It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELFor many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
-
-
All action is vicarious faith.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don’t be old. Don’t be stale.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The man who has not suffered – what does he know anyway?
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The task of life is to face sacred moments.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL