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Israel: An Echo of Eternity
Israel "the promised land," the "holy land," has long played a central role in Jewish and Christian thought. Now, in the closing few years of the twentieth century, politics and prophesy coincide. The Israeli-Arab peace process unfolds; messianic concepts of the role of Israel at the millennium and the end of days are receiving great attention. In An Echo of Eternity , one of the foremost religious figures of our century gives us a powerful and eloquent statement on the meaning of Israel in our time. Heschel looks at the past, present, and future home of the Jewish people. He tells us how and why the presence of Israel has tremendous historical and religious significance for the whole world. This classic, originally published in 1967 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is now updated with an important introduction by Susannah Heschel, his daughter, who holds the Abba Hillel Silver Chair in Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Illustrated with line drawings by Abraham Rattner.
233 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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150 people want to read
About the author
Abraham Joshua Heschel
77 books623 followersHeschel was a descendant of preeminent rabbinic families of Europe, both on his father's (Moshe Mordechai Heschel, who died of influenza in 1916) and mother's (Reizel Perlow Heschel) side, and a descendant of Rebbe Avrohom Yehoshua Heshl of Apt and other dynasties. He was the youngest of six children including his siblings: Sarah, Dvora Miriam, Esther Sima, Gittel, and Jacob. In his teens he received a traditional yeshiva education, and obtained traditional semicha, rabbinical ordination. He then studied at the University of Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate, and at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he earned a second liberal rabbinic ordination.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 8, 2020
If you want an idea of what the land of Israel means to the Jewish people, this is a pretty good place to start. Heschel wrote this shortly after Israel's resounding victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, and, not only was that fresh in his mind, the memories of the Holocaust would still have been fairly fresh. I think the section where he talks about living side by side with the neighboring Arab countries still resonates today, and all Israelis and Arabs would do well to read the wisdom of that chapter. I have been to the Middle East multiple times, and I've been to Jerusalem once. When Heschel says "Once you have lived a moment at the [Temple Mount's Western] Wall, you never go away." It is such a true statement. You have to go for yourself in order to understand.
February 26, 2025
Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of a handful of writers any of whose writings I am inclined to read.
One thing that was underscored throughout this book and brought out more vividly to me was the extent to which Jerusalem and Zion occupy the fixed liturgy of the Jews. Heschel writes, "How can anyone expect us to betray our pledge: 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither' (Psalm 137:5)?" He further adds in exposition that Jerusalem is to the prophet the quintessence of the land, corresponding to the people. "We have never left Jerusalem, we have never abandoned the city of David. For thy servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust" (Psalm 102:15). This is true of the Jewish people before the founding of the modern state of Israel as it was of the Jewish people in the Babylonian captivity. They have never left Jerusalem.
Heschel writes of the modern return to Israel: "We have arrived at a beginning; the night often looked interminable. Amalek was Fuhrer, and Haman prevailed…We, a people of orphans, have entered the walls to greet the widow, Jerusalem, and the widow is a bride again." Heschel says spiritually he is native of Jerusalem and has prayed there in spirit all his life. His hopes are in the hills of Jerusalem. He warns that a true understanding of Jerusalem will not be attained in terms of generalizations or comparative history.
Heschel notes that the two most solemn occasions of the year in the Jewish calendar, the Seder on Passover, and the Day of Atonement, found their climax in the proclamation, "Next year in Jerusalem." Indeed, the central theme of the story of the Covenant, in his eyes, is the promise of the land to Abraham.
