Abraham J Heschel

If you don't know this jewish scholar, and early civil rights and anti-war leader, get to know Abraham J Heschel.

"Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. They make much ado about paltry things, lavishing excessive language upon trifling subjects. What if somewhere in ancient Palestine poor people have not been treated properly by the rich? So what if some old women found pleasure and edification in worshiping "the Queen of Heaven"? Why such immoderate excitement? Why such intense indignation?

The things that horrified the prophets are eve now daily occurrences all over the world...

We ourselves witness continually acts of injustice, manifestations of hypocrisy, falsehood, outrage, misery, but we rarely grow indignant or overly excited. To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions ...

Others may suffer from the terror of cosmic aloneness; the prophet is overwhelmed by the grandeur of divine presence. He is incapable of isolating the world. There is an interaction between man and God which to disregard is an act of insolence. Isolation is a fairy tale.
....

Prophetic sympathy is a response to the transcendent sensibility. It is not, like love, an attraction to the diving being, but the assimilation of the prophet's emotional life to the divine, an assimilation of the function, not of being. The emotional experience of the prophet becomes the focal point of the prophet's understanding of God."

Selections from "The Prophet"


Oh Lord, would you rise up your daughters and your son's to dream dreams and see visions, to have a sympathy with your thoughts, to live lives that are a protest to this world, and speak out against the injustice that we see as no big deal. Thank you that you speak through the voice of many. May we be cut to the heart, and see our need for justice, our need for restoration, our eternal need for you!