GOD AS PARTNER

SHAI HELD: The core theological commitment that Heschel carried is not just that God needs people, but rather that God has chosen to need people. God does not want to be the only actor in the world. God doesn't want to redeem the world alone. God wants partners, God wants covenant partners. And that's a gamble. In Heschel theology, God takes an enormous gamble. If God relies on people, God can be sorely devastatingly disappointed. That's how the prophets talk. God is sorely, devastatingly disappointed at human failure, human cruelty, and human indifference in the face of human cruelty, all of that. That's a risk God takes in taking human beings seriously.

JAMES RUDIN: For Heschel God was a partner, and I know that's a lot of chutzpah, that's a lot of arrogance to say that, but I think as I read Heschel, that's what he thought. That God needs us as much as we need God, and that is a radical concept. Not that we're equal to God or we’re God ourselves. No, but that the God of the universe needs God's creation, humanity, to be part of the divine economy, which is fancy language. It means to be part of the universe, to be part of it, that we have a responsibility. God has a responsibility. And for him of course and for Judaism in general there’s a covenant. There’s a covenant between the Jewish people and God beginning at Mount Sinai. And to fulfill the covenant, you fulfill it on both sides. So that was radical, and drew a lot of opposition from other Jewish religious thinkers who found that God is God, omnipotent, omnipresent, and that we are Servants of God. And for Heschel to say we work with God, we're partners with God, that was something very different.

CORNEL WEST: We should all read I and Thou, we should all read God in Search of Man because for Heschel his dissertation written on prophetic consciousness, this notion of divine pathos, what does it really mean to acknowledge that God needs us in the way that we need God and our calling is to be a partner with God to engage in Tikkun Olam this amending of the world, repairing the damages of the world, transforming the world in light of the hurt, the pain, the misery, the suffering of other human beings never to be restricted to one group, one tribe, one clan. That Heschel understood when Amos talked about, “Let justice roll down like water,” that was not just for Israel, that was for nations all around the world. It emerged out of Israel but it had a universal vision.

RELIGION IN DECLINE

SHARON BROUS: In his time, Heschel was speaking from deep within the American Jewish establishment, the religious establishment, but he was offering a stirring critique of what was broken in religious life. He said that religion was on the decline not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, insipid, oppressive and that people were no longer moved to tears by religious encounter and religious experience in our religious institutions. But he so firmly believed that the world desperately needed people of faith and communities of faith to live into the best versions of who we were called to be in the world. SHAI HELD I think if you read Heschel carefully you realize that he has a sense of almost desperate urgency. We live in a world in which Auschwitz is possible. We live in a world in which African Americans can be degraded in unfathomable ways over hundreds of years in America. And we need a response or else the world will not be around much longer. There's a sense of, we don't have lots of time to figure this out. Human beings in the modern world have to fundamentally change our ways, reorient the way we carry ourselves in the world or we’re doomed. And he sees his job, I think -- he’s a teacher of Judaism, he’s a theologian, but he’s also out to heal what he sees as broken in the culture. And what he sees as leading to a widespread dehumanization of others.

Heschel’s 1955 book God in Search of Man, and the earlier companion volume Man Is Not Alone (1951), exemplify a theme that runs throughout much of Heschel’s life and work: That God needs human beings as partners in establishing justice and restoring wholeness to the world. This radical understanding of the relationship between human beings and the divine is revealed in the biblical covenant between God and Israel. God chooses to need human beings, and in so doing, God takes a risk on being disappointed, frustrated, and even betrayed by humankind. In Heschel’s thinking, God experiences “divine pathos;” that is, God is emotionally affected by the actions of humankind, for good and for ill. At the same time, human beings can help make God more present in and to the world by their actions on behalf of justice, compassion, love, and mercy - the very qualities God represents. This process of restoration is humankind’s sacred duty. It is how human beings fulfill their part of the covenant with the divine. This “partnership” is the true origin of religion and the theological foundation for Heschel’s own involvement in movements for civil and human rights, for peacemaking, and in support of the marginalized. God and people must work together to repair the world.

1. Rabbi Shai Held asserts that the sentence “God is in need of man” appears often in Heschel’s writing. Does it trouble you to think that God might “need” people, even if God has voluntarily chosen to experience that sort of vulnerability? How does this change the way you think about God (if it does)? How does it change the way you think about your relationship to God?

2. Rabbi James Rudin says that Heschel wants us to accept the surprising idea that “God needs us as much as we need God.” Following Heschel, Rudin also asserts that this places a unique responsibility upon individual human beings. If, as Heschel argues, God seeks us out to be “partners” in restoring the world, what sort of responsibility does that place upon us? What does or could it mean to be a “partner” with God? Is that an unfamiliar idea to you?

3. “Divine pathos” is a central part of Heschel’s depiction of the relationship between God and human beings. According to Heschel, God is not some remote, indifferent being, but a divine creator deeply concerned with and affected by what God’s creatures do. Does it surprise you to think about God being affected by your actions? If you were to accept Heschel’s argument, would that impact or influence what you do, or the decisions and actions you take?

4. Heschel insists that God has chosen a kind of self-limitation in order to engage as a partner with humankind, and that we can follow that model by choosing to transcend our own selfinterests. In what way is God’s concern for and chosen vulnerability towards humankind a model for human beings to follow?

5. Scholar Benjamin Sax applies a contemporary interpretation of the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam to Heschel’s theology, particularly in regard to the idea of covenant or partnership between God and humankind. What is Tikkun Olam, and how might it relate to Heschel’s interpretation of the covenantal partnership between human beings and God? (It should be noted that Heschel himself did not use the term Tikkun Olam, or not in terms of its contemporary meaning.)