In the drab landscape of contemporary American Jewish thought, the writings of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel stand out. His works are fresh and vital, casting light where it is sorely needed and helping us achieve a renewed understanding of what it means to be a Jew. Yet, certain points in his philosophy of religion and of Judaism require revision—or, at least, a shift in emphasis. This brief essay examines his position to see whether it is ultimately sound and whether it accords with the main body of classic rabbinic teaching. [This essay is based on Heschel’s book, *God in Search of Man* (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956). All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from this volume.]
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I. The Problem of Intuition as a Method
Philosophy of religion, according to Heschel, is concerned with clarifying and validating the claims of particular faiths. If we are to validate religious insights, however, we must have a reliable method. The only method Dr. Heschel offers us is intuition. He explicitly rejects the claim that religious truth can be established by empirical techniques or discursive reason. The existence of God, revelation, divine providence in history, and the uniqueness of human nature—none of these can be established by external observation or logical demonstration. Our certainties about these matters depend entirely on direct intuition.
The most common objection to any intuition-based theory is that it offers no reliable way to distinguish between genuine perceptions of a higher reality and mere delusions or hallucinations. How can we be certain whether a given intuition is a authentic prophetic vision or the aberration of a madman? Dr. Heschel notes this difficulty and attempts to resolve it by asserting that the individual who undergoes a true experience of the divine is so completely overpowered by the vision that they are rendered incapable of doubt.
This, however, is not a solution to the problem; it is an avoidance of it. It fails to provide an objective criterion by which an outside observer—or even the subjective individual upon reflection—can distinguish between genuine revelation and psychological delusion.
HESCHEL'S PARADOX OF RELIGIOUS INTUITION
[ Intuitive Claim ] ----------> [ Absolute Subjective Certainty ]
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How do we validate it? "Incapable of doubt"
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+-------------------> ✗ [ FAILS OBJECTIVE CRITERION TEST ]
Result: Theological Chaos
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Furthermore, this problem creates a vulnerability in the marketplace of competing, contradictory religious ideas. If an appeal to intuition justifies one specific doctrine, it can be used with equal success to justify any other. The net result is an intolerable theological chaos—an environment that provides fertile ground for the saccharine inanities of the modern "goodwill" movement.
Must we admit the equal validity of every religious doctrine that bases itself on internal intuition? As Jews, we are bound to insist on the truth of our own tradition and reject any view that contradicts it. Devout Christians find themselves in precisely the same position regarding their own articles of faith. But on what ground do we make such a selection? Is there any element in the intuitive experience itself that proves our intuitions are correct and all others are false? Can any persuasive argument be formulated in favor of one specific set of intuitions over another?
Additionally, a religion that depends primarily on intuition restricts itself to a very small segment of mankind. Great spiritual sensitivity is rare. What are we to do with the vast majority of people who are neither prophets nor the sons of prophets?
According to rabbinic tradition, during the revelation at Sinai, even the untutored handmaidens witnessed greater prophetic visions than the prophet Ezekiel would experience in later generations. But we, the Jews of this age, do not possess this rare prophetic gift. Flashes of insight, moments of spiritual exaltation, and soul-shattering visions are unavailable to most of us. A conception of religion rooted entirely in such experiences automatically restricts the realm of faith to a small spiritual elite.
Professor Heschel believes that "the supreme problem in any philosophy of Judaism... is: what are the grounds for believing in the realness of the living God?" He asks whether man is capable of discovering such grounds. According to his analysis, there are three pathways of reliable intuition that lead man to God: sensing His presence in the world, sensing His presence in the Bible, and sensing His presence in sacred deeds. But each of these three ways is open only to the person who is *already* responsive to the reality of God; they offer little help to the skeptic.
If one looks at the world with spiritual eyes closed, one sees nothing of religious significance. A person who already conceives of the world as a divine creation will find evidence of divinity throughout nature and history. However, a mind that finds in nature nothing but matter and motion, and views man as merely another animal in the natural order, will not achieve religious insight through this route. To see the sublime in the world, one must already possess the eyes of faith. There is no evidence that men achieve that faith simply by inspecting the physical world.
The proposal that men can find God in the Bible involves a similar difficulty. The reader who approaches the text convinced of its divinity will find their religious awareness deepened and intensified by its study. But what reason have we to hope that a reader who denies the divinity of the Bible will find their way to God through its pages?
All that Professor Heschel writes about the divine character of the Scripture is convincing only to those who already agree with his premises. There is a tacit recognition of this fact in his almost too-vigorous defense of the text. His arguments repeatedly beg the question by presupposing what they set out to prove.
A typical example is his basic claim that a failure to respond to the Bible testifies to the limitations of the reader, not the book:
"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own spiritual opacity than his insensitiveness to the Bible... We accept it because in approaching it our own splendid ideas turn pale, because even indisputable proofs appear vulgar at the sound of prophetic words... Ultimately, then, we do not accept the Bible because of reasons, but because if the Bible is a lie all reasons are a fake."
True as we believe these claims to be, they do not constitute a logical argument. Men who stand outside the world of the Bible will only be perplexed or enraged by such absolute demands. Examining those same pages, they often discover nothing more than a collection of ancient superstitions and errors. To them, belief in the literal divinity of the Bible is evidence of a shallow intelligence or a weak character. Exchanging epithets will not solve this problem, nor will vociferous reassertions of our counterclaims.
We who have found light in the Bible must acknowledge our dependence on an antecedent faith. Through this faith, we sense the presence of God in the sacred words. But the Bible cannot serve as a pathway to God for those who approach it without religious faith to begin with.
The third of Professor Heschel's pathways—discovering God through the performance of sacred deeds—suffers from the exact same circularity. At first glance, it appears that even those outside the world of faith might discover God through action. No matter what they think or believe, they can act as if they believe, echoing the Sinai covenant of *Na'aseh v'Nishma* (נעשה ונשמע — "We will do and we will understand"). As Heschel puts it:
"A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does... Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the hereness of God. Right living is a way to right thinking."
Yet this road, too, can lead to religious conviction only if it presupposes some measure of prior commitment. If a person performs commandments (*mitzvot*) without any sense of their transcendent significance, how can those mechanical actions lead them to God?
Indeed, in his later exposition of the mitzvot, Dr. Heschel himself argues impressively against mere mechanical performance, which reduces the religious life to a behaviorist "sacred physics." A "leap of action" must be religiously motivated if it is to lead to an awareness of God. As Dr. Heschel admits, "At the beginning is the commitment, the supreme acquiescence." Without that initial commitment of faith, a person is highly unlikely to undertake the performance of sacred deeds at all; and if they do, the acts risk becoming empty postures devoid of spiritual effect.
This brings us to the point that must be stressed above all: **we cannot depend on direct, subjective intuition as our primary theological foundation.** Perhaps this is what Rabbi Yochanan meant when he taught that since the destruction of the Holy Temple, prophecy was taken away from the prophets and given to madmen and children (*Baba Batra 12b*). Sober men know how utterly unreliable raw intuitions can be. Those who view themselves as having unmediated insight into ultimate truth too often turn out to be victims of delusion. Professor Heschel’s position would be far sounder if he consistently placed his primary emphasis on the initial act of faith—on "the supreme acquiescence."
Contemporary Jews come to live a life of Torah-loyalty in one of two ways. Some simply accept the entire tradition as valid because they received it from parents and teachers. For them, there are no serious personal or intellectual obstacles to a Torah-true life; their faith is firm, and it is not to them that Professor Heschel addresses his writings.
Our special concern is the perplexed and searching Jew. This individual will never be persuaded to live as a Jew by an appeal to religious intuitions they do not possess and cannot comprehend. Instead of being asked to look for mystical evidences of God in nature or the Bible, they must be confronted with the ultimate existential challenge: **the challenge to find meaning in their own life.**
They must be forced to see that without God and His Torah, human beings are ultimately reduced to animals and automata. Our faith does not derive from personal prophetic visions; it is forced upon us as the only alternative to forfeiting our very humanity. Only when we recognize the depth of our own existential need are we ready, in faith, to pass beyond the limits of discursive knowledge. We affirm that *"In the beginning God created"* because we recognize that to deny God means to intellectually and spiritually destroy ourselves.
Armed with this antecedent faith, we are endowed with a heightened awareness that makes the evidence of God's presence in nature and history apparent. With this faith, we can discover the divine truth hidden in each letter of sacred Scripture. Not in vain did Maimonides set down as the very first principle in his *Mishneh Torah* the intellectual obligation to know that God exists and is the source of all being. Without this conviction, there can be no religious thought, no religious intuition, and no religious action.
In summary, our difference with Professor Heschel on this point is one of direction: he suggests that intuition is the pathway to faith; we argue that faith must precede intuition. This view is far more consistent with the post-exilic Jewish tradition, which viewed the age of prophecy as ended, and offers a more realistic approach to the religious dilemma of the contemporary Jew.
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II. The Supremacy of Halakhah over Aggadah
Dr. Heschel's philosophy of Judaism reflects his general philosophy of religion. The Judaism he sets forth is a religion of deep spiritual craving—an insatiable thirst for God. While he acknowledges and stresses the absolute importance of Halakhah (Jewish law), it is clear that he demands something beyond it.
"The meaningfulness of the mitzvot," he says, "consists in their being vehicles by which we advance on the road to spiritual ends." The clear implication is that the mitzvot themselves are insufficient for the elevation of man's spirit—that they are merely a means to a higher, mystical end. In fact, early in his book, Dr. Heschel affirms that "religion is, indeed, little more than a desiccated remnant of a once living reality when reduced to terms and definitions, to codes and catechisms."
There is little quarrel with the beautifully idealized representation of Judaism that Professor Heschel formulates. Any fair examination of authentic Jewish tradition will recognize that it seeks a disciplined life whose pattern is set by Halakhah, with the ultimate aim of bringing man close to God. But even among the most faithful and pious Jews, exalted spiritual moments are infrequent. One cannot shake the feeling that Professor Heschel overemphasizes this ecstatic dimension of the religious life, placing too little value on the ordinary routine of piety and demanding far too much spiritual fire from the ordinary Jew.
Is it necessary to go as far as Dr. Heschel does in his absolute requirement of spontaneity, burning religious feeling, and inner devotion? Must we scorn the quiet piety of the vast numbers of meticulously observant Jews simply because their practice is often routine and mechanical?
Does such a view of Judaism not inadvertently grant validity to the old, polemical charge that the letter of the law kills while the spirit gives life? Despite Dr. Heschel's repeated affirmations of the need for Halakhah, his structural qualifications and restrictions of its place ultimately undermine the effectiveness of his stand.
Classic Jewish tradition devoted its major intellectual efforts to the development of Halakhah without qualification or apology. Judaism recognized that while man may be commanded to act in a certain way, he cannot be commanded to *feel* in a certain way; actions can be regulated, but not spontaneous thoughts or emotions. A Jew who lives faithfully in accordance with Halakhah has done all that can be asked of them. Whenever a person acts in response to a mitzvah, they draw close to God—even if they never experience a mystical flash, and even if they never know the inner anguish of craving for the divine presence. Professor Heschel consistently underestimates the intrinsic worth of this prosaic fulfillment of the divine commandments.
While we applaud the skill with which he explicates and defends the often-neglected world of Aggadah (homiletic and narrative tradition), this enthusiasm seems to have blinded him to the unique structural place of Halakhah in Judaism. According to Dr. Heschel, "Halakhah does not deal with the ultimate level of existence." He writes:
"The law does not create in us the motivation to love and to fear God, nor is it capable of endowing us with the power to overcome evil and to resist its temptations, nor with the loyalty to fulfill its precepts. It supplies the weapons; it points the way; the fighting is left to the soul of man."
The greatest Jewish sages were, of course, cognizant of the importance of Aggadah, and many made brilliant contributions to it. Nevertheless, they consistently centered the bulk of their study and existential concern on Halakhah. This preference indicates that they found within the legal matrix far more than Professor Heschel does. They were convinced that Halakhah *does* deal directly with the ultimate level of existence. They understood that Halakhah is more than a dry legal code and that halakhic study is more than intricate mental gymnastics. Through Halakhah, Judaism grasped and crystallized the profoundest religious insights into a clear, communicable, and democratic form.
Dr. Heschel fails to appreciate this when he attacks "pan-halakhic theology" as "a view which exalts the Torah only because it discloses the law, not because it discloses a way of finding God in life." To the contrary, normative Jewish tradition has always taught that Halakhah is the *only* universally reliable way of finding God in life.
