Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

HESCHEL'S SIGNIFICANCE
FOR JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS
EVA FLEISCHNER
Abraham Joshua Heschel did his best to help Christians
understand they could overcome their failure and become
truly human.
We all have our stories to tell about Abraham Joshua Heschel—
allow me to tell one also, a story I received from a friend:
The Jesuit Daniel Kilfoyle was one of the founders of Clergy and Laity
Concerned about Vietnam. After the first few meetings he was
forbidden by his superiors to remain with the group. Kilfoyle decided to
go to one more meeting, so that he could tell his friends in person why
he would not be able to stay with them. Heschel sat across the table from
him as he spoke. When he had finished, Heschel got up, came around
to where Daniel was sitting, and embraced him saying: "You are my
brother!" 1
In some mysterious way Abraham Heschel, the Jew,
respected the Jesuit's decision to obey and understood his pain.
What was it about Heschel that gave him this capacity for
understanding a tradition and a discipline that were—at least in this
case—quite alien to his own, a discipline which, by the 1960s, even
some Catholics had difficulty in understanding and accepting? How
was it that, less than three months after his death, America magazine
published an entire issue dedicated to Heschel, in which Protestant
and Catholic scholars joined with Jewish scholars in paying tribute to
Heschel? John Bennett, at the time president of Union Theological
Seminary where Heschel had been a visiting professor, wrote in that
issue that "Abraham Heschel belonged to the whole American
Eva Fleischner is professor of religion at Montclair State College in New Jersey and a
member of the Bishops' Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations. She is the author of Views
of Judaism in German Christian Theology since 1945 (Scarecrow, 1975) and of a Holocaust
bibliography and a number of articles. She also edited Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?
(KTAV, 1977).
This essay was originally delivered at a Heschel Symposium at the College of St. Benedict,
St. Joseph, Minn., in 1983. It has been shortened for publication here, but the full version
will appear in a volume to be published by McMillan.
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