O Centro de Estudos Judaicos da Universidade de São Paulo, USP, promoveu o

Simpósio Internacional Heschel, o Teólogo Poeta, que ocorreu nos dias, 23 e 24 de

agosto de 2022, no auditório 14 do Edifício de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais da
Universidade de São Paulo.

No dia 23 de agosto de 2022, Susannah Heschel e Moacir Amâncio, mediados por

Alexandre Leone, realizaram a palestra de abertura ao Simpósio Internacional
Heschel, o Teólogo Poeta, no auditório 14 do Edifício de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais
da Universidade de São Paulo. Em 2022 completam-se cinquenta anos do
falecimento do pensador e exegeta bíblico Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972),
um dos mais influentes filósofos judeus da contemporaneidade. Heschel, diante de
uma civilização cada vez mais desumanizada, debruçou-se sobre a temática do
humano em sua dimensão de dignidade e ética. A renovação do humanismo a partir
da crítica à civilização posterior ao genocídio da Segunda Guerra Mundial constitui a
grande contribuição de Heschel para a filosofia contemporânea. Na abertura do
evento, os palestrantes discorrem sobre o tema "O humanismo ético-religioso" na
obra e no pensamento de Heschel.

Ao final da conferência, os presentes puderam endereçar perguntas para a dra.

Heschel, algumas das quais, devidamente adaptadas para a apreciação escrita,
são transcritas abaixo. Na transcrição, fizemos apenas pequenas alterações
pontuais, sem nenhum prejuízo ao conteúdo das respostas de Susannah
Heschel.1

PERGUNTAS

Começa com Rabino Leone (1:13:36)

Profª. Drª. Susannah Heschel, por volta dos anos 50, 60, três diferentes filósofos
judeus usam a mesma imagem para falar da nossa época. Max Horkheimer, escreve
acerca do eclipse da razão, poucos anos depois, Martin Bubber, já no final da sua

1
A seleção das perguntas foi feita pelo Pe. Donizetti. A transcrição e edição das questões e respostas ficou a
cargo dos professores Marivan Soares e Cicero Lourenço da Silva.
obra, escreve um livro cujo título é o Eclipse de Deus. Pouco tempo depois,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, naquele magnifico livro Who is man (Quem é o homem),
fala em termos do eclipse da humanidade. Essa imagem do eclipse
interessantemente acontecendo em três pensadores logo após o Holocausto. Talvez
pegando três aspectos diferentes dessa Eclipse. O que eu gostaria de pedir é que
você pudesse explicar um pouco mais o que é o eclipse da humanidade e essa
urgência que Heschel sente em nossa época e se isso continua?

Question: Professor Doctor Susannah Heschel, around the 1950’ s or 60’s, three
different Jewish philosophers use the same image to talk about our time. Max
Horkheimer writes about the “eclipse of reason”, and a few years later, Martin
Bubber, towards the end of his work, writes a book whose title is the Eclipse of God.
A short time later, Abraham Joshua Heschel, in that magnificent book Who is man,
speaks in terms of the eclipse of mankind. This picture of the eclipse, interestingly
enough, occurs in the writings of three thinkers just after the Holocaust, and maybe
assuming three different aspects of this eclipse. What I would like to ask is: would
you explain a bit more what the eclipse of humanity is? Regarding the urgency that
Heschel perceived in his time: is it also an urgency of our own time?

Susannah Heschel

Thank you, Rabbi Leone. It is a very interesting question and I think the metaphor
that uses an eclipse is temporary, it is not forever. An eclipse comes and an eclipse
goes and it's interesting to put those three together: eclipse of Reason, eclipse of
God, eclipse of humanity. Max Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, feels
that there is another element to the Enlightenment than reason. There's also the
element of the irrational and that fascism was the triumph of the irrational over the
rational. So, there was an eclipse of reason. If reason were to come back and
triumph, we would not have fascism. I think it's too simple. And I think what we're
seeing today around the world with the fascination with fascism, growing fascism and
that is more than an eclipse of reason. Buber spoke about an Eclipse of God - my
father rejected that because he felt that putting responsibility on God is a kind of
abdication of our moral responsibility. So, considering the difference between saying
God controls the world and humans also have responsibility, my father would say:
the question to ask is not where was God that has such hubris, but to say, how does
God continue to have faith in us given how we behave? How can we even have
hopes for the future of humanity when we see throughout this world people being
tortured? How does a person torture another human being?

Before I came here I read Bernardo Kucinski's book K2. That book has changed my
life. I´ll have all my students read that book and I felt I'm coming to a country that is a
swamp of blood. How can you kill your own children? I don't demean you, you
understand. I'm talking about the dictatorship. How can they kill their own children
like this? And Kuccinski writes there, you know, the Nazis wrote down the name of
each person who came to a concentration camp. You can go to a memorial, you can
go to Auschwitz and here we call it “disappeared”, “murdered”, no Memorial, no
name, no responsibility, no one wrote down a name. How can that be? How can
people behave this way? So that's why my father said it's an eclipse of humanity and
he said “eclipse” because he had a little hope that it doesn't have to be that way.

Final da 1ª reposta

Rabino Leone

You can´t imagine how meaningful that is not only for the time of the dictatorship but
even for today. It´s not something only historical.

2ª pergunta em Português (1:19:16)

Q. I´ve noticed that in the writings of your father, though he dialogues with, and
critiques several contemporary thinkers, as well as others that came before him, he
hardly ever mentions the names of the ones he´s criticizing. Why?

S. Heschel: Yes, this is true, he disagrees with the argument but not with the human
being. And I think he does this out of respect and to say that his argument is not with
a person. He disagrees with an idea and I like that, I appreciate that. But I will say, in
his dissertation it's different. Before the war he was very clear in naming names in his
dissertation, this scholar, that scholar said this and that. So it's different after the war
and maybe I think my father was so deeply affected that he felt he didn't want to say
something bad about a human being and so he didn't do that.

2
BERNARDO KUCINSKI, K – Relato de Uma Busca, Cia das Letras, 2016.
3ª pergunta em Inglês (1:21:19)

Question: I´m curious about this idea of a “mandate” because the way I understand
judaism it's more of a set of rules of conduct that tell you what to do in the micro
decisions of life: what to do, what not to do and then, in the end of life, someone
could say “you know, that was your impact, that's how you changed the world or not.
The ideal mandate, I think - I´m not a scholar on that - I think more of christian
protestantism and Catholicism, in which people have missions or don't have
missions. So I´m wondering how this idea of mandate clashes with the idea of the
small “micro ethical” decisions that we have to do like going or not to Selma or going
or not to a demonstration on Paulista Avenue. What we do that anyone can do, not
only those who have this big mission. Everyone confronts these micro daily
decisions. Thank you.

S. Heschel : So let me tell you about an argument my father had. During the Vietnam
war my father started an organization called Clergy and Layman Concerned About
Vietnam. And he started it because Seymour Melman, a professor at Columbia had
gathered material demonstrating the war crimes that the United States was
committing. That this was no longer a war with a political purpose and Military
strategy; it was a war of daily crimes, of dropping bombs of destroying land, of killing
people and that's what made my father decide he had to oppose the war. My father
was not a pacifist, but this war was wrong. And during that period of time – so, this is
by the way a very intense period in my father's life, 1963 to 1968 in particular - that
year 1965 was an extraordinary year for my father. It was the year he spent two
months - we spent two months - in Israel. My father was traveling and lecturing in
Israel. It was the year he founded that anti-war organization, the year he gave the
lecture No Religion is an Island, it was the year that the second Vatican Council
issued Nostra Aetate. There was a lot in that year, but during that time my father had
an argument with Father Daniel Barrigan – whose brother who was also a priest,
Philip Berrigan. They used to come to our home, especially Daniel Berrigan, for
Shabbat dinner. Berrigan's argument was that my father should commit Civil
Disobedience and go to prison as a symbolic gesture. And my father said that he
could accomplish more by not being in prison, but by talking to people, by lecturing,
by going to colleges, by trying to convince people, by writing. So the question for my
father was, what is the goal? What is the purpose here? I want to end the war. How
do I do that most effectively in my life? Writing? Speaking out? Talking to people?
What should I do? That was how he decided: Selma. My father was pretty fragile, he
had a weak heart, he couldn't go as a freedom rider on the - you know what that is -
bus when people were being beaten and, so, he couldn't survive it - and Selma was
at that moment actually more of a celebration than a protest because the president of
the United States supported the march and that was a major political moment. But
how do we make these decisions? What to do? We have to think about clearly, what
is the goal we want to accomplish? What am I able to do to accomplish that goal?
But I think there's also a question of our own conscience. What do I need to do?
What do I need to do to be able to live with myself? What do I have to do? In the last
few years, look at the people who go to the rallies with Donald Trump. He engages in
mockery, he makes fun of people, he makes fun of disabled people... It's racist and
it's mockery and the people cheer. They cheer the mockery, they see they are
destroying their own dignity. How will they ever recover it? I don't know and I think
that's something we need to worry about, because without a sense of dignity it's very
difficult for us as human beings to repent, to create a better world, to have a sense of
moral responsibility. Without dignity how do we do that? So I'm very concerned about
that and I think, in other words, that there are marches, they are writing speeches,
they are writing articles speaking out to friends, but there are also subtle ways, subtle
things like dignity that we have to be attentive to and we need to ask ourselves right
now: this will come to an end at some point but, how will we recover? The Germans,
after 1945, had the same problem. How to recover a moral compass after what they
did - and that was the 1950´s. How can they possibly find their ethical footing again?
The ministers asked, but so did the politicians. How do we become an ethical country
where people will respect us? And I say that about the United States. How can we
once again become an ethical country where people will respect us? How will we
regain our dignity? And I think we should start worrying about that now. And it's a
very much a religious question we should be asking our religious Leaders: give us
help give us advice, what to do?. (fim 1:29:15)

PERGUNTA EM PORTUGUÊS precisa traduzir (1:29:17)

I´d like to thank you and ask about something that came up in a conversation I had
recently with some students on the text of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. How did your father´s philosophy interact with that document which on one
hand entailed an apology to the universality of human rights, but on the other, did not
prevent discrimination against vast segments of the American population – especially
blacks – due to racial laws? My question approaches also the very nature of
kavanah, once it thinks about the ways from which intention goes beyond principles
to the concrete manifestation of change in the world.

RESPOSTA (1:31:08)

Susannah Heschel

The United States didn't want to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
because they said then they'll come after the United States for our racism, our Jim
Crow laws. And that's exactly the problem. And in the United States there is a
political movement of contempt for the United Nations, which I think we see in other
countries as well. And there´s a sense that there is no “universal human”. So, of
course, that was anathema to my father. I mentioned earlier, Meir Kahane said
“never again to the Jews”. My father said “never again to anyone”; it was universal. I
know my father would be very upset by the politicians who were rising today in Israel.
Smotrich who may end up with 15 seeds in the Knesset. my father would be appalled
by that. There is Jewish racism also and that's something we have not paid enough
attention to. At least I see in my colleagues, my friends in the United States. Racism
in Jewish texts including some of the texts that I otherwise love - in a Hasidic text and
kabbalistic texts, it is there. We all have this. We also have contempt for women. The
dignity of women is not valued the same as the dignity of the men and the rights of
women and the lives of women. There are aspects of the Torah that I think would
count as criminal. Sotah3 is one passage for instance; sexual assault. So, that sense
of the universal, the human universal, seems to be something new in Jewish thought
- a classical Jewish thought - but I think there are also intimations of it which is why I
mentioned Yaakov Emden, for instance. And I think that's something that my father
brings out certainly in his book Who is Man but elsewhere. Judaism is not unified.
There are different views and my father doesn't try to reconcile them. He says there´s

3
Sotáh (‫ )ׂשֹוָט ה‬is one concept derived from rabbinic judaism, found in the Talmud, and refers, among other
subjects, to the trial of an adulterous woman. (Editor´s note)
this view and there's this view, different understandings of Revelation. They coexist,
but I think we have an innate moral conscience and we know what's right and what's
wrong. And the idea that some human beings are more precious to God than others
is a denial of God. My father was very clear about that (FIM 1:34:20)

PERGUNTA CÍCERO (1:34:33)

My question is about the legacy of your father. In Brazil, just like in the USA, the
Christian Right uses politics to advance ideas clearly contrary to human rights. How
did your father construct such a humanitarian religious philosophy in a time when
political theology was associated with Carl Schimitt and other negative ideas around
religion?

RESPOSTA (1:35:20)

You´re asking several things and they're all important and deserve more than a
simple quick answer. You know, by the way, that Carl Schmidt was very close to
certain christian leaders who supported Hitler. And, of course, for my father that was
horrible. But I think the larger question that you're asking is really what would my
father say to these evangelical leaders. How would he speak to them and how would
we respond to them and to the people who were attracted to them. That's really what
you're asking, right? So what would he say? First of all let me say: my father was a
very gentle person. He never talked to Christians about anti-semitism. It wasn't
necessary. When I was a child my father often had visitors from the Vatican or from
the Union Theological Seminary. Christians would come to our home for Shabbat
Dinner or for a Passover Sêder, and in those days it was very unusual. It was the first
time Catholics were told in America in the 50´s not to socialize with anyone who was
not a Catholic. For a nun and a priest to come to our home wearing religious clothing
for Shabbat Dinner, to come into our home and to see my father at the table pray…
you could tell they were transformed by the moment. They suddenly realized that you
couldn't say “this person is not going to go to heaven”. They suddenly realize that as
Christians they had something to learn about God from a Jew. And it was 2.000
years since they felt that way. Two thousand years! So maybe what my father in
those moments was doing was simply being a religious Jew and allowing Christians
to experience Judaism at its most holy moments and have a chance to be
transformed. I don't know if everyone would react like that, but I think that my father
felt that we, as Jews, shouldn't be ashamed of being Jewish as many were in
America. That we shouldn't try to hide or live in a ghetto world, that people have
something to learn about God from Jews and maybe we can help them and maybe
that is part of our mandate today. So I think, sometimes there is a longing among
some of the Evangelical Christians that I have experienced. I lived for example, in
Dallas, Texas, for three Years. I went to Israel every summer to recuperate, but I felt
that they wanted more from their Christianity than going to church on Sunday for one
hour and they didn't know how to do it. They didn't know what we know, which is that
Judaism is every day and it's in our home and not just in the synagogue. That we
have a language of Hebrew, that we have customs, that we have an ethnicity, that
we have little phrases we say like, “Baruch Hashem” and “Good Shabbos” and things
like that. I think Christian evangelicals want to ethnicize Christianity. I think they have
shuttle envy. I think they would like to be more like Judaism and I think that might be
one way of trying to say to that, “look you can have this without being right-wing
politically”, that is, without damning other people, without saying we're good and
they're bad, without saying either you´re friend or an enemy, like Carl Schmidt. I think
we can show it to them and I think that they do long for that. So, I say this because I
do have some hope, even when I see people who are against everything I stand for.
Still I think we can't give up and maybe there is a way of showing them that it's
possible. Look, we as Jews, we have what they want: community. We have
ethnicity ,we have everything that they want too and we can embrace the whole
world and not have that schmittian friend-enemy. So that's just a small bit of a
response on a very practical level.

Thank you (FIM 1:41:12)

(...)

Q. I´d like to ask you two questions: one question is what role did Yiddish play in your
family life because I´m very interested in the Yiddish-schreiben aspect of your
father's life and work and I would also like to know how your father viewed the
decline of yiddish and the matzav, the situation of yiddish towards the end of his life.
S. Heschel: Thank you for the question. My father grew up speaking yiddish as a
child, of course, and he wrote his last book in yiddish on the Kotzker. Some of my
father's family managed to get out of Europe before the war. If they didn't, whoever
didn't get out before the war was killed, but a few got out including my father's sister.
My father was three years old when his sister got married. She was seventeen and
she married a cousin and they moved to Vienna and they got out of Vienna just
before the war and they came to New York city. My father had his sister and a
brother who also got out and was in England, but with the family, as with my father's
sister, only spoke Yiddish. And so my father's cousin, brother-in-law, my uncle also
only spoke yiddish. So certainly when we were family it was only Yiddish. And so it's
really remarkable thing that my father wrote books in four languages, not many
people. But there was that aspect the yiddish of the of the religious world of the
hassidic world, then my father was friend with some yiddish writers. Chaim Grade
was a good friend and there were others as well. Hillel Seidman, you might know,
was also a friend - his daughter's my friend - he was a journalist; Gershom Jacobson,
who wrote for a yiddish newspaper, was another good friend. So they were friends of
my father´s who would come to our home and would speak yiddish at all. In terms of
a decline, yes my father was concerned about the way that hebrew was becoming
more important than Yiddish and he felt that yiddish was nonetheless an extremely
important language which is why he wrote about the Kotsker in Yiddish, because
there are some things you can only say in Yiddish. And maybe there were some
things that my father could only talk about in Yiddish. Just as I think is true for
everybody, there's some things when you speak more than one language, there's
some ideas, some words, some things you only feel you can say in that language
and not in the other. My father never used the word holocaust like that or shoah. He
talked about what happened, what happened during the war, and he didn't address it
directly very often, only occasionally. And when he did it was in Yiddish. So we can
ask ourselves why did he choose this language versus that language for certain
books, certain ideas. After the war my father never again wrote in german and would
never go to Germany even though he was invited.

Q.Did he write poetry in English?

S. Heschel: No.
Q. Only in Yiddish?

S. Heschel. And that was when he was actually in Vilna with a group of yiddish poets
the young Vilna, (Chaim) Grade and few others were there and that was a small book
that he published with a dedication to his father and he was often very shy about
those poems. He didn't want them republished, he didn't want them translated,
because he was very young then. And I think it's common to many of us, when we
look back at something we wrote when we were very young… he was… we often feel
a little embarrassed: “I wrote that, you know. I was 19”. Thank you

Q. Professor could you please share with us some thoughts from your father on the
interfaith dialogue and cooperation and if he had any relations to any institution of
interfaith cooperation?

S. Heschel. My father used to say that interfaith has to begin with faith. What is my
faith? Do I know what my faith is? So my father used to say the problem with
interfaith is that too often the people who participate don't really know their own
religion. So, how can they begin to talk to others? He said sometimes, well, maybe
you know in this book Moral Grandeur there's an essay that begins with a funny
story. My father says he was invited once to a conference to speak about God in
judaism and then he agreed and then he got the program and the program had the
title of his lecture The Idea of God in Judaism. God is not an idea. I had this
experience myself when I was a graduate student and a professor in class kept
talking about “the god idea”. You know, I´m not an idea either! I´m a person! I´m
alive, I´m present, I´m here, and god is not just some idea. And once God becomes
an idea, my father says, that's not faith anymore. So that was very important for my
father to make that point. My father says in Torá Min Ha-shamaim, in which one of
the main themes is, how do you make the transcendent immanent and the immanent
transcendent? So, how do you make the transcendent immanent, so God is
transcendent, but how can you feel God's presence everywhere? How do you make
God present when God is so remote and so transcendent?

My father used to joke about the protestant theologian Paul Tillich, and so did Martin
Luther King, who was another good friend. Tillich said “God is the ground of being”.
My father said “okay, so he's a ground of being, so let him be the ground of being -
doesn't do anything, I´m not for, I´m not against, what does it matter? It doesn't mean
anything, there's no command, there's no obligation. Ground of being… what does
that mean? You don't march in Selma for a ground of being, you don't scream
against the war in Vietnam for a ground of being, the prophets are not screaming in
agony on behalf of the poor and the suffering... I don´t think Ground of being will stop
people torturing other human beings. What is it that keeps people from feeling
themselves the agony of other human beings? That's the question. So with interfaith
too if God has to command too “I want this, I want this to be a better world, I want this
to be a world of justice”, how do I make God's immanence transcendent? As my
father always said, these are questions that face all human beings of all religions and
those are the kinds of questions we should talk about. What religious resources do
we have to stop torture? It doesn't matter what our particular religion says. That's not
the point. More important is what questions do we ask as religious people. There's so
much talk these days about leadership. I see all the time. I have two children and
there are all kinds of programs that come through: “send your children to this camp or
this program. We train leaders”. What do you think my father would say? He would
be appalled! What leaders? It´s principles! It's principles, moral principles, that's what
you want. What's a leader? Bolsonaro is also a leader, no? Trump… So my father felt
this is what interfaith really should focus on and he says over and over, one article
after another, in this piece No Religion is an Island what do we do in moments of
despair? - we all have despair, we religious people. And how do we support each
other in those moments?

One last thing: there's a prayer in judaism where we speak of God resurrecting the
dead. You know, a lot of well-meaning liberal jews don't believe that the dead will be
resurrected, including Saadya (who was not a liberal, but a medieval philosopher,
okay?). And so in some reformed prayer books they change it, instead of God
resurrects the dead it says God resurrects everything. And I think for my father
prayers aren't supposed to describe the world as it is, but to give expression to hope,
to longing, to wishes. What could we want more than anything when someone we
love dies? That they should come back to life, it's what we want. Prayer is an
opportunity to speak in terms of hope and wish and longing, and that's why prayer,
my father says, is the home for the soul. So I think interfaith, for my father, was about
that where our hopes and our wishes and our longings that we all share, we can
focus on, and that's what should go on in synagogues and in churches. Let's speak
of our longing that this should be a world of justice, there should be no torture, there
should be no poverty, there should be no racism. We long for that, we long for that
for others and for ourselves and because we can't possibly live a full human life when
other people are suffering. So I think that's what interfaith should be for my father.
Thank you.

Rabbi Leone: It's wonderful to be with you. I´m so happy that you made this
conference.

S. Heschel: It's wonderful to meet everyone and I think Brazil is an extraordinary

place and the fact that you are so interested in my father, jews and christians here, I
think that's really extraordinary. It would make my father so happy! I wish I could
phone him and tell him. I can't imagine this community here in Brazil and he would be
so happy! Thank you, thank you very much!

Seleção, transcrição e notas: Pe. Donizzetti, Marivan Soares e Cicero Lourenço da

Silva.