Heschel and Spiritual Amazement

Bubbling not far beneath the surface of the formidable academic that was Abraham Heschel was the soul of a poet. He wrote in Man is Not Alone,

But, then, a moment comes like a thunderbolt, in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. It is full of overpowering brilliance, like a point in which all moments of this life are focused or a thought which outweighs all thoughts ever conceived of…Apathy turns to splendour unawares. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul…We are penetrated by His insight.

Indeed, he understood Jewish mysticism as an essentially ‘this-wordly’ pursuit. His mysticism had a classically Jewish bent,

Jewish mystics are inspired by a bold and dangerously paradoxical idea that not only is God necessary to man, but that man is also necessary to God, to the unfolding of His plan in this world.

The notion of God being necessary to humanity is one Christianity is familiar with and comfortable with, but only in recent years, in such fields as the openness of God movement, have we begun to explore the possibility that we mighty be necessary to God, about which I know too little.

In the following quotation however, from ‘A Preface to an Understanding of Revelation‘ Heschel stands amazed at the great truth of God’s relentless pursuit of humankind,

The idea of revelation remains an absurdity as long as we are unable to comprehend the impact with which the reality of God is pursuing man. Yet at those moments in which the fate of mankind is in the balance, even those who have never sensed how God turns to man, suddenly realise that man…is important enough to be the recipient of spiritual light at the rare dawns of his history