Biblical sources would not allow him to remain in the Hassidic world. Just one example of his departure from that world is that he wrote that the whole Torah is a sacred Midrash. That it – to Heschel, the Torah itself - is a flawed human approximation of a real actual message from God to man, but not the actual words of God as dictated to a secretary.
Rabbi Heschel’s name is so integrated into American religious life, both Christian and Jewish, that his public prominence sometimes overshadows the actual contribution that he makes to, for example, this mornings sacred prayer service. What did Rabbi Heschel actually do for the life of prayer, God and Jews? Simply put, he changed the rules of the game. Prior to Heschel, prayer was thought of as seeking God, imploring God, praising God, searching for God. Heschel wrote that a real understanding of prayer is the opposite. Prayer is rather allowing God to find us; prayer is our answering God’s question; prayer is so enveloping ourselves in the experience that we find that we are worthy to view the worlds from God’s perspective. Hence the title of his most prominent work “God in Search of Man.”
All this shift of rules, moving the goal-posts so to speak, require of us the pray-er to alter radically “our mind set”, “our soul set”. But the reward is worth it. The prayer experience becomes more profound and personal.
I must tell you that Rabbi Heschel was “Basar V’dam” – i.e. a human being! He was a better writer than teacher. In class, where I was his student preparing for my rabbinate, Dr. Heschel simply read the latest gallies of his latest book. As a student, I sometimes questioned his radical resetting of the rules of the game, his shifting of the assumptions of prayer, which frustrated me. I once questioned Dr. Heschel “Dr. Heschel, we are asking A. theologically; you are (profoundly) answering B. – ie changing the nature of the question. Could you please help us with A. our original question – that is who is this God that is searching for us?” To which Heschel said to me in his own inimitable manner “Mr. Zelizer. Why do you insist on rubbing a tire across a Rembrandt?”
So here I am 50 years later telling my congregation in the words of the ethics of the Father “Go and study” read his books in our library because your soul will be better off for it.
We recall on this Shabbat this yahrzeit and birthday, of two vital religious figures in American religious history; Reverend Martin Luther and Rabbi Abraham Heschel whose lives were intertwined, whose birth and death are intertwined on the solar and lunar calendar this Shabbat. These two men were not elected to their office, or appointed to their office. Their fire surged from within. The source of fire is extinguished because both of them are dead, but we have all been ignited religiously from their lives. Let us mark their life and death in this significant way on this overlapping of the birthday of Martin Luther King and the yahrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Heschel.