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Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel's Poetics of Piety
A strategy for reading Heschel's major works, as well as a new route to understanding religious writing in a lucid study of modern religious and ethical thought using literary criticism.
"A brilliant, and at the same time, moving, and deeply personal interpretation of the works of one of the greatest religious thinkers of this century. By skillfully analyzing Heschel's rhetoric and mastery of language--his 'poetics of faith'--Edward Kaplan acts as a guide to Heschel's writings for the specialist as well as the general reader, for Jew as well as non-Jew. Holiness in Words enables us to see that what Heschel wrote of scripture applies to his own '...the words became a live wire charged with His spirit.'" -- Eva Fleischner, Professor Emerita, Montclair State University
"Once again--and in a new way--the theological and moral nuances of Heschel's spiritual passion can be heard. Kaplan has set our ear to sounds long-forgotten or never known. His work is no deposit of academic travail, but exemplifies scholarship as service in the highest sense.
"A lifetime of listening has gone into the making of this book. Over many years, Edward Kaplan has contributed careful and perceptive studies on Heschel's poetic rhetoric, on his understanding of prophecy and prophetic consciousness, and on the moral life and its relationship to mysticism and transcendence. They are now put to the service of a full-scale exposition of Heschel's thought and spiritual orientation." -- From the Foreword by Michael Fishbane
Holiness in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Poetics of Piety is both an introduction to reading Heschel's works in English, and an in-depth study of the way his literary style can transform the consciousness of readers. Heschel's life and works respond to the contemporary crisis in religion, formulating positions on faith and despair, racism and social justice, the Holocaust, interreligious dialogue, and the availability of God's presence. We study Heschel's theory and use of literary language, his "poetics of piety," in order to elucidate his narrative strategy to teach God-centered (or prophetic) thinking.
The book traces the major themes of his "depth theology," awe and radical amazement, the meaning of symbol, ritual, prayer, and mystical insight. Historical and biographical information clarifies Heschel's implicit polemic with Martin Buber and a supplemental study guide provides sources for each chapter and suggestions for further thought and discussion.
"This work is an unusually poignant and unique study of understanding modern religious thought using literary criticism. Unrelated to this observation, but of equal significance, is the author's important presentation of Heschel's response to the Holocaust. Also important is his linkage between Heschel's theology--particularly his views of prophecy, and his biography--especially his involvement in social action. While other writers on Heschel have touched on these issues, no other author has done it with such depth or with such clarity. The focus upon the aesthetic features of Heschel's work makes this work unique and significant. The delineation of Heschel's 'sacred humanism' is very well done and could serve as a model for dealing with similar thinkers, e.g., Thomas Merton." -- Byron L. Sherwin, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
"A brilliant, and at the same time, moving, and deeply personal interpretation of the works of one of the greatest religious thinkers of this century. By skillfully analyzing Heschel's rhetoric and mastery of language--his 'poetics of faith'--Edward Kaplan acts as a guide to Heschel's writings for the specialist as well as the general reader, for Jew as well as non-Jew. Holiness in Words enables us to see that what Heschel wrote of scripture applies to his own '...the words became a live wire charged with His spirit.'" -- Eva Fleischner, Professor Emerita, Montclair State University
"Once again--and in a new way--the theological and moral nuances of Heschel's spiritual passion can be heard. Kaplan has set our ear to sounds long-forgotten or never known. His work is no deposit of academic travail, but exemplifies scholarship as service in the highest sense.
"A lifetime of listening has gone into the making of this book. Over many years, Edward Kaplan has contributed careful and perceptive studies on Heschel's poetic rhetoric, on his understanding of prophecy and prophetic consciousness, and on the moral life and its relationship to mysticism and transcendence. They are now put to the service of a full-scale exposition of Heschel's thought and spiritual orientation." -- From the Foreword by Michael Fishbane
Holiness in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Poetics of Piety is both an introduction to reading Heschel's works in English, and an in-depth study of the way his literary style can transform the consciousness of readers. Heschel's life and works respond to the contemporary crisis in religion, formulating positions on faith and despair, racism and social justice, the Holocaust, interreligious dialogue, and the availability of God's presence. We study Heschel's theory and use of literary language, his "poetics of piety," in order to elucidate his narrative strategy to teach God-centered (or prophetic) thinking.
The book traces the major themes of his "depth theology," awe and radical amazement, the meaning of symbol, ritual, prayer, and mystical insight. Historical and biographical information clarifies Heschel's implicit polemic with Martin Buber and a supplemental study guide provides sources for each chapter and suggestions for further thought and discussion.
"This work is an unusually poignant and unique study of understanding modern religious thought using literary criticism. Unrelated to this observation, but of equal significance, is the author's important presentation of Heschel's response to the Holocaust. Also important is his linkage between Heschel's theology--particularly his views of prophecy, and his biography--especially his involvement in social action. While other writers on Heschel have touched on these issues, no other author has done it with such depth or with such clarity. The focus upon the aesthetic features of Heschel's work makes this work unique and significant. The delineation of Heschel's 'sacred humanism' is very well done and could serve as a model for dealing with similar thinkers, e.g., Thomas Merton." -- Byron L. Sherwin, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
213 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1996
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December 13, 2016
It wasn’t until I came to poetry that I realized how impoverished my idea of love had been. For a concept so important to our culture, and even our own individuality, it’s almost shocking how little the word itself has to say about the experience it connotes. The truth is, outside of poetic experience—that is, taken as a word alone—‘love’ is nearly useless. Bathe it in the rich allusiveness of metaphor, however, and then you’ll understand love in all its splendor. “It is", according to Shakespeare, "the star to every / wandering bark,”.
If poetry has the power to guide us through the darkness of love’s literality, might it also enrich our understanding of the divine? For the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the most successful poetic experience hints at the transcendent. Oakeshott, however, is little concerned with the precise mechanics of that experience. For that we look to his contemporary, the philosopher of religion and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel. For Heschel, poetry, in so much as it drives the impulse toward wonder or radical amazement, doesn’t just hint at the transcendent, but is in fact “a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”
For more than half a century scholars have lavished attention on Heschel’s work. But none have paid more attention to the mechanics of his rhetoric than Edward Kaplan, whose 1996 book Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety uses literary criticism to analyze the relationship between poetry and revelation. Kaplan, it should be noted, envisions his book as a “guide to transformation.” As readers draw closer to Heschel’s work, his hope is that it “might help alleviate today’s cynicism, moral confusion, and spiritual thirst. By becoming aware that all language is metaphorical,” he maintains, “we open ourselves to the reality beyond words, beyond concepts, systems, ideologies.” In other words, Kaplan’s aim is not only to open the hood on Heschel’s theology and explain how it works, but also to convince us that Heschel’s words do in fact have within them the revelatory power to substantiate the claims made for successful poetic experience.
A guide to transformation? If you’re like me, you usually don’t immerse yourself in literary criticism as if it were the River Jordan, nor do you expect the critic to simply take up the apologetic work of the subject he writes about. In the broad spectrum of Heschel’s fans and detractors, Kaplan is clearly an apologist’s apologist. But if that leads him to offer generous interpretations or gloss over logical inconsistencies, as I certainly think it does, he somehow accomplishes it in an entirely unobjectionable way. As someone toeing at the threshold of faith, I appreciated Kaplan’s admission that he was inspired to write the book because he too had been a seeker enchanted by Heschel’s words. And, like him, I share the hope that in writing we can traverse the intersection of the human and the divine.
Ben Lerner, in his recent essay The Hatred of Poetry, frames that very possibility in secular terms, holding that the true power of poetry lies in the difference between an actual poem and the ideal poem. Kaplan, following Heschel, makes the same argument but in metaphysical terms:
Both versions of the argument hold appeal, but Lerner’s reliance on the abstract polarity of actual/ideal, at least for the skeptic, is easier to come to terms with. Whereas Kaplan, with his conclusion that “[l]anguage perceived in this manner confirms the ineffable as a valid intuition of the Divine within human consciousness” (my emphases), seems to, at first blush, betray his own confidence in the proposition by employing terms more appropriate for scientific analysis than poetic experience.
