Here is a brief article I once submitted to National Public Radio, who asked for submissions of articles depicting the listener’s memories of Abraham Joshua Heschel. I don’t know if it was ever published, but, nonetheless, it represents “one man’s opinion.”
My most compelling memory of Abraham Joshua Heschel was watching him being interviewed on television when I was about 10 years old. The interviewer, who was also Jewish, seemed mesmerized and enthralled by the man, and I watched as Abraham Heschel leaned slowly back in his chair, pontificating his philiosophical views until he reached such an angle that the yarmulke, which was already precariously perched on his considerable head of hair, slipped to the ground. Neither he, nor anyone else felt compelled to pick it up. And this is the metaphor which has stuck with me which defines and describes his life. Stemming from an illustrious Hassidic family and once, himself, steeped in Torah and Hassidic philosophy in his youth, he was a Jew who lost his way and strayed from the path of Torah. In as much as he had once drunk deeply from the living waters of Torah, his own philiosophy, while errant, contained kernals of truth. Therefore, he was able to have a huge influence on many secular Jews who were seeking spirituality, as every Jew who is not completely cut off from his or her spiritual source does, but were of course not interested in making any changes in their essentially secular and non-Torah observant lives. While he was a great humanist and advocate for social change, he was, in the last analysis a great Jewish soul whose potential for great spiritual achievement was sadly lost, obfuscated and squandered in pusuit of the current winds of “isms”–secularism, humanism, activism, etc.