“We know what he makes, but we do not know what he is or what to expect of him. “ Heschel awakened man’s spiritual dimension and it’s underlying anxiety that he calls “the need to be needed” and that something is asked of man and that he is not a mere bystander in the cosmos.
Heschel ultimately submitted to God and God needs man for the attainment of his ends in the world.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading theologians and philosophers of the 20th century; he also participated in the civil rights movement with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (such as the march on Selma), and against the Vietnam War.
Heschel persuaded the Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned the Jews, or referred to an expected conversion to Christianity. His theological works argued that religious experience is a fundamentally human impulse, not just a Jewish one. He believed that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth. For these and other reasons, Martin Luther King Jr. called Heschel "a truly great prophet." Heschel actively participated in the Civil Rights movement, and was a participant in the third Selma, Alabama to Montgomery march, accompanying Dr. King and John Lewis on 25 March 1965.
“Who is Man? (1965)
In these three lectures, originally delivered in somewhat different form as The Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures at Stanford University in May 1963, Dr. Heschel inquired into the logic of being human: What is meant by being human? What are the grounds on which to justify a human being’s claim to being human?
In the author’s words, “We have never been as openmouthed and inquisitive, never as astonished and embarrassed at our ignorance about man. We know what he makes, but we do not know what he is or what to expect of him. Is it not conceivable that our entire civilization is built upon a misinterpretation of man? Or that the tragedy of man is due to the fact that he is a being who has forgotten the question: Who is Man?
The failure to identify himself, to know what is authentic human existence, leads him to assume a false identity, to pretend to be what he is unable to be or to not accepting what is at the very root of his being. Ignorance about man is not lack of knowledge, but false knowledge.”
One of the world’s most illustrious and influential theologians here confronts one of the crucial philosophical and religious questions of our time: the nature and role of man.
Abraham Joshua Heschel - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel
"Animals are content when their needs are satisfied; man insists not only on being satisfied but also on being able to satisfy, on being a need not simply on having needs. Personal needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed? There is no human being who has not been moved by that anxiety."(p.57)
This is a book on philosophical ideas which attempts to answer the age old question of Who Man Is?
Some of the topics that are dealt within the book : To think of man in human terms; Do we live what we are? ; Self-knowledge as part of our being human; The self as a problem; The logic of being human; The dimension of meaning; The essence of being human.
From the book there are quite a few things to learn and apply in real life :;
"It is a fatal illusion to assume that to be human is a fact given with human being rather than a goal and an achievement. To animals the world is what it is; to man this is a world in the making, and being human means being on the way, striving, waiting, hoping." (P. 41)
Knowledge and reciprocity
"Knowledge is a debt, not a private property. To be a person is to reciprocate, to offer in return what one receives." (P. 46)
Man’s Unique Need to be Needed
"Animals are content when their needs are satisfied; man insists not only on being satisfied but also on being able to satisfy, on being a need not simply on having needs. Personal needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed? There is no human being who has not been moved by that anxiety." (P. 57)
Man's complexity
"There are alleys in the soul where man walks alone, ways that do not lead to society, a world of privacy that shrinks from the public eye. Life comprises not only arable, productive land, but also mountains of dreams, an underground of sorrow, towers of yearning ... " (P. 59)
The Task of Mankind
"It is only despair that claims: the task of man is to let the world be. It is self-deception to assume that man can ever be an innocent spectator. To be human is to be involved, nolens volens, to act and to react, to wonder and to respond. For man, to be is to play a part in a cosmic drama, knowingly or unknowingly." (P. 68)
Two Ways
"There are two primary ways in which man relates himself to the world that surrounds him: manipulation and appreciation. In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired. It is the hand that creates the tools for the purpose of manipulation, and it is the ear and the eye by which we attain appreciation. (p. 82)
Fellowship depends upon appreciation, while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: what I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence. (p. 82)
Two Versions of Man
To the Greek mind, man is above all a rational being; rationality makes him compatible with the cosmos. To the biblical mind, man is above all a commanded being, a being of whom demands may be made. The central problem is not: What is being? but rather: What is required of me?
Greek philosophy began in a world without a supreme, living, one God. It could not accept the gods or the example of their conduct. Plato had to break with the gods and to ask: What is the good? And the problem of values was born. And it was the idea of values that took the place of God. Plato lets Socrates ask: What is good? Yet Moses' question was: What does God require of thee? (p. 107)
Failure to understand what is demanded of us is the source of anxiety. The acceptance of our existential debt is the prerequisite for sanity. The world was not made by man. The earth is the Lord's not a derelict. What we own, we owe. "How shall I ever repay to the Lord all his bounties to me!" (Psalm 116:12) (p. 112)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/403110.Who_Is_Man_
Quotes
“We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”
“Man cannot see God, but man can be seen by God. He is not the object of a discovery but the subject of revelation.”
“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”
—Abraham Joshua Heschel
Racism as the root of poverty
“Racism is Satanism.” It was this conviction that launched Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a religious Jew from a Hasidic family in Poland, into the American civil rights movement.
He appears beside Martin Luther King Jr. in several of the most iconic photographs of that time: crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge arm in arm in March 1965; and standing together outside Arlington Cemetery in silent protest of the Vietnam War in 1968.
The two came from very different backgrounds – King had grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, while Heschel arrived in the United States as a refugee from Hitler’s Europe in March of 1940 – “a brand plucked from the fire,” as he wrote. Yet the two found an intimacy that transcended the growing public rift between their two communities. Heschel brought King and his message to a wide Jewish audience, and King made Heschel a central figure in the struggle for civil rights. Often lecturing together, they both spoke about racism as the root of poverty and its role in the war in Vietnam; both also spoke about Zionism and about the struggles of Jews in the Soviet Union. The concern that they shared was “saving the soul of America.”
By the time Heschel and King met, the nation was tense: the Birmingham campaign was underway in the first months of 1963, and on June 11, 1963, George Wallace, governor of Alabama, attempted to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama; federal troops forced him to step aside. That night, President Kennedy delivered a major televised speech, promising legislation and calling civil rights a “moral issue.” The next day, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, was murdered.
The March on Washington took place in August 1963, with more than two hundred thousand people participating.
