1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
page 3

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the civil rights movement. Wikipedia  

✵ 11. January 1907 – 23. December 1972
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel: 130   quotes 6   likes

Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

“The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

"No TIme for Neutrality", p. 107
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

God , Faith

“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. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prologue p. 10
The Sabbath (1951)

World , Time

“The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

Truth , Time

“Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of many generations, and effort accumulated over many centuries. … There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this memory which is the main source of our faith.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

"The Holy Dimension", p. 333
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

God , Faith , Effort , Memory

“The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Wisdom of Heschel (1970), p. 150

World

“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prologue p. 6
The Sabbath (1951)

Wealth

“In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prologue p. 5
The Sabbath (1951)

God , Reality , Sense

“The prophets never taught that God and history are one, or that whatever happens below reflects the will of God above. Their vision is of man defying God, and God seeking man to reconcile with him.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Source: The Prophets (1962), p. 168

God , History

“To Hosea, marriage is the image of the relationship of God and Israel. ... Idolatry is adultery.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Volume 1, p. 50
The Prophets (1962)

Marriage , God