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Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Our concern with environment cannot be reduced to what can be used, to what can be grasped. Environment includes not only the inkstand and the blotting paper, but also the impenetrable stillness in the air, the stars, the clouds, the quiet passing of time, the wonder of my own being. I am an end as well as a means, and so is the world: an end as well as a means. My view of the world and my understanding of the self determine each other. The complete manipulation of the world results in the complete instrumentalization of the self.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.
This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There are many creeds but only one faith. Creeds may change, develop, and grow flat, while the substance of faith remains the same in all ages. The overgrowth of creed may bring about the disintegration of that substance. The proper relation is a minimum of creed and a maximum of faith.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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It would be a contradiction in terms to assume that the attainment of transcendent meaning consists in comprehending a notion. Transcendence can never be an object of possession or of comprehension. Yet man can relate himself and be engaged to it. He must know how to court meaning in order to be engaged in it. Love of ultimate meaning is not self-centered but rather a concern to transcend the self.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The account of our experiences, the record of debit and credit, is reflected in the amount of trust or distrust we display towards life and humanity. There are those who maintain that the good is within our reach everywhere; you have but to stretch out your arms and you will grasp it. But there are others who, intimidated by fraud and ugliness, sense scorn and ambushes everywhere and misgive all things to come. Those who trust develop a finer sense for the good, even at the hight cost of blighted hopes. Charmed by the spell of love, faith is, as it were, imposed upon their heart.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The Torah has not imposed upon Israel a tyranny of the spirit. It does not violate human nature. On the contrary, the road to the sacred leads through the secular. The spiritual rests upon the carnal, like "the Spirit that hovers over the face of the water. " Jewish living means living according to a system of checks and balances. We are not asked anything that cannot be responded to. We are not told: Love thy enemy, but Do not hate him, and positively: "If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." (Exodus 23:4).
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face.
We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.
All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Born:
January 11, 1907
Died:
December 23, 1972
(aged 65)
Bio:
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.
Known for:
The Sabbath (1951)
The prophets (1962)
God In Search of Man (1955)
Man Is Not Alone (1951)
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity
Most used words:
god
faith
man
sense
life
time
living
self
mystery
awe
prayer
human
live
meaning
face
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