Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

HESCHEL'S SIGNIFICANCE
question for Heschel was always: How can we talk with each other out
of our specific and partly different commitment of Jews and
Christians? Out of commitment, not without commitment.
The question for Heschel was always: How can we talk
with each other out of our specific and partly different
commitment of Jews and Christians? Out of commitment,
not without commitment.
In every God-human relationship—and this relationship was at the
heart of all that Heschel wrote and did—there are four dimensions:
creed or teaching; faith or the assent of the heart; law or deed, which
concretizes the first two; and the context in which faith is lived in
history, the community. 9
We are united in the dimension of the deed by our common concern
for safeguarding and enhancing the divine image in our fellow human
beings, by building a world where justice and freedom can prevail.
There is commonality also in the realm of faith (which for Heschel is
always distinct from creed): our awareness of "the tragic insufficiency
of human faith," even at its best, our anguish and pain in falling so far
short of the divine command, in being callous and hardhearted in
response to God's invitation. All this unites us.
And what divides us? Creed, dogma: "There is a deep chasm
between Christians and Jews concerning . . . the divinity and the
Messiahship of Jesus." 10
Yet the chasm need not be a source of
hostility. For, "to turn a disagreement about the identity of this
'Anointed' into an act of apostasy from God Himself seems to me
neither logical nor charitable." 11
The chasm remains, but we can
extend our hands to each other across it provided we are willing to
recognize that doctrine, all doctrine, can only point the way: it can
never hold fast the mystery of God. The goal of our journey is not
doctrine but faith; along the way doctrines can serve as signposts, but
"the righteous lives by . . . faith, not by . . . creed. And faith . . .
involves profound awareness of the inadequacy of words, concepts,
deeds. Unless we realize that dogmas are tentative rather than final
... we are guilty of intellectual idolatry." 12
The challenge for Heschel was not how to relate to a religious
institution different from his own, but rather, to human beings who
worship God in another way, "who worship God as followers of
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