Heschel writes that "Western civilization is in a profound way mankind's confrontation with the Bible." I think this is well said. In the book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come (2024), the author John Daniel Davidson in certain sections points out the pagan heartlessness of human sacrificial cults such as the Aztec cult in Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now stands. In that city each year 22,000 people culled from subject tribes were sacrificed on temple mounts that dominated the city's skyline, many after being ritually tortured, having each of their fingernails pulled out. The Aztecs also engaged in mass compulsory cannibalism, believing the gods demanded it of them. The Settler Colonialism ideology, which is currently being employed against Israel by Hamas supporters around the world, was also employed for historical revisionist purposes against the conquistadores, so that not long ago a president of Mexico farcically demanded an apology from the Pope and Spain for the thousands killed by the conquistadores, while making no mention of the tens of thousands killed annually in the human sacrificial cult that Cortez ended. The Judeo-Christian critique of evils done by the conquistadores is sufficient but the pagan Settler Colonialism ideology noticeably contains lacunae in its skein where vast swaths of people are relegated to the dark of pagan of heartlessness. Hence we see, for example, the spectacle of moral abomination by Hamas's morally carnivalesque theatre this week parading the dead bodies of the Bibas babies and their mother around in coffins marked with their "arrest dates" before celebrating crowds of Palestinians. Settler Colonialism counter-myth making permits any crime against humanity if it is done against Jews because in their rubric this is a political kill and fair game. Similarly, it has nothing to say about the depredations of indigenous people if the depredations are against other indigenous people. (It is a view that implies an otherworldly, static status and non-meeting or intermingling of peoples, and it uses the charge of genocide in such a morally irresponsible way that the word loses its meaning). The Jewish and Christian teaching about the sacredness of all human life in contrast does not preserve for the human heart permissions of human heartlessness in certain cases but is truly universal at least in the perfect for which adherents strive.
But how does one integrate the State of Israel into one's understanding of the Bible? "Never before has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,877 years. This extraordinary aspect is bound to carry some shock to the conventional mind, to be a scandal to the mediocre mind and a foolishness to the positivists. It requires ordering of some notions." In Romans 11:28-29, Paul writes regarding his fellow Jews, "As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. 29For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. " Israel's continuity and the continuity of God's gifts and calling to her don't seem to be adequately differentiated in much of Christian theology and just looking at the modern state of Israel through secular lenses and not revisiting underdeveloped aspects of the church's relationship to the Jews seems to me an inadequate response to the phenomena we have been witnessing.
After the Babylonian exile there was the restoration led by Ezra and Nehemiah. Had they not prevailed against the Samaritans, what would have become of the Christian church? Would there have been Judaism, or Christianity, or, for that matter, Islam. Another exile began in the year 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed.
Trying to view the Jews' attachment to the land, based on the Biblical promises made to Abraham by God in a secular lens, and with the blunt instrument of Settler Colonialism ideology's generalizations, leads to distortion. There is no such attachment to a land anywhere else in the world. "It is here where the great works of the Jewish people came into being: the Bible, the Mishnah, the Palestinian Talmud, the Midrashim, the Shulhan Arukh, Lurianic mysticism. No other people has created original literary works of decisive significance in the land of Israel." pg. 57 The words, songs, and chants of Jewish liturgy which shape the life of prayer in both Judaism and Christianity (the Psalms!) were born in the Holy Land. The great Arab contributions came from Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, not Jerusalem.
Heschel notes that the Israelites' doubting of God's promise of the land was dealt with more severely than the sin of worshipping the golden calf, so that that generation was fated to die in the desert rather than enter the Promised Land. He asserts, "What we have witnessed in our own days is a reminder of the power of God's mysterious promise to Abraham and a testimony to the fact that the people kept its pledge, 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither' (Psalm 137:5). What is the Christian's response to the Jewish belief that God's promises and gifts are irrevocable? Even the Apostle Paul called them this, and his words are Christian Scripture, so how is that this is no de facto altered to omit the gifting of the Land? On what basis, if they disagree, can they confidently respond to those Jews like Heschel who still respond believingly to the promise of the Land in holy writ? Have the Scriptures been adequately addressed which address this, or has prior history been allowed to marginalize those Scriptures?
Heschel further observes the unique association of the Jews with the land of Israel. Even before Israel became a people, there was a promise of the land to Abraham.
The Zionist pioneers to Israel came to a land described by a number of contemporaries as barren and for the most part uninhabited, having been allowed to become barren under successive rulers. When the Jews drained a swamp, it was to them an act with redemptive connotation. "One must live as if the redemption of all men depended upon the devotion of one's own life," Heschel reminds us.