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THE DEMOCRATIC BRIDGE OF HALAKHAH
[ Rare Mystical Insight ] --> Only accessible to the spiritual elite (Heschel)
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{ THE HALAKHAH } --> Translates the ineffable into concrete actions
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[ The Everyday Jew ] --> Meets God face-to-face via daily mitzvot
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In Halakhah, Judaism bridges the gap between the individual of rare spiritual genius and the rest of the community. The great religious insights, which are ordinarily restricted to those of prophetic sensitivity, are made real and available through the law to every Jew in all the ordinary circumstances of daily life.
Heschel notes this problem himself, writing:
"Insights are not a secure possession; they are vague and sporadic; they are like divine sparks, flashing up before us and becoming obscure again, and we fall back into a darkness almost as black as that in which we were before."
Because he sees clearly that we cannot rest within such fleeting moments, Professor Heschel asks the most earnest questions:
"The problem is: How to communicate those rare moments of insight to all the hours of our life? How to commit intuition to concepts, the ineffable to words, insight to rational understanding? How to convey our insights to others and to unite in a fellowship of faith?"
Surely Dr. Heschel must admit that the historic Jewish answer to these questions has always been an unwavering reliance on Halakhah. Given the vagueness and insecurity of our moments of insight, they must be translated into concrete terms related to man's physical life to survive. This is precisely what Halakhah achieves. It is the objectification of Israel's collective religious experience—a concrete expression, in human terms, of those elusive truths granted through divine revelation and grasped by our choicest spirits.
The entire structure of Halakhah is the Jewish way of committing intuition to concepts, the ineffable to words, and insight to rational understanding. This is neither a rejection of religious thinking nor a derogation of theology. It is the insistence that these spiritual dimensions are already fully present inside the Halakhah itself.
In spite of his strictures, Dr. Heschel would surely grant that a talmudic discourse concerning "the ox that gored the cow" (*Bava Kama*) is not merely an arid discussion of ancient tort law. It is the Jewish way of objectifying the presence of God within the mundane aspects of daily life. Rabbi Elazar ben Chisma made this point eminently clear when he laid down the principle: **קנין ופתחי נדה הן הן גופי הלכות** (*"The laws of bird-offerings and the lifespans of purity are the very bodies of the Halakhot"* — *Avot 3:18*).
This is the view of the halakhic realm as an ideal world in which we meet God face-to-face. What seems impractical or irrelevant on the surface is shown within that world to be deeply meaningful; what seems mundane is transformed into the highest level of refinement. In his life and in his study, the halakhic Jew continually renews the essence of his being. Though he may have no personal mystical insights, he is always close to God, for it is the objectification of divine reality in Halakhah that stands at the center of Jewish life.
This explains the consistent priority that rabbinic tradition gave to halakhic literature as the supreme subject of study. How revealing is the talmudic observation that the study of sacred Scripture alone is only a partially satisfactory activity, while the most desirable of all intellectual pursuits is the study of Gemara:
"They who occupy themselves with the Bible alone are but of indifferent merit; with the Mishnah, are indeed meritorious... with the Gemara—there can be nothing more meritorious." (*Baba Metzia 33a*)
This teaches us that the rigorous legalisms of halakhic debate encompass all the divine beauty and wisdom of the Bible. Even more than this, divine revelation receives its most specifically concrete and crystallized form in halakhic discourse and decision-making.
However lovely and moving the flights of aggadic imagination may be, they lack the stability and clarity of Halakhah. Aggadah may inspire us, but only Halakhah can give sustainable direction to our actions. The need for aggadic inspiration is granted without question, but Aggadah remains effective only when channeled through halakhic discipline. God and man find each other by way of the bridge of halakhic study and action, for we have been taught: *"Since the day that the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing in this world but the four cubits of Halakhah alone"* (*Berakhot 8a*). The world of Halakhah is the pure distillation of our authentic efforts to encounter the divine.
Repeatedly in his writings, Professor Heschel affirms this very point, only to back away from it out of an overarching fear of "pan-halakhism." It is this hesitation regarding the self-sufficient power of Halakhah that remains inconsistent with normative Jewish tradition. At his best, Dr. Heschel offers a superb exposition of the ultimate significance and ultimate claim of Jewish law. His philosophy of Judaism would be immeasurably strengthened if he held to his own halakhic insights with complete consistency.