In my own reading, I’ve encountered neither Lerner’s power-imbuing difference nor Kaplan’s absolute disparity between the human/actual and the divine/ideal. I have, however, come across poems in which I’ve glimpsed something that certainly feels transcendent, or at least speaks to the idea. Philip Belcher’s Ode to the God of Dogs provided one of the first instances of what might be called a micro-revelatory moment. In revisiting that poem over the course of my reading of Kaplan’s book, I realized that Heschel’s own words, to a surprising degree, speak to Belcher’s poem, which begins:
The poet opens by reminding us that what we take for granted is not in fact assured. The sun may not rise. We may not rise. Heschel himself needed no reminder, “What is extraordinary appears to us as habit, the dawn of a daily routine of nature. But time and again we awake.” We open our eyes to reality. Belcher then evokes the hound’s supreme attentiveness, its unerring love for its master. Putting this imagery in the context of Heschel, we think about the living God: could our own relationship with the divine presence be so faithful, so attentive?
If the first sentence of his poem trains our mind on an uncomplicated wonder borne in the divine presence, Belcher uses the second sentence, like a rocket jettisoned at high altitude, to plunge us back to limited actuality of human cognition. The tone is ironic, the internal rhyme of ‘sibilant grit’ emphasizes its negative valence while those spinning ‘O’s anchor our minds in a whirlpool of being and becoming. Intellectual arrogance stands in the way of our own attentiveness to God. For Heschel, the mind of concepts such as ‘ontological’ and ‘existential’ is a “mercenary of our will to power,…trained to assail in order to plunder rather than to commune in order to love.” The barely hinged meanings of those two words contrast vividly with the hound’s every shift. “In the confinement of our study rooms, our knowledge seems to us a pillar of light. But when we stand at the door that opens out to the infinite,” writes Heschel, “we realize that all concepts are but glittering motes that populate a sunbeam.”
Kaplan argues that Heschel uses the “loveliness” of luminescent images to ease the discomfort of our intellectual humiliation. Belcher uses the embedded hope of that third short and crisp sentence at the end of the sixth line to do the same. He then continues:
If in the opening lines we were painfully reminded of the lack of our own attentiveness to God, now in the seventh line we encounter praise. For me praise is personified as an outdoors cat, thankful for the small amount of warm milk the poet shares on a cold morning. She’s also a reminder of our own feeble means of expression. How infrequently we ourselves praise God, wag our way into the light. With these revelatory moments of attentiveness and praise fresh on his mind, the poet then sheds all human pretense in the ninth and tenth lines, the triumphant climax of the poem. I think back to Kaplan’s words, “[h]umility can reconcile us with the universe, so that we might view the self, not as an antagonist but as a member of a cosmic community.”
As Ode to the God of Dogs continues, Belcher’s poet senses the presence of God poetically in a barren field and in the color of a dog’s flank, “not” as Heschel wrote, “with the tools he has made but with the soul with which he was born; not like a hunter who seeks his prey but like a lover to reciprocate love.” And then the poet’s final, emphatic plea:
The beauty of the poem as a whole is its allusiveness to the divine and the hope conveyed in the unvoiced idea that we might, from our own jealous tables, learn the ways of love from the humblest of creatures at our feet.
Heschel doesn’t say just how much successful poetic experience it might take to fulfill the prerequisite requirements for an awareness of that which is, but I feel certain that Ode to the God of Dogs is at least suggestive enough to satisfy a introductory level requirement on his course plan. Just as with faith in God, however, I’m left still uncertain as to whether or not Belcher’s poem provides us a glimpse of the meeting place of the human and the divine. And even if I acknowledge the intuition of the transcendent that has stayed with me in the two years since I first read the poem, like a distant ringing sensation in the ear, an unpersistant reminder of something beyond consciousness, I have no way to confirm it’s validity. But for Heschel, “poetry is to religion what analysis is to science” so maybe Kaplan’s appropriation of a language more closely related to science than poetry is not such a stretch after all. The dilemma of poetry’s micro-revelatory moments, Heschel might say, is that “The self is more than we can dream of; it stands, as it were, with its back to the mind.” © Jeffrey L. Otto, December 12, 2016
If poetry has the power to guide us through the darkness of love’s literality, might it also enrich our understanding of the divine? For the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the most successful poetic experience hints at the transcendent. Oakeshott, however, is little concerned with the precise mechanics of that experience. For that we look to his contemporary, the philosopher of religion and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel. For Heschel, poetry, in so much as it drives the impulse toward wonder or radical amazement, doesn’t just hint at the transcendent, but is in fact “a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”
For more than half a century scholars have lavished attention on Heschel’s work. But none have paid more attention to the mechanics of his rhetoric than Edward Kaplan, whose 1996 book Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety uses literary criticism to analyze the relationship between poetry and revelation. Kaplan, it should be noted, envisions his book as a “guide to transformation.” As readers draw closer to Heschel’s work, his hope is that it “might help alleviate today’s cynicism, moral confusion, and spiritual thirst. By becoming aware that all language is metaphorical,” he maintains, “we open ourselves to the reality beyond words, beyond concepts, systems, ideologies.” In other words, Kaplan’s aim is not only to open the hood on Heschel’s theology and explain how it works, but also to convince us that Heschel’s words do in fact have within them the revelatory power to substantiate the claims made for successful poetic experience.
A guide to transformation? If you’re like me, you usually don’t immerse yourself in literary criticism as if it were the River Jordan, nor do you expect the critic to simply take up the apologetic work of the subject he writes about. In the broad spectrum of Heschel’s fans and detractors, Kaplan is clearly an apologist’s apologist. But if that leads him to offer generous interpretations or gloss over logical inconsistencies, as I certainly think it does, he somehow accomplishes it in an entirely unobjectionable way. As someone toeing at the threshold of faith, I appreciated Kaplan’s admission that he was inspired to write the book because he too had been a seeker enchanted by Heschel’s words. And, like him, I share the hope that in writing we can traverse the intersection of the human and the divine.
Ben Lerner, in his recent essay The Hatred of Poetry, frames that very possibility in secular terms, holding that the true power of poetry lies in the difference between an actual poem and the ideal poem. Kaplan, following Heschel, makes the same argument but in metaphysical terms:
[Heschel’s] paradoxical term “fullness of [human] powerlessness” expresses, in a concise, antithetical, poetic mode, an intuition through words themselves, of the relationship between divine and human. On the one hand, language is powerless to communicate with the transcendent God; the very feebleness of our “means of expression” conveys God’s unutterable grandeur. On the other hand—and herein lies the hope that poetic experience bestows upon the seeker—by this awareness of absolute disparity, we achieve a “fullness,” a more forceful longing for the Absolute.
Both versions of the argument hold appeal, but Lerner’s reliance on the abstract polarity of actual/ideal, at least for the skeptic, is easier to come to terms with. Whereas Kaplan, with his conclusion that “[l]anguage perceived in this manner confirms the ineffable as a valid intuition of the Divine within human consciousness” (my emphases), seems to, at first blush, betray his own confidence in the proposition by employing terms more appropriate for scientific analysis than poetic experience.
In my own reading, I’ve encountered neither Lerner’s power-imbuing difference nor Kaplan’s absolute disparity between the human/actual and the divine/ideal. I have, however, come across poems in which I’ve glimpsed something that certainly feels transcendent, or at least speaks to the idea. Philip Belcher’s Ode to the God of Dogs provided one of the first instances of what might be called a micro-revelatory moment. In revisiting that poem over the course of my reading of Kaplan’s book, I realized that Heschel’s own words, to a surprising degree, speak to Belcher’s poem, which begins:
Six in the morning, the sun uncertain of its rise,
this hound lying by my chair, her eyes and forehead
lifting at my every shift. I yearn to say the words
“ontological” and “existential,” the latter for the way
it fills the mouth with sibilant grit, the former for the “O”s
it spins on my tongue. Something essential is up and about.