One thing I learned from this book is that after the Arab riots, Haj Amin al-Husseini, upon being released from prison, was appointed by the British high commissioner to the post of Mufti of Palestine and head of the Islamic Council. Before I had perhaps unduly blamed the Palestinian Arabs for setting over themselves a singularly evil man, a kind of Hamman who would become a Nazi war criminal during WWII, interceding directly to Hitler to prevent the exchange of thousands of German soldiers for thousands of Jewish children, ensuring the Jewish children went to the gas chambers. Hear I find it was the block-headed decision of the British to set him in the post of Mufti of Palestine. Among his unhinged acts of Jews hatred was the instigating of slaughter of the ancient Jewish community in Hebron and calling on public radio, when Rommel's victory seemed imminent in Egypt, for Egyptians to rise up in the streets and kill the Jews.
It is sometimes claimed that the Arabs should not have to pay for a European's Holocaust of the Jews but I note the story was more complicated than this. The Arabs had over them as Grand Mufti this evil man, whose rich family would forbid selling of land to Jews upon threat of death, forcing landowners to sale at fire-sale prices to the Husseinis, who would turn around and sale it to the Jews at exorbitant prices. When Hitler rose to power there was a period of time where the Jews were still being allowed to immigrate from Nazi controlled territory, but the Arab protests drove the British to block Jewish immigration at this time, consigning as many as two million Jews to the gas chambers as a consequence. So I don't regard the Palestinians of that time as guiltless bystanders.
I also note that by 1974, the population of Israel was half European and half Jews from the Middles East, who were driven out of Arab countries all over the Middle East from places where they had lived for millenia. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries equaled or exceeded the amount of Arabs displaced by the Nakhbah. The failure of Settler Colonialism ideology to deal with this aspect of history is another demonstration of its inadequacy as a rubric. Today the Palestinians are some of the handful of people who openly praise Hitler, proclaiming to the world that as far as they are concerned Islam means hate and inhumanity to certain non-Muslim groups.
A unique and strict policy designed to keep the Arabs refugees since the Nakhbah has been pursued for some 80 years now. The pagan United Nations and relief agencies like UNRWA have been called in to permanently support their refugee status. UNRWA has had many employees and UNRWA facilities and institutes commandeered for terrorist purposes including teaching martyrdom cults to little children, whipping them with hoses if they don't show hatred for the Jews, teaching them to chortle praises for grown men who, as tools of the imams, gunned down women and children intentionally. The Palestinian Authority, who is poised to take over Gaza as the official face of government, still has in place a "pay for slay" insurance incentive program where, if an ailing man worries for his family's financial wellbeing after he dies, he has merely to attempt to slay Israelis and die trying, and then his family will be rewarded a pension for his willingness to murder.
Heschel writes of his experience regarding the modern state of Israel when its existence was threatened in the Yom Kippur War of 1967: "As an individual I discovered that I am a wave in the mysterious movement of Jewish history. Israel is the premise, I am the conclusion. Without the premise, I am a fallacy. I had not known how deeply Jewish I was." When asked by a Christian friend (I wonder if it was Reinhold Niebuhr, a friend of Heschel's) in those tense days, "Why are you so dreadfully upset, so dreadfully desperate?" I answered, "Imagine that in the entire world there remains one copy of the Bible and suddenly I see a brutal hand seize this copy, the only one in the world, and prepare to cast it into the flames…"
On October 7th, 2023, Israel was murderously attacked by Hamas and the Palestinians in a way that similarly threatened the existence of Israel. Perversely, crowds of foolish youths, manipulated by Settler Colonialist ideologues and hate filled Islamists, chanted chants calling for the extinction of Israel, like the heartless pagans of old, and, in morally carnivalesque manner accosted them for self-defense as a nation beginning the day after the barbaric attack, calling their reaction an "Aggression", which Arab governments parroted, and accused them with moral absurdity of perpetuating a genocide against the Palestinians, when more babies have been born to the Palestinians since the war started than have been killed, while, using the blinkered and blinding rubric of Settler Colonialist ideology, which exonerates those deemed "indigenous" people of the responsibility of bearing any moral agency (thus dehumanizing them), so that they have nothing to say in reprimand to a people who use their children as political fodder, who let them go out to throw rocks at soldiers as a way of life and teach them from the cradle they must sing bloodthirsty songs about murdering Jews in order to receive approbation.
I believe that, as Hans Urs von Balthasar writes below, Jesus Christ reveals God's love for Christian, Jew and Muslim, a love that is the ultimate ground for our overcoming these bitter divisions. I reject the rejection of those who refuse to love Israel.
"In the New Testament we read that joy is able to permeate not only the extremes of suffering and situations like the abandonment of God by God, but that it is also to be found in the face of the hardest demands, the most remorseless rebuke, even that most tragic of all divisions (between Jews and Christians, who stand divided before the Cross). Indeed the gospel would not have so evidently been a message of pure joy, had it not had power and courage to overcome the 'great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart' (Romans 9:2); for the mighty promise of the love of God 'comforts us in all our affliction' (2 Cor. 1:4)." (Engagement with God, pg. 45).
One thing that was underscored throughout this book and brought out more vividly to me was the extent to which Jerusalem and Zion occupy the fixed liturgy of the Jews. Heschel writes, "How can anyone expect us to betray our pledge: 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither' (Psalm 137:5)?" He further adds in exposition that Jerusalem is to the prophet the quintessence of the land, corresponding to the people. "We have never left Jerusalem, we have never abandoned the city of David. For thy servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust" (Psalm 102:15). This is true of the Jewish people before the founding of the modern state of Israel as it was of the Jewish people in the Babylonian captivity. They have never left Jerusalem.
Heschel writes of the modern return to Israel: "We have arrived at a beginning; the night often looked interminable. Amalek was Fuhrer, and Haman prevailed…We, a people of orphans, have entered the walls to greet the widow, Jerusalem, and the widow is a bride again." Heschel says spiritually he is native of Jerusalem and has prayed there in spirit all his life. His hopes are in the hills of Jerusalem. He warns that a true understanding of Jerusalem will not be attained in terms of generalizations or comparative history.
Heschel notes that the two most solemn occasions of the year in the Jewish calendar, the Seder on Passover, and the Day of Atonement, found their climax in the proclamation, "Next year in Jerusalem." Indeed, the central theme of the story of the Covenant, in his eyes, is the promise of the land to Abraham.
Heschel writes that "Western civilization is in a profound way mankind's confrontation with the Bible." I think this is well said. In the book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come (2024), the author John Daniel Davidson in certain sections points out the pagan heartlessness of human sacrificial cults such as the Aztec cult in Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now stands. In that city each year 22,000 people culled from subject tribes were sacrificed on temple mounts that dominated the city's skyline, many after being ritually tortured, having each of their fingernails pulled out. The Aztecs also engaged in mass compulsory cannibalism, believing the gods demanded it of them. The Settler Colonialism ideology, which is currently being employed against Israel by Hamas supporters around the world, was also employed for historical revisionist purposes against the conquistadores, so that not long ago a president of Mexico farcically demanded an apology from the Pope and Spain for the thousands killed by the conquistadores, while making no mention of the tens of thousands killed annually in the human sacrificial cult that Cortez ended. The Judeo-Christian critique of evils done by the conquistadores is sufficient but the pagan Settler Colonialism ideology noticeably contains lacunae in its skein where vast swaths of people are relegated to the dark of pagan of heartlessness. Hence we see, for example, the spectacle of moral abomination by Hamas's morally carnivalesque theatre this week parading the dead bodies of the Bibas babies and their mother around in coffins marked with their "arrest dates" before celebrating crowds of Palestinians. Settler Colonialism counter-myth making permits any crime against humanity if it is done against Jews because in their rubric this is a political kill and fair game. Similarly, it has nothing to say about the depredations of indigenous people if the depredations are against other indigenous people. (It is a view that implies an otherworldly, static status and non-meeting or intermingling of peoples, and it uses the charge of genocide in such a morally irresponsible way that the word loses its meaning). The Jewish and Christian teaching about the sacredness of all human life in contrast does not preserve for the human heart permissions of human heartlessness in certain cases but is truly universal at least in the perfect for which adherents strive.
But how does one integrate the State of Israel into one's understanding of the Bible? "Never before has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,877 years. This extraordinary aspect is bound to carry some shock to the conventional mind, to be a scandal to the mediocre mind and a foolishness to the positivists. It requires ordering of some notions." In Romans 11:28-29, Paul writes regarding his fellow Jews, "As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. 29For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. " Israel's continuity and the continuity of God's gifts and calling to her don't seem to be adequately differentiated in much of Christian theology and just looking at the modern state of Israel through secular lenses and not revisiting underdeveloped aspects of the church's relationship to the Jews seems to me an inadequate response to the phenomena we have been witnessing.
After the Babylonian exile there was the restoration led by Ezra and Nehemiah. Had they not prevailed against the Samaritans, what would have become of the Christian church? Would there have been Judaism, or Christianity, or, for that matter, Islam. Another exile began in the year 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed.
Trying to view the Jews' attachment to the land, based on the Biblical promises made to Abraham by God in a secular lens, and with the blunt instrument of Settler Colonialism ideology's generalizations, leads to distortion. There is no such attachment to a land anywhere else in the world. "It is here where the great works of the Jewish people came into being: the Bible, the Mishnah, the Palestinian Talmud, the Midrashim, the Shulhan Arukh, Lurianic mysticism. No other people has created original literary works of decisive significance in the land of Israel." pg. 57 The words, songs, and chants of Jewish liturgy which shape the life of prayer in both Judaism and Christianity (the Psalms!) were born in the Holy Land. The great Arab contributions came from Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, not Jerusalem.
Heschel notes that the Israelites' doubting of God's promise of the land was dealt with more severely than the sin of worshipping the golden calf, so that that generation was fated to die in the desert rather than enter the Promised Land. He asserts, "What we have witnessed in our own days is a reminder of the power of God's mysterious promise to Abraham and a testimony to the fact that the people kept its pledge, 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither' (Psalm 137:5). What is the Christian's response to the Jewish belief that God's promises and gifts are irrevocable? Even the Apostle Paul called them this, and his words are Christian Scripture, so how is that this is no de facto altered to omit the gifting of the Land? On what basis, if they disagree, can they confidently respond to those Jews like Heschel who still respond believingly to the promise of the Land in holy writ? Have the Scriptures been adequately addressed which address this, or has prior history been allowed to marginalize those Scriptures?
Heschel further observes the unique association of the Jews with the land of Israel. Even before Israel became a people, there was a promise of the land to Abraham.
The Zionist pioneers to Israel came to a land described by a number of contemporaries as barren and for the most part uninhabited, having been allowed to become barren under successive rulers. When the Jews drained a swamp, it was to them an act with redemptive connotation. "One must live as if the redemption of all men depended upon the devotion of one's own life," Heschel reminds us.
One thing I learned from this book is that after the Arab riots, Haj Amin al-Husseini, upon being released from prison, was appointed by the British high commissioner to the post of Mufti of Palestine and head of the Islamic Council. Before I had perhaps unduly blamed the Palestinian Arabs for setting over themselves a singularly evil man, a kind of Hamman who would become a Nazi war criminal during WWII, interceding directly to Hitler to prevent the exchange of thousands of German soldiers for thousands of Jewish children, ensuring the Jewish children went to the gas chambers. Hear I find it was the block-headed decision of the British to set him in the post of Mufti of Palestine. Among his unhinged acts of Jews hatred was the instigating of slaughter of the ancient Jewish community in Hebron and calling on public radio, when Rommel's victory seemed imminent in Egypt, for Egyptians to rise up in the streets and kill the Jews.
It is sometimes claimed that the Arabs should not have to pay for a European's Holocaust of the Jews but I note the story was more complicated than this. The Arabs had over them as Grand Mufti this evil man, whose rich family would forbid selling of land to Jews upon threat of death, forcing landowners to sale at fire-sale prices to the Husseinis, who would turn around and sale it to the Jews at exorbitant prices. When Hitler rose to power there was a period of time where the Jews were still being allowed to immigrate from Nazi controlled territory, but the Arab protests drove the British to block Jewish immigration at this time, consigning as many as two million Jews to the gas chambers as a consequence. So I don't regard the Palestinians of that time as guiltless bystanders.
I also note that by 1974, the population of Israel was half European and half Jews from the Middles East, who were driven out of Arab countries all over the Middle East from places where they had lived for millenia. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries equaled or exceeded the amount of Arabs displaced by the Nakhbah. The failure of Settler Colonialism ideology to deal with this aspect of history is another demonstration of its inadequacy as a rubric. Today the Palestinians are some of the handful of people who openly praise Hitler, proclaiming to the world that as far as they are concerned Islam means hate and inhumanity to certain non-Muslim groups.
A unique and strict policy designed to keep the Arabs refugees since the Nakhbah has been pursued for some 80 years now. The pagan United Nations and relief agencies like UNRWA have been called in to permanently support their refugee status. UNRWA has had many employees and UNRWA facilities and institutes commandeered for terrorist purposes including teaching martyrdom cults to little children, whipping them with hoses if they don't show hatred for the Jews, teaching them to chortle praises for grown men who, as tools of the imams, gunned down women and children intentionally. The Palestinian Authority, who is poised to take over Gaza as the official face of government, still has in place a "pay for slay" insurance incentive program where, if an ailing man worries for his family's financial wellbeing after he dies, he has merely to attempt to slay Israelis and die trying, and then his family will be rewarded a pension for his willingness to murder.
Heschel writes of his experience regarding the modern state of Israel when its existence was threatened in the Yom Kippur War of 1967: "As an individual I discovered that I am a wave in the mysterious movement of Jewish history. Israel is the premise, I am the conclusion. Without the premise, I am a fallacy. I had not known how deeply Jewish I was." When asked by a Christian friend (I wonder if it was Reinhold Niebuhr, a friend of Heschel's) in those tense days, "Why are you so dreadfully upset, so dreadfully desperate?" I answered, "Imagine that in the entire world there remains one copy of the Bible and suddenly I see a brutal hand seize this copy, the only one in the world, and prepare to cast it into the flames…"
On October 7th, 2023, Israel was murderously attacked by Hamas and the Palestinians in a way that similarly threatened the existence of Israel. Perversely, crowds of foolish youths, manipulated by Settler Colonialist ideologues and hate filled Islamists, chanted chants calling for the extinction of Israel, like the heartless pagans of old, and, in morally carnivalesque manner accosted them for self-defense as a nation beginning the day after the barbaric attack, calling their reaction an "Aggression", which Arab governments parroted, and accused them with moral absurdity of perpetuating a genocide against the Palestinians, when more babies have been born to the Palestinians since the war started than have been killed, while, using the blinkered and blinding rubric of Settler Colonialist ideology, which exonerates those deemed "indigenous" people of the responsibility of bearing any moral agency (thus dehumanizing them), so that they have nothing to say in reprimand to a people who use their children as political fodder, who let them go out to throw rocks at soldiers as a way of life and teach them from the cradle they must sing bloodthirsty songs about murdering Jews in order to receive approbation.
I believe that, as Hans Urs von Balthasar writes below, Jesus Christ reveals God's love for Christian, Jew and Muslim, a love that is the ultimate ground for our overcoming these bitter divisions. I reject the rejection of those who refuse to love Israel.
"In the New Testament we read that joy is able to permeate not only the extremes of suffering and situations like the abandonment of God by God, but that it is also to be found in the face of the hardest demands, the most remorseless rebuke, even that most tragic of all divisions (between Jews and Christians, who stand divided before the Cross). Indeed the gospel would not have so evidently been a message of pure joy, had it not had power and courage to overcome the 'great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart' (Romans 9:2); for the mighty promise of the love of God 'comforts us in all our affliction' (2 Cor. 1:4)." (Engagement with God, pg. 45).
February 13, 2019
It is impossible imagining a world where I give Heschel less than four stars. This was my least favorite and most challenging of anything I've read from him. The book is a deep and wisdom-filled look at the Jewish people and the physical land of Israel. As usual, it is beautiful and poetic in its writing and does not disappoint in that regard.
I had to keep reminding myself that this book was written at a particular point in history (1967). This is critical to understanding the context that moves Heschel to write what he does. I had to keep disconnecting the content from the current socio-political setting of today. I am very confident that if Heschel were writing a similar book today, he would not have written this one.
Having said that, the book is full of rich, rich ideas and imagery. He talks about the importance of the land and the necessity of hope. The final few chapters are fantastic and especially helpful on his thoughts on Christians (ancient allegorical readings that shaped Christian theology) and the interaction with the Text.
In my opinion, not Heschel's best, but definitely reading one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of our era when you read this book.
I had to keep reminding myself that this book was written at a particular point in history (1967). This is critical to understanding the context that moves Heschel to write what he does. I had to keep disconnecting the content from the current socio-political setting of today. I am very confident that if Heschel were writing a similar book today, he would not have written this one.
Having said that, the book is full of rich, rich ideas and imagery. He talks about the importance of the land and the necessity of hope. The final few chapters are fantastic and especially helpful on his thoughts on Christians (ancient allegorical readings that shaped Christian theology) and the interaction with the Text.
In my opinion, not Heschel's best, but definitely reading one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of our era when you read this book.
March 23, 2020
This was my first exposure to Zionist apologetics, which, per my usual experience with Heschel, was beautiful, moving, and deeply challenging. The thing that I feel unambiguously about is that this is some kind of platonic expression of the a deeply held Zionist belief, which, frankly, is not something I've really been exposed to before. However, the realities of history can make it hard to read at some points - terrible things have been done because of this ideology, both for and against it, and they've gotten much worse since 1967, when this book was written. I hope this book becomes one light in a constellation of writings about Zionism I read, and I'll be glad to have it among them. Having it stand alone makes me feel a little uneasy.
January 3, 2023
All of our history is within reach.
The Lord dwells in thick darkness. Will he dwell in a Temple? Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less the house which I have built?
All my springs are in you.
Our scars are her ruin.
Not a document sealed and finished. It is a book alive, a book that goes on and extends into the present—always being written, always disclosing and unfolding. We are in labor with biblical visions - Oblivion shuns its pages. -
Wherever we dwell, we live in a graveyard.
We are a people in whom the past endures, in whom the present is inconceivable without moments gone by.
Infinitely greater than the sacrifice of Isaac was the martyrdom of Auschwitz
To be is to go on, to continue, to adhere to, to carry out today what we carried out yesterday. Yet mere continuation of being leads to disintegration. Being alive means being exposed to contradictions and defiance, facing challenge and disappointment.
Despair is not man’s last word. Hiddenness is not God’s last act.
The Lord dwells in thick darkness. Will he dwell in a Temple? Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less the house which I have built?
All my springs are in you.
Our scars are her ruin.
Not a document sealed and finished. It is a book alive, a book that goes on and extends into the present—always being written, always disclosing and unfolding. We are in labor with biblical visions - Oblivion shuns its pages. -
Wherever we dwell, we live in a graveyard.
We are a people in whom the past endures, in whom the present is inconceivable without moments gone by.
Infinitely greater than the sacrifice of Isaac was the martyrdom of Auschwitz
To be is to go on, to continue, to adhere to, to carry out today what we carried out yesterday. Yet mere continuation of being leads to disintegration. Being alive means being exposed to contradictions and defiance, facing challenge and disappointment.
Despair is not man’s last word. Hiddenness is not God’s last act.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews