October 27, 2014 [1]
Pope Francis never met Rabbi Heschel, and
although he is known to own a number of books by Heschel, it is not
clear to what extent he has studied Heschel’s thought. Nonetheless, he
may have been indirectly “spiritually enriched and strengthened” by
Rabbi Heschel. A few connections between the men point in this
direction. Take, for example, the testimony of Rabbi Abraham Skorka of
Argentina, one of Pope Francis’ closest friends. Rabbi Skorka
accompanied Francis to the Holy Land in May, and in 2010 they
co-authored a book, On Heaven and Earth. About the conversations
that became that book, Rabbi Skorka, who claimed Rabbi Heschel as a
“formative spiritual guide,” has said that the spirit of Rabbi Heschel
guided his dialogue with Francis. “In our live dialogue, one drew from
the other,” Skorka explained in an email message to Rabbi Alexander
Even-Chen. “In this manner, Francis undoubtedly drew spiritually from
Heschel.”
Another connection exists through Rabbi
Marshall T. Meyer (1930-93), one of Rabbi Heschel’s most devoted
students, who became the most influential rabbi in Argentina while Jorge
Mario Bergoglio served as the provincial superior of the Jesuits there
(1973-79) and then as rector of the Jesuit university and seminary in
San Miguel, outside Buenos Aires. Rabbi Meyer inspired not only Jews but
also Christians. He was passionate about spreading Abraham Heschel’s
approach to Judaism and once said he felt that Rabbi Heschel had
“accompanied” him during his 25 years in Argentina.
In light of these connections, we decided to
probe what Pope Francis has said and written about topics central to
the religious worldview of Rabbi Heschel. We found that Francis has a
strong affinity for a number of the rabbi’s core ideas.
God’s Search for Us
One of Rabbi Heschel’s greatest and most influential books is God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
(1955). Like other books of his, it has been translated into Spanish
and is widely read not only in Argentina’s Jewish community but also by
many Argentine Catholics, especially members of the clergy. The title
expresses what is perhaps Rabbi Heschel’s most distinctive or signature
idea: it is not so much we who seek God, but God who seeks us.
Rabbi Heschel explains, “This is the core of
all biblical thoughts: God is not a being detached from man to be
sought after, but a power that seeks, pursues and calls upon man.
…Israel’s religion originated in the initiative of God rather than in
the efforts of man.” By this he does not mean that God does not know
where we are and is looking for us. Note what he writes: “God is not a
being detached from man.” For him, God is always present to us. But
because we are not always, or perhaps even usually, present to God,
Rabbi Heschel suggests that God must “reach out” to us (from around us
and from within us) to elicit our presence, our responsiveness. We dwell
within the sphere of God’s presence, yet God must strive to get us to
appreciate that presence. God dwells within us, yet God must awaken us
to the divine indwelling.
This idea that God searches for us, an idea
that Rabbi Heschel emphasized throughout his adult life, is one that
Pope Francis also advances. In his very first entry in the book with
Rabbi Skorka, Francis says: “I would say that one encounters God
walking, moving, seeking Him and allowing oneself to be sought by Him.
They are two paths that meet. On one hand, there is our path that seeks
Him, driven by that instinct that flows from the heart; and after, when
we have encountered each other, we realize that He was the one who had
been searching for us from the start.” Francis repeated this idea in his
interview with Jesuit journals (Am., 9/30/2013). “We must let God search and encounter us,” he said. “God is always first and makes the first move.”
The Presence of God
At the core of Rabbi Heschel’s
Judaism is faith in the one God, whose search for human beings has
received a response from the Jewish people, who by living in a covenant
with God have accepted the challenge of giving witness to God. But just
as the biblical and rabbinic authors reminded the people that their
being chosen to give this witness to God did not imply that they were
superior to other peoples or had an exclusive relationship with God, the
rabbi points out that it does not imply that the Jewish people are the
only vehicle of God’s revelation.
According to Rabbi Heschel, God is, or may
be, revealed through each and every human being. “The human is the
disclosure of the divine,” he said in his inaugural lecture, titled “No
Religion Is an Island,” as a visiting professor at Union Theological
Seminary in New York in 1965. “To meet a human being is an opportunity
to sense the image of God, the presence of God.” Although the Jewish
people are chosen for a special type of witness, every human being,
created in the image of God, is meant to be “a witness for God,” he
said. Pope Francis sounded very much like Rabbi Heschel in the interview
with Jesuit journals. “God is in every person’s life,” he said
repeatedly. “You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.”
While it is a traditional Jewish teaching
that every person, created in the image of God, may somehow reveal the
presence of God, Rabbi Heschel goes beyond this claim in suggesting that
Judaism is not the only religion of divine revelation. Speaking about
different religious traditions in the lecture at Union, Rabbi Heschel
insisted that divine revelation reaches the human spirit “in a variety
of ways, in a multiplicity of languages.” And in an interview shortly
before his death, he said, “God is to be found in many hearts all over
the world—not limited to one nation or to one people, to one religion.”
In the dialogue with Rabbi Skorka, Pope Francis revealed his spiritual
affinity to Rabbi Heschel. “God makes Himself felt in the heart of each
person. He also respects the culture of all people. Each nation picks up
that vision of God and translates it in accordance with the culture,
and elaborates, purifies and gives it a system.”
In Rabbi Heschel’s view, religions may be
considered valid to the extent that they foster awareness of God’s love
and also love for God and God’s creatures. Even non-monotheistic
religions may be considered valid to the extent that they foster love
for human beings, which, for Rabbi Heschel, “is a way of worshiping God,
a way of loving God,” as he writes in Israel: An Echo of Eternity
(1967). Regardless of their theologies, of whether or not they have a
monotheistic understanding of ultimate reality, all religions that
cultivate such love are, in Rabbi Heschel’s view, valid and vital ways
of serving God.
In his lecture at Union, Rabbi Heschel said,
“In this aeon diversity of religions is the will of God.” So far, Pope
Francis has not spoken explicitly on this issue, so it is uncertain if
he would go as far as Rabbi Heschel. In his apostolic exhortation “The
Joy of the Gospel,” however, Francis seems to offer something in the
same spirit as Rabbi Heschel when he writes: “The same Spirit everywhere
brings forth various forms of practical wisdom which help people to
bear suffering and to live in greater peace and harmony. As Christians,
we can also benefit from these treasures built up over many centuries,
which can help us better to live our own beliefs.”
The Failure of Religion
For Rabbi Heschel, God may be
present in and through diverse religions, yet these same religions often
fail to manifest God. He begins God in Search of Man: It is customary to blame
secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of
religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion
for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but
because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is
completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when
the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past;
when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when
religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice
of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.
To this summary of Rabbi Heschel’s countless
critiques of religion, Pope Francis would surely say “Amen.” As a
parallel to Rabbi Heschel’s criticism of faith being “replaced by creed”
and how “the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the
past,” Francis warned in the interview with Jesuit journals that “faith
becomes an ideology among other ideologies” in those who long for “an
exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a
past that no longer exists.” Like Rabbi Heschel, Francis wants faith to
be a “living fountain” rather than an “heirloom.” The pope put it this
way: “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants
everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and
memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas
to God.”
Francis also shares Rabbi Heschel’s
criticism of religion when it “speaks only in the name of authority
rather than with the voice of compassion.” The pope has repeatedly
warned against clericalism, for example. “The risk that we must avoid is
priests and bishops falling into clericalism, which is a distortion of
religion,” he explained in his dialogue with Rabbi Skorka. “When a
priest leads a diocese or a parish, he has to listen to his community,
to make mature decisions and lead the community accordingly. In
contrast, when the priest imposes himself, when in some way he says, ‘I
am the boss here,’ he falls into clericalism.”
Since becoming pope, Francis has denounced
clericalism with even greater force. In a closed-door meeting with
religious superiors in November 2013, later reported by La Civiltà
Cattolica, Francis called clericalism “one of the worst evils.” This is
reminiscent of Rabbi Heschel’s claim at the convention of the American
Medical Association in 1964 that striving for personal success, when it
becomes the object of “supreme and exclusive concern,” is both
“pernicious and demonic.” And the pope’s warning to newly appointed
bishops in September 2013, that careerism is “a form of cancer,” sounds
just like Rabbi Heschel’s remark in the A.M.A. address: “According to my
own medical theory, more people die of success than of cancer.”
Rabbi Heschel did not shy away from making
harsh criticisms—not of specific people but of what many people do and
pursue. Neither does Pope Francis shy away from making such criticisms.
But for both men the voice of religion, while necessarily involving
prophetic criticism, is ultimately meant to be “the voice of
compassion.” And for both the rabbi and the pope, interreligious
dialogue is urgently needed for people of different traditions to
develop that voice and to recognize it in each other.
The Urgency of Dialogue
In Rabbi Heschel’s view, one of the
principal reasons for the failure of religion is the inflation of its
importance, treating a given religion as if it were itself divine rather
than a human response to the divine. “Religion is a means, not the
end,” he said in the lecture at Union Seminary. “It becomes idolatrous
when regarded as an end in itself.” To assume that there is only one
valid way of responding to God is—precisely by absolutizing that way—to
equate a religious means with the divine end. About this, Rabbi Heschel
was emphatic: “To equate religion and God is idolatry.”
For Rabbi Heschel, genuine monotheistic
faith demands an attitude of openness to the validity of various
religions precisely because it is opposed to absolutizing—that is,
deifying—anything other than God, including a cherished tradition that
fosters faith in God. “We must not regard any human institution or
object as being an end in itself,” he writes in God in Search of Man.
“A temple that comes to mean more than a reminder of the living God is
an abomination.” So, contrary to what many people seem to assume, true
monotheistic faith means that we must not make our faith the object of
our faith. “There is great merit,” Rabbi Heschel explains, “in our
having no absolute faith in our faith.” He said in the Union lecture:
“Human faith is never final, never an arrival, but rather an endless
pilgrimage, a being on the way.” Therefore, Rabbi Heschel asserts
emphatically in Man Is Not Alone: “To rely on our faith would be idol-worship. We have only the right to rely on God.”
While Pope Francis has not gone so far as to
suggest that reliance on our faith may be a form of idolatry, he has
spoken of how faith can be transformed into ideology, which for him is
tantamount to idolatry. During a homily at a weekday Mass in October
2013, he said that a Christian can become “a disciple of ideology.” He
explained, “The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and
becomes ideology.” Because “ideologies are rigid, always” and because
Christian ideology is “rigid, moralistic, ethical, but without
kindness,” the pope said that this Christian ideology is a “serious
illness.”
For both Rabbi Heschel and Francis, it is clear that pride and arrogance are at the root of idolatrous and ideological approaches to religion and that the key to genuine religious faith is humility. “A major factor in our religious predicament is due to self-righteousness,” Rabbi Heschel said in the Union lecture. “Religion is often guilty of the sin of pride and presumption.… But humility is the beginning and end of religious thinking, the secret test of faith.” Speaking about religious ministers, Francis made the same point in his dialogue with Rabbi Skorka: “Humility is what gives assurance that the Lord is there. When someone is self-sufficient, when he has all the answers to every question, it is proof that God is not with him. Self-sufficiency is evident in every false prophet.”
Self-sufficiency is also a mark of a false
understanding of religion. “The religions of the world are no more
self-sufficient, no more independent, no more isolated than individuals
or nations,” Rabbi Heschel said. “No religion is an island. We are all
involved with one another. Spiritual betrayal on the part of one of us
affects the faith of all of us. Views adopted in one community have an
impact on other communities. Today religious isolationism is a myth.”
Claiming that nihilism is “world-wide in extent and influence,” Rabbi
Heschel emphasized the urgency of interfaith dialogue and cooperation:
We must choose between
interfaith and inter-nihilism. Cynicism is not parochial. Should
religions insist upon the illusion of complete isolation? Should we
refuse to be on speaking terms with one another and hope for each
other’s failure? Or should we pray for each other’s health, and help one
another in preserving one’s respective legacy, in preserving a common
legacy?”
Pope Francis takes a similar position. In an
address to civic and religious leaders in Brazil in July 2013, Francis
emphasized the need for dialogue “in a spirit of openness and without
prejudice.” He said: “Only in this way can understanding grow between
cultures and religions, mutual esteem without needless preconceptions,
in a climate that is respectful of the rights of everyone. Today, either
we take the risk of dialogue, we risk the culture of encounter, or we
all fall; this is the path that will bear fruit.”
For both Rabbi Heschel and Pope Francis,
interreligious dialogue is not simply an option but an obligation,
because it “is a necessary condition for peace in the world,” as Francis
writes in “The Joy of the Gospel.” Reflecting on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, Heschel puts it bluntly in Israel: An Echo of Eternity:
“The choice is to love together or to perish together.” And beyond
peaceful coexistence, interreligious dialogue also yields spiritual
enrichment for those engaged in it. Believing it presumptuous for anyone
to think that his or her religion is exclusively true and fruitful,
Heschel said in the Union lecture that “the purpose of religious
communication among human beings of different commitments is mutual
enrichment and enhancement of respect and appreciation.” Cardinal
Bergoglio, S.J., echoed this sentiment in an interview published in
2010, when he explained that we can build a true community only by
recognizing the value of others and “celebrating the diversity that is
enriching for us all.”
Pope Francis has inspired countless people
of diverse religions and of no religion to seek a path and find a way
toward spiritual enrichment. Perhaps through Francis some of the
signature insights of Rabbi Heschel are reaching far more people than he
could have ever imagined.
* * *
Links:
[1] http://americamagazine.org/toc-past/2014-10-27
[2] http://americamagazine.org/users/harold-kasimow
[3] http://americamagazine.org/users/john-merkle
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