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The Sabbath (review)

Vol. 26, No. 1 ♦ 2007 writes Heschel. “Truth is inwardness, inwardness is authenticity, and authenticity is attained through intense, passionate inner action. Only integrity can save man and his faith” (A Passion for Truth, p. 127). Like the Kotzker, Heschel criticized the “spiritual vapidity of his fellow Jews,” his fellow rabbis who “canonized religious mediocrity,” the “salesmen of their own delusions.” Like the Kotzker, he sees a Judaism that “had been weakened from within, its insights had become clichés, its loyalties stale” (A Passion for Truth, pp. 153, 318, 20, 314). Like the Kotzker, he denounced “the equation of religion and self-interest whether it is the survival of the people within the Jewish context or the personal salvation that is the center of concern in Christianity” (A Passion for Truth, p. 316). For Heschel, the issue is not “to be or not to be” a Jew, but why and how to be a Jew. The prime directive for Jews, even after the Holocaust, is not sheer survivalism (Moral Grandeur, p. 30). Rather, “the gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents” (The Earth is the Lord’s, p. 109). For Heschel, American Jewry has forgotten what it represents; it has become a messenger who has forgotten the message. And, that message is the spiritual legacy of East European Jewry. Devoid of its wisdom, American Jewry has become a conclusion without a premise, a fallacy; a community characterized by smugness and “intellectual vulgarity,” wrapped in its own self-delusions of inauthenticity, and engaged in its own spiritual suicide, a “second holocaust.” American Jewry had become the epitome of the Kotzker rebbe’s observation that it’s bad enough to be in a state of exile and alienation, but it’s even worse to be in such a state and not even to know it. Byron L. Sherwin Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies