Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

“Awareness of the divine,” Heschel writes, ultimately “bristles with an unbearable concern that deprives us of complacency and peace of mind, forcing us to care for ends which we do not wish to care for, for ends which have no appeal to our personal interest.” We resist this ineffable call “with all our might, pride and self-reliance,” but it is an “enforced concern . . . a pressure that weighs upon us,” and it “plants a question, a behest, in front of us, which our heart echoes like a bell, overpowering as if it were the only sound in endless stillness and we the only ones to answer it.” The voice of God, Heschel tells us, demands “concern for the unregarded.”
― Shai Held, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence