Heschel’s 50th Yohrzeit: Honoring, Learning, Acting
Dear friends of renewing a Prophetic vision,
We at The Shalom Center, we good friends of Dr. Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth University, and we throughout the world are about to celebrate a moment of joyful learning that is half a century old and rooted in a grievous loss: the 50th yohrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. A loss that calls us to turn the hearts of elders and youth to each other, their minds and legs to work together.
We are sponsoring three webinars that will bring his teachings to the eyes and ears, the hearts and minds, the legs and souls, of Americans facing arrogant neo-fascists and modern pharaohs who are burning Earth for the sake of cash. The webinars will be Wednesday evenings January 18, Jan. 25, and February 1. Details below!
Heschel: great-great-grandson of a great Hassidic rebbe, student in Vilna of Talmud in the daytime and the secularist socialist Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, the Jewish Workers Band or Union at night, a little later in Berlin the last recipient of a Ph.D. in Jewish thought, granted “illegally” just after the Nazis closed the universities to Jews and Jewish ideas — his dissertation, two volumes on The Prophets.
Heschel, who was delegated by Martin Buber to lead the Freie Judische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt until as a Polish Jew he was expelled from Germany and lived forlorn on the edge of Poland until he was brought to America to teach at the Reform Jewish seminary in Cincinnati.
Heschel, who then was brought to teach “Jewish ethics and mysticism” at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York; who startled the Christian world and puzzled much of the Jewish world with several books of theology built around the idea of “God in Search of Man.” (Was it not supposed to be the other way around?)
Heschel, whose own book on The Prophets taught him that in the racial turmoil and antiwar upheavals of America in the late ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s, God in search of the Heschel God needed could find only little of him in research libraries and much more of him on marches demanding voting rights for Black Americans or in the activist gatherings of “Clergy Concerned About Vietnam,” alongside Dr. King and Reverend Bill Coffin.
In this photo, Heschel, King, and Torah joined at Arlington National Cemetery to mourn the American soldiers and Vietnamese citizens killed in an illegal, immoral war ordered by the US government.
The Shalom Center will honor the Heschel who insisted that understanding the Prophets led to emulating the Prophets. Below are details for the three webinars to apply his teachings and practice to our present crises — the Democracy and Racism Crisis, the Planetary Crisis, and a third webinar on Heschel’s world-wide impact.
You can register for the bundle of three Heschel Webinars at: https://bit.ly/heschel50yohrzeit
The first will be at 7:30 pm EST on Wednesday evening, January 18, with Dr. Cornel West; Rabbi Susan Talve of Central Reform Congregation in St Louis, whose whole congregational stance has been anti-racist since their founding (and Susan herself was welcomed into the Ferguson demonstrations); and Koach Frazier, a creative activist who is a Black senior-year rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. This webinar will address the meaning of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on racism in the US as the blight of racism here is now growing stronger and resistance to it is taking new forms in our own generation.
The second will be at 7:30 pm EST on Wednesday evening, January 25, with Bill McKibben, Jacqui Patterson, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow speaking on how Rabbi Heschel’s teachings (especially about Shabbat as a techno-pause, about “radical amazement,” and about “praying with one’s legs”) speak to the present climate crisis, 50 years after his death.
The third webinar will take place from 7:30‒9:00 pm EST (Eastern U.S.) on Wednesday evening, February 1. Drawing on their experience in varied countries, the teachers will address Rabbi Heschel’s influence and impact throughout the world. It will include Professors Martin Chung of Hong Kong; Jacob Teshima of Japan; Dror Bondi of Israel, and Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Israel. All have written about what they have learned from Rabbi Heschel’s work and shared his wisdom with students, the book-reading public, and activists.
You can register for the bundle of three Heschel Webinars — one ticket covers ALL THREE webinars — at:
https://bit.ly/heschel50yohrzeit
There will be alternative tuitions for all three Yohrzeit Webinars (at $72 “regular”; $36 low-income, seeking-mutual-aid; & $144 for those who can lovingly afford to make mutual aid available). We will record the three webinars; so if you can’t make the listed time, register anyway to get the link for the recording.
Heschel + 50 will move many people — just what we need now. Please share this letter and photos with your friends, colleagues, congregants. We look forward with excitement to seeing and hearing and breathing together.
— Arthur