Feb 2012: Recently completed Book II -- also excellent, a bit less of direct argument and more historical contextualising against other faiths.


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Oct 2011: This review is for Book I -- am taking a break before digging into Book II. I generally enjoyed Book I and really like how as a Jewish author he argues solely from the Old Testament and yet the message resonates very strongly with the message of the New Testament. The structure of the text is a reading of individual books, then a few thematic summaries: chiefly on God's role in history. The final chapter is on justice which I used as basis for a short public prayer, with the key points below.

1. Justice and morality are more important to God than sacrifice and even prayer

2. Justice is not — like in the Greco-Roman conception — an objective reality or set of unalterable laws that exists apart from God. Rather justice is an expression of God’s will and being. Justice in the Hebrew mind (or mishpat) is a mode of action, which stems from tsedakah, or righteousness — the former implies giving each his due, the latter implies a burning compassion, an emotive sense.

Sub-point: justice implies one party has a right, and this implies the counter-party has an obligation or responsibility. Justice is thus an inter-personal relationship, and exists only in context of community.

Implication: Justice doesn’t exist apart from God. Wherefore humanism then?

3. Why justice doesn’t exist apart from God — reason 1:

“Justice represented as a blindfolded virgin, while conveying the essential thought of the rightful caution of the mind against illusions and partiality of the heart, conceives the process of justice as a mechanical process, as if the life of man were devoid of individuality and uniqueness and could be adequately understood in terms of inexorable generalisations. There is a point at which strict justice is unjust.

“Immutable justice — the principle of fiat justicia, pereat mundus — raises justice to a position of supremacy, denying to any other principle the power to temper it, regarding it as an absolute; the world exists for the sake of maintaining justice rather than justice for the sake of maintaining the world…

“God’s concern for justice grows out of His compassion for man. The prophets do not speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle or idea called justice. They are intoxicated with the awareness of God’s relationship to His people and to all men…. Justice, as stated above is not an abstraction or value. It exists in relation to a person and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.

“When Cain murdered his brother Abel, the words denouncing his crime did not proclaim: You have broken the law. Instead we read: And the Lord said, What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the Ground.”

4. Why justice doesn’t exist apart from God — reason 2:

The personalisation of the moral idea is the indispensable assumption of prophetic theology. Mercy, grace, repentance, forgiveness, all would be impossible if the moral principle were held to be superior to God. “If thou, O Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?” Psalm 312:3.

5. Human justice progresses to mercy, which progresses to humility before God

What does God require of you O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 8:6.

To do justly — righteousness; To love mercy — reflecting that mercy is part of the justice born of righteouness (in the sense of compassion), rather than the justice born of ideology; To walk humbly — to recognise that we ourselves are in need of mercy.

Also consider: humanism’s justice aims for the first, and to a certain extent the second. But the impossibility of universalising legal justice is why humanism fails. To some extent our judicial systems try to adjust for that by giving the judge some leeway in interpretation and administration of the law. But only to some extent, and certainly there is no forgiveness clause. Humanistic justice makes no attempt at the third — addressing the pride of a civilisation and aiming for humility.

Harking back to Amos 4:6-13: after a slew of punishments… “yet you did not return to me, says the Lord. Therefore thus I will do to you O Israel… Prepare to meet your God!” — usually interpreted to mean prepare to meet extreme disaster worse than any punishment so far — but the word ‘prepare’ in Hebrew usage means to prepare to meet someone favorably, or for a constructive achievement. So Heschel reads it here to mean: God will come to meet you, to forgive you — since the ‘justice’ approach hasn’t worked, let’s do the ‘mercy’ approach.

I noted down the majority of this book in my notebook so if you want a copy I essentially have 2 now

“The prophet was an individual who said no to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism. His fundamental objective was to reconcile man and God. His words are a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”

Heschel, the prophets challenge us to see injustice and awaken from moral complacency something he believed everyone needs to hear. I certainly did.

Abraham Joshua Heschel is well known for his short and accessible work that delves into the spirit of shabbat, The Sabbath. I am happened upon The Prophets at a book sale at my synagogue and was daunted by its size and scope. I am so relieved that I picked it up. This has been one of the best books I have read on Judaism to date. Dealing with prophesy, comparative religion and philosophy can be difficult but Heschel makes reading all of this accessible and breezy. Great book, super insightful, I highly recommend.

I have read the vast majority of this book for a graduate level Prophets course. It's commentary is extraordinarily helpful in understanding both the major and minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible. In particular I appreciated how Heschel embeds the word into his commentary. Through his work, Heschel helps develop what the prophet Hosea calls daath elohim - an intimate sensitivity for who God is and God hopes and desires for relationship with humanity and all creation.

This is an eerily good read; I'm a little scared of its relevance. Skimming, so not reviewing, but I'm sure I'll revisit as I read through the rest of the Bible.

Marvelous

“God is not the detached, unmoved mover of the Aristotelian tradition… but is "the most moved mover," deeply affected by human deeds. Divine pathos indicates a constant involvement of God in human history but insists that the involvement is an emotional engagement: God suffers when human beings are hurt, so that when I hurt another person, I injure God.
Hence the prophet is neither a messenger, an oracle, a seer, nor an ecstatic, but a witness to the divine pathos, one who bears testimony to God's concern for human beings.”

Is God involved in prophecy?

The late Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was one of the great Orthodox Jewish scholars, theologians, and philosophers of his generation. His books made a striking impression on many people, including me. His many insights are eye opening. His book “The Prophets” is one of his classics.
He tells us that he will not address the well-known question about prophets: Did God really speak to them? Did they actually communicate with God? Yet, I think it is clear that he did not believe that God spoke to the prophets. I say this because his book is devoted to telling us about the passions that the prophets felt that encouraged, even compelled, them to speak.
Heschel’s view of prophecy is radically different than that of Maimonides (1138-1204). The two seem to agree that prophecy is not a supernatural event, it is part of human nature. But they differ in whether the prophet is prompted to act by his emotions or his intellect. Heschel mentions Maimonides in his book ten times, but only to disagree with him.
Heschel stressed the anguish of the sensitive prophets over what they saw. He considered this emotion a good thing, and contended that their emotional reactions to what they saw around them prompted them to speak. While it seems to me that Heschel was influenced by hasidic mystical thinking, for he was raised as a hasid, Maimonides took the rational Aristotelian view that what is important is intellect, thinking, not emotions. Maimonides stressed that emotions must be controlled by the intellect, and unless emotions are controlled by the intellect, they can be evil. Maimonides contended that it was not emotions that prompted prophets to speak but the higher level of understanding that the prophets had; his or her understanding that what was being done was wrong. They saw and understood what the general population did not understand.
Heschel not only contends that emotions are good and that it is an emotional reaction that compels prophets to speak, he also takes the biblical stories about God’s reactions to the Israelite behavior literally and states that God also has emotional reactions. God, he writes, is “moved and affected by what happens in the world, and acts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath…man’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him.” He writes that “the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos (emphasis by Heschel).” God, according to Heschel, has these feelings because “His thoughts are about the world. He is involved in human history and is affected by human acts.”
Maimonides rejected the idea that God could be affected by human behavior. He taught that God has no body and no emotions and all of the biblical descriptions of God having an emotional reaction refers not to God, but to the way the people perceive their own behavior. When the Bible states that God is angry, it does not mean that God suddenly changed and reacted with anger. It means that the people realized that the behavior was wrong and not what God wanted. A side effect of portraying God having an emotional reaction is that it tends to frighten the masses who think that God actually is angry at them, and they become frightened and some even change their evil deeds.
Thus, for example, Heschel, as well as Rashi and the Targum, understood that the prophet Hosea actually married a harlot and suffered extreme agony as a result of her behavior, her adulteries, and these emotions caused him to understand how the wavering of the Israelites, their abandonment of God, affected God. In contrast, rationalists such as Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Kimchi interpreted the tale of Hosea’s marriage to a prostitute as a parable that Hosea invented and used to dramatize his message, a message he developed intellectually.

You haven’t met the prophets if you haven’t read Heschel.

This book was originally issued in two separate volumes. In the first volume Heschel begins with the excellent essay "What Manner of Man is the Prophet?" which stands alone as a masterpiece but also fits well within the context of the whole. He then provides a scholarly commentary on a number of major and minor prophets. The first volume is a fantastic introduction to prophetic literature. The second volume is more of a philosophical and theological investigation of the nature of prophesy. Heschel strives to explain why and how biblical prophesy cannot be accounted for by psychological theories, theories from comparative religion, or from the sociology of religion. The second volume will probably be less appealing to non-academics or non-specialists, and at times it gets repetitive as he makes similar points in different ways. It seems like an attempt to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, even when Heschel is doing very scholarly air-tight work, I find that his writing is of the type that leads the reader into awe filled moments of prayer and contemplation.

A work of moral, theological, and intellectual genius. I will be revisiting this book for many years to come.