WSJ: Scholars Compare Barack to Rabbi Heschel's Ideal of the Prophet

Leave it to those scholars to compare Barack Obama favorably to the ideal prophet as described by the famous Rabbi Heschel.

...Yet a collective yearning to attribute the properties of the prophet to a political figure could lead to a misinterpretation of Rabbi Heschel's teachings, according to others who have studied his work. The political left has in recent years come to embrace the term "prophetic." But whether Rabbi Heschel believed that a politician could be a prophet or that a prophet could be a politician remains an open question.

Edward Kaplan, the rabbi's biographer, later told me: "Heschel saw the Hebrew prophets as being in sympathy with God's point of view, what he called the divine pathos. Heschel's judgments about American racism, economic inequality and the unjust Vietnam war were passionate and extreme." Still, Mr. Kaplan emphasizes, that the rabbi "was suspicious of politics as representing the perspective of expediency, which often includes lying."

"The problem is that to win votes and to tell the truth presents an inherent conflict," said Mel Scult, a professor of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College, in an interview. "The prophet is a social critic who speaks out and disregards the consequences." Which might be a little hard to do if he's the one in power. Still, Prof. Scult argues that, in Heschel's interpretation, a political figure "could be prophetic if he had the courage."

Ms. Heschel agrees. Though she thinks her father was careful not to use the word "prophet" too loosely, she does believe that a political figure can possess a prophetic spirit. "Would it be possible for a politician to embody certain kinds of moral values, to speak about those moral truths from a higher vantage point, and be willing even to criticize the country -- to speak at some remove? I would hope so," she continued. "It's possible to have a prophetic moment, even from a president." Of course, there is a difference, Mr. West noted after the event, between a statesman and a politician. "Great statesmen," West pointed out, "are able to fuse the prophetic with the prudential."

Prophet Sharing: Discussing the Legacy of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
By JORDANA HORN

"The main task of prophetic thinking," Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-72) wrote in his seminal book, "The Prophets," "is to bring the world into divine focus." For two hours at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage last week, Dartmouth Prof. Susannah Heschel (the rabbi's daughter) and Princeton Prof. Cornel West used Rabbi Heschel's words to discuss whether there is a "prophetic spirit" in modern America.

The answer, more than a century after the rabbi's birth, was a resounding "yes." But the question of how that spirit can manifest itself -- and in whom -- turned out to be more complex.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, born in Warsaw, was the descendant of two Hasidic rabbinic dynasties. He grew up in Poland and received his doctorate from the University of Berlin. His dissertation was later published as "The Prophets." In 1940, he left Europe for the U.S., and in 1945 he became a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Heschel's writings -- studied extensively in Jewish and Christian communities alike -- give great consideration to the relationship between man and God and the potential for individuals to imbue their own lives with a sense of sanctification and purpose. "We are called upon to be an image of God," he said in an ABC interview in 1971. "You see, God is absent, invisible, and the task of a human being is to represent the divine, to be a reminder of the presence of God."

Rabbi Heschel's legacy as a religious and civil-rights leader stems from his strong personal sense of justice, in part derived from the writings of biblical prophets. Prophets speak words filled with indignation, Heschel explained in his book, and they are intended to wrestle listeners out of complacency: "Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people. Few are guilty, but all are responsible." Religion without that indignation at political evil, he believed, was not religion at all. It is this spirit that led him to march in Selma, Ala., with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to speak out against the war in Vietnam.

The recent evening's discussion of Heschel's legacy gravitated, over and over, to the subject of Barack Obama. First Ms. Heschel and Mr. West brought up the presidential candidate and then the audience did. "He's a gift to this country," Ms. Heschel said, to great applause. It was as if everyone in the room were intoxicated with the idea that a politician could embody the prophetic. As she explained: "Today, there is a yearning for redemption. We want to be redeemed from cynicism and corruption. We want our politicians to turn swords into plowshares."

Yet a collective yearning to attribute the properties of the prophet to a political figure could lead to a misinterpretation of Rabbi Heschel's teachings, according to others who have studied his work. The political left has in recent years come to embrace the term "prophetic." But whether Rabbi Heschel believed that a politician could be a prophet or that a prophet could be a politician remains an open question.

Edward Kaplan, the rabbi's biographer, later told me: "Heschel saw the Hebrew prophets as being in sympathy with God's point of view, what he called the divine pathos. Heschel's judgments about American racism, economic inequality and the unjust Vietnam war were passionate and extreme." Still, Mr. Kaplan emphasizes, that the rabbi "was suspicious of politics as representing the perspective of expediency, which often includes lying."

"The problem is that to win votes and to tell the truth presents an inherent conflict," said Mel Scult, a professor of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College, in an interview. "The prophet is a social critic who speaks out and disregards the consequences." Which might be a little hard to do if he's the one in power. Still, Prof. Scult argues that, in Heschel's interpretation, a political figure "could be prophetic if he had the courage."

Ms. Heschel agrees. Though she thinks her father was careful not to use the word "prophet" too loosely, she does believe that a political figure can possess a prophetic spirit. "Would it be possible for a politician to embody certain kinds of moral values, to speak about those moral truths from a higher vantage point, and be willing even to criticize the country -- to speak at some remove? I would hope so," she continued. "It's possible to have a prophetic moment, even from a president." Of course, there is a difference, Mr. West noted after the event, between a statesman and a politician. "Great statesmen," West pointed out, "are able to fuse the prophetic with the prudential."

Even so, Alan Mittleman, a philosophy professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, suggests that there is a danger in using prophetic language too much. "The rabbis say in the Talmud that a wise man who engages in dialectical text interpretation is preferable to a prophet," Mr. Mittleman notes. While he says that he "can appreciate the moral passion that wants to wrap itself in the mantle of prophecy, there's something politically imprudent about it."

He worries that Heschel and his admirers today may rely too heavily on ambiguous claims of a prophetic spirit. "I think it makes a lot more sense to admit that what we're doing is arguing, as fallible human beings, out of the best reasons we can produce for the validity of the moral views we're trying to defend," he adds. "The basic rabbinic understanding of religion and ethics as taking place in the world of text interpretation, and the back and forth of rational justification, is a much better basis of life in a democratic society than these presumptive claims to prophetic authority that lean on God in the absence of real divine speech," Mr. Mittleman concludes.

Perhaps Rabbi Heschel's greatest contribution to our modern political debate, then, is to remind us not to rely too much on politics.

Ms. Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel.