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This chapter addresses the question: how far can Jews and Christians go in affirming the faith of the other? It presents a reassessment of Christianity by modern Jewish theologians: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. It then presents a reassessment of Judaism by three modern Christian theologians: Paul van Buren, A. Roy Echardt, and Clark M. Williamson. It argues that the dialogue does not and should not ask either faith tradition to give up any of its positive doctrines. What each must be willing to do is to reevaluate negative convictions. In altering the views of the other Judaism and Christianity should be recognised as having crucial roles to play in sacred history.

This chapter covers the writings and interchanges of various Jewish theologians who wrote in America in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, who included existentialists, and Reform Jewish theologians. These writers include Emil Fackenheim, Will Herberg, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Eugene Borowitz, Bernhard Heller, Jakob Petuchowski, Arthur Cohen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Soloveitchik, Lou Silberman, Bernard Martin, Eliezer Berkovits, Richard Rubinstein, and many others. The chapter also covers the debates in various journals as well as ideas put forward in more substantial publications (essays, books, etc.).

This chapter uses the metaphor of wireless hangouts to explore the teen’s desire to establish meaningful connections by providing an overview of the teen developmental tasks, in the cognitive, social and emotional domains, and how those are negotiated through the use of social media. Wireless communication among teens has become the ubiquitous norm. This chapter assesses these wireless hangouts and how they can help or hinder a teen’s necessary quest to establish personal identity. Text messaging services, social networks, and online communication can be a vehicle for introspection, internalization, and self-discovery. Structuring online resources as a “palace in time,” to borrow Abraham Joshua Heschel’s term, is more effective than simply building wireless hangouts. With the proper framework, technologies like mobile phones, tablets, and ubiquitous internet access can be powerful tools for teen identity.

Post-supersessionist theologies identify soteriology as a primary site for the articulation of supersessionist Christian theology. A common point of departure for supersessionism is reading God’s covenant with Israel as meaningful only in so far as it prepares for the saving activity of Jesus Christ centered in his atoning death. As such, any attempt to develop a non-supersessionist Christian theology requires a re-articulation of soteriological narratives and claims that retain the integrity of both Israel’s covenant and Christ’s death. This chapter offers a comparative reading of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Jürgen Moltmannn on divine suffering to argue that understanding covenantal belonging is necessary for articulating a non-supersessionist Christian theology of the atonement.

This chapter discusses contemporary Jewish spirituality from an Ignatian perspective. It explains the influence of a March 1963 meeting in New York chaired by Abraham Joshua Heschel to the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate. This dialogue was attended by Augustin Cardinal Bea, head of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and his assistant Monsignor Jan Willebrands. This chapter explains the relevance and similarity of Jewish spirituality expounded by Jewish writers Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

This chapter discusses the theological beliefs of Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It suggests that reading Heschel's writings is like coming back to the common Jewish and Christian heritage, and that to read Heschel is to allow his thought to penetrate the deepest recesses of one's heart. This chapter clarifies some misconceptions and misinterpretations that consider Heschel's as a challenge for Catholic theology. Even today, Heschel's legacy in Poland is still very vivid, particularly among Polish Jews.

This chapter introduces Heschel as a remarkable teacher, celebrating Heschel's life and defining his guiding principles. It illustrates how a wide variety of people—Christians, Muslims, Jews, African Americans, and others—appreciated and revered Heschel as a thinker, prophetic activist, and spiritual guide. A major theme of Heschel's writings was human grandeur and dignity. His environment, scholarship, and concerns were each characterized by an unusually broad range. This contributed to the wholeness of his person: the breadth of his understanding as well as its depth. According to Heschel, two opposite Hasidic masters served as his models: The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and his counterpart, Rabbi Mendl of Kotzk. The chapter concludes that Heschel was a nasi, a prince of his people; shalem, marvelously whole; and zaddik hador, master for the age.

This chapter includes a wide-ranging preface to Heschel's posthumous book, The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov. Few people are aware of Heschel's monographs on Hasidic masters, published in Hebrew or in Yiddish. The discussion suggests how Heschel, had he lived longer, might have absorbed these meticulous studies into a scholarly biography of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidim. Published in Hebrew and Yiddish and in various stages of completeness, the essays that make up The Circle should be understood as preliminary studies that constitute the work on the Besht that Heschel had planned. Descendant of a Hasidic dynasty and heir of the living tradition at its most vital source, master of the philosophical and historical-critical method of the West, and possessing unusual creative gifts, the chapter argues that Heschel was the scholar who might have given a definite work on Hasidism.

This concluding chapter links some of the issues raised in the book's chapters to the writings that have been central to theologians engaged in the same enterprise. It firsts examine some of the most explicit statements Levinas made about the post-Nostra Aetate relationship between Christianity and Judaism, followed by echoes of his work in two prominent Christian theologians, the writings of Pope John Paul II and Johann Baptist Metz, as well as two outstanding Jewish theologians, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It demonstrates that there is a mutual attraction between the thought of Levinas and the theologians who have engaged in the renewed relationship between Jews and Christians after the Second Vatican Council.

This chapter looks at Abraham Joshua Heschel. Abraham Joshua Heschel emigrated to the United States in 1940, but his first thirty-three years in Europe made him the religious philosopher, biblical interpreter, and social activist he became as a naturalized American citizen. Born in Warsaw on January 11, 1907, his ancestors were hasidim, continuing the eighteenth-century pietistic movement founded by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Ba'al Shem Tov. This Jewish consciousness, according to Heschel, assumed a spontaneous awareness of divine presence. Heschel's relationship with Poland was painful and complex. Growing up in hasidic Warsaw, he had little contact with Polish culture, and to prepare for his secular studies, he had to learn Polish from tutors. As a child he experienced the common antisemitism of the streets. As an adolescent in Warsaw, Heschel was expected to inherit the position of rebbe—a spiritual and community leader—held by his father and uncles. However, he reconciled his hasidic vision with west European culture and history's demands, making the transition by leaving Warsaw to earn a diploma at the recently established secular, Yiddish-language Realgymnasium in Vilna. By 1933, he had completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin. From there he went to Frankfurt, and returned for one academic year to Warsaw before finally leaving Poland in July of 1939.

This chapter focuses on the reality of persons in a world of things. It begins and ends with some relevant views drawn from the Jewish philosophers Buber (1878–1965), Heschel (1907–72), and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93). Framed by the Jewish concerns, it turns to a philosophical exploration of human personhood. The chapter begins by consiering Sellars's classic essay on the scientific and manifest images of “man-in-the-world.” Sellars shows how urgent and difficult it is to sustain a recognizable image of ourselves as persons in the face of scientism. With additional help from Nagel and Kant, it argues that persons cannot be conceptually scanted in a world of things. Notwithstanding the explanatory power of science, there is more to life than explanation. Explanation of what we are needs supplementing by a conception of who we are, how we should live, and why we matter. Those are questions to which Jewish sources can speak.

This chapter explores the connection between holiness and ethics or between holiness and goodness. Drawing on a theory of holiness in Judaism, it considers how holiness relates to other values, including moral ones, and whether holiness is more primordial or primitive than ethics. The discussion is anchored on two texts: the first from the Book of Leviticus, and the second from the modern Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The chapter argues that holiness and morality are equally primordial, equally original to the human condition, and goes on to propose a natural history of holiness in which the human experiences of love and awe, of goodness and holiness arise together against man's evolutionary background as a social primate. It also examines the concepts of primordial morality, natural morality, ethical naturalism, and moral realism before concluding with an analysis of intuition in relation to the good, the right, and the holy.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of great upheaval in American life. The politics of gender, sexuality, and family changed, transformed by new reproductive technologies and a resurgent feminist movement. The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal eroded Americans' confidence in political institutions. This period also saw a remarkable intellectual ferment of American religious liberalism, which assumed that religion had to adapt to a changing culture and that social and political reform were necessary imperatives for committed people of faith. This chapter presents the following documents: John F. Kennedy's “Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association” (1960), Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Jerry Falwell's “Ministers and Marches” (1965), Abraham Heschel's “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam” (1967), and Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (1973).

This chapter introduces, reformulates, and defends the old Indian allegory of the blind men and the elephant to argue that, despite critiques, it remains a valuable tool for thinking about religious diversity. Appealing to John Hull, theologian of blindness, the book reformulates the ancient tale as one about blindfolded men and the elephant. After reformulating the tale, the author puts it to new uses. He argues that theology of religious diversity is the work of accounting for why there are so many different accounts of the elephant, comparative theology is the work of actually walking over to another side of the elephant, and constructive theology is the venture of actually redescribing the elephant in light of the other two tasks. This chapter argues that all three tasks must be done together.

This chapter focuses on Sylvia Heschel, and how she began to launch her own career during the time her husband Abraham was writing and preparing Man is Not Alone for publication. Sylvia had practiced every day for years, preparing for her concert debut at Manhattan's Town Hall. Heschel zealously supported his wife's professional aspirations. He sent out numerous letters with tickets and copies of the program, urging relatives, friends, colleagues, and students to attend the recital. He even enlisted students to distribute tickets. Sylvia Heschel, as the playbill named her, would be performing pieces by Bach, Schumann, Mozart, Chopin, and Maxwell Powers, ending with Stravinsky's “Danse Russe” from Petrouchka. Sylvia's performance touched many in the audience, her expressive body movements heightening the musical emotions. After the concert, people remained to congratulate her.

This chapter presents two book reviews on antisemitism, the Holocaust, and genocide. Firstly it reviews The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, by Susannah Heschel. This book focuses on Deutsche Christen, the most notable strand of nazified Protestantism, which attempted to create Christianized Nazism during the Third Reich. The book argues that there was continuity between the “dejudaization” and nazification campaigns of a cohort of German Protestants in the Third Reich and the theological and racist thought of the pre-Nazi period. Secondly, the chapter reviews Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, edited by Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg. This book is framed by its efforts to acknowledge the ultra-Orthodox response and sense of obligation after the Shoah and invites discussion, dialogue, and debate about the post-Shoah world. It analyzes works by different writers about Holocaust including Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, and Ignaz Maybaum.

The period from the end of the 1940s through the 1960s was ubiquitously referred to in popular culture as “The Age of Anxiety.” Anxiety had multiple resonances: fear of nuclear annihilation, the pathological condition that mental health professionals treat, and the fear of non-being that existentialist thinkers (starting with Kierkegaard) spoke of. The mania for meaning fostered by such writers as Tillich was a natural fit, since a likely source of anxiety was precisely the unsuccessful quest for meaning that seemed in this age to mark the human condition. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and other religious thinkers, including the Jewish mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), had fallen under the spell of Tillich and reflected his influence in their plentiful use of meaning.