The poet opens by reminding us that what we take for granted is not in fact assured. The sun may not rise. We may not rise. Heschel himself needed no reminder, “What is extraordinary appears to us as habit, the dawn of a daily routine of nature. But time and again we awake.” We open our eyes to reality. Belcher then evokes the hound’s supreme attentiveness, its unerring love for its master. Putting this imagery in the context of Heschel, we think about the living God: could our own relationship with the divine presence be so faithful, so attentive?
If the first sentence of his poem trains our mind on an uncomplicated wonder borne in the divine presence, Belcher uses the second sentence, like a rocket jettisoned at high altitude, to plunge us back to limited actuality of human cognition. The tone is ironic, the internal rhyme of ‘sibilant grit’ emphasizes its negative valence while those spinning ‘O’s anchor our minds in a whirlpool of being and becoming. Intellectual arrogance stands in the way of our own attentiveness to God. For Heschel, the mind of concepts such as ‘ontological’ and ‘existential’ is a “mercenary of our will to power,…trained to assail in order to plunder rather than to commune in order to love.” The barely hinged meanings of those two words contrast vividly with the hound’s every shift. “In the confinement of our study rooms, our knowledge seems to us a pillar of light. But when we stand at the door that opens out to the infinite,” writes Heschel, “we realize that all concepts are but glittering motes that populate a sunbeam.”
Kaplan argues that Heschel uses the “loveliness” of luminescent images to ease the discomfort of our intellectual humiliation. Belcher uses the embedded hope of that third short and crisp sentence at the end of the sixth line to do the same. He then continues:
And praise, that infrequent guest, raps her warm paw
on the back porch door, wags her way into the light.
Whether you exist is a question I choose not to ask today.
Nor will I button my well-worn sweater of doubt.
If in the opening lines we were painfully reminded of the lack of our own attentiveness to God, now in the seventh line we encounter praise. For me praise is personified as an outdoors cat, thankful for the small amount of warm milk the poet shares on a cold morning. She’s also a reminder of our own feeble means of expression. How infrequently we ourselves praise God, wag our way into the light. With these revelatory moments of attentiveness and praise fresh on his mind, the poet then sheds all human pretense in the ninth and tenth lines, the triumphant climax of the poem. I think back to Kaplan’s words, “[h]umility can reconcile us with the universe, so that we might view the self, not as an antagonist but as a member of a cosmic community.”
As Ode to the God of Dogs continues, Belcher’s poet senses the presence of God poetically in a barren field and in the color of a dog’s flank, “not” as Heschel wrote, “with the tools he has made but with the soul with which he was born; not like a hunter who seeks his prey but like a lover to reciprocate love.” And then the poet’s final, emphatic plea:
…Oh god
of the hound, the Brittany, the chocolate Lab,
god of the pointer, the setter, and breeds less enamored
by death, if others live in your pack, implore them to lean
from their jealous table and look down on one man
aiming not for a place in their pantheon but content
in his woods by a Herald stove, reddening in the heat
from his last block of beech, a Bluetick’s chin on his boot.
The beauty of the poem as a whole is its allusiveness to the divine and the hope conveyed in the unvoiced idea that we might, from our own jealous tables, learn the ways of love from the humblest of creatures at our feet.
Heschel doesn’t say just how much successful poetic experience it might take to fulfill the prerequisite requirements for an awareness of that which is, but I feel certain that Ode to the God of Dogs is at least suggestive enough to satisfy a introductory level requirement on his course plan. Just as with faith in God, however, I’m left still uncertain as to whether or not Belcher’s poem provides us a glimpse of the meeting place of the human and the divine. And even if I acknowledge the intuition of the transcendent that has stayed with me in the two years since I first read the poem, like a distant ringing sensation in the ear, an unpersistant reminder of something beyond consciousness, I have no way to confirm it’s validity. But for Heschel, “poetry is to religion what analysis is to science” so maybe Kaplan’s appropriation of a language more closely related to science than poetry is not such a stretch after all. The dilemma of poetry’s micro-revelatory moments, Heschel might say, is that “The self is more than we can dream of; it stands, as it were, with its back to the mind.” © Jeffrey L. Otto, December 12, 2016
Displaying 1 of 1 review