Thanks so much to all who joined us on our summer adventure with
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
We deeply appreciated every comment and each word of encouragement and have decided to select two winners instead of one.
MAZEL TOV and so much appreciation from both of us ~ Keren and Cindy.
Please drop us a note with your choice from this booklist:
The God Of Pathos And Passion – 9.04 minutes
To the prophets God was overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present. They never spoke of Him as from a distance.
They disclosed attitudes of God rather than ideas about God.
God does not reveal Himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world.
It was the certainty of God’s love and mercy that enabled the prophets to accept His anger.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Prophets from Amazon.com
The Prophets (Perennial Classics)
*Note – Only two weeks left to leave your comments and be entered to win a free Abraham Joshua Heschel book of your choice.You are awarded one entry for each comment made on the Heschel posts here and also at the HIS-ISRAEL Facebook Page.
What Manner Of Man Is The Prophet? – 11.56 minutes
Over the life of a prophet, words are invisibly inscribed: “All flattery abandon, ye who enter here.” To be a prophet is both a distinction and an affliction.
The prophet’s duty is to speak to the people, “whether they hear or refuse to hear.” A grave responsibility rests upon the prophet. …Yet, being a prophet is also joy, elation, delight!
The pages of prophetic writings are filled with echoes of Divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation. The God of Israel is never impersonal. This Divine pathos is the key to inspired prophecy.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Prophets from Amazon.com
The Prophets (Perennial Classics)
Introduction To The Prophets – 12.20
The prophet is a person, not a microphone. He is endowed with a mission, with the power of a word not his own that accounts for his greatness – but also with temperament, concern, character, and individuality.
The situation of a person immersed in the prophet’s words is one of being exposed to a ceaseless shattering of indifference. …Reading the words of the prophets is a strain on the emotions, wrenching one’s conscience from the state of suspended animation.
Worship preceded or followed by evil acts becomes an absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds.
The prophet …begins with a message of doom; he concludes with a message of hope. His essential task is to declare the word of God to the here and now; to disclose the future in order to illumine what is involved in the present.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Prophets from Amazon.com
The Prophets (Perennial Classics)
GOD’S PEOPLE [Chapter Eight] – 16.26 minutes
Heschel describes himself as,
“A brand plucked from the fire , in which my people were burned to death…”
The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There has never been so much guilt and distress, agony, and terror. …The taste for the good has almost gone from the earth.
The world [here we can substitute our life, home, government, country] is not a vacuum. Either we make it an altar for God or it is invaded by demons.
Heschel’s childhood was spent among the Hassidic Jews of Eastern Europe. He describes how:
They put no trust in the secular world. …To them life without Torah [the Word of God] and without piety was chaos.
They believed that a bit of spiritual nobility was a thousand times more valuable than all the secular sciences; that praying three times a day, “My God, guard my tongue from evil,” was more important than the study of physics; that meditating upon the Psalms filled man with more compassion than the study of Roman history.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase I Asked For Wonder from Amazon.com
I Asked For Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
THE BIBLE [Chapter Six]- 5.20 minutes
The Bible is holiness in words.
It is as if God took these Hebrew words and breathed into them of His power, and the words became a live wire charged with His Spirit.
To this day they are connections between heaven and earth.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase I Asked For Wonder from Amazon.com
I Asked For Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
Prayer [Chapter Two] – 6.40 minutes
Prayer is the border between heaven and earth.
Lord, the dominion is Thine. Take away from me all that would not enter Thy realm.
If not for the certainty that God listend to our cry, who could stand so much misery, so much callousness?
Prayer [in the light of His truth and will] makes visible the right and reveals what is hampering and false. In its radiance, we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hopes, and the meaning of our deeds.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase I Asked For Wonder from Amazon.com
I Asked For Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
To Sanctify Time [Epilogue] – 5.45 minutes
Our world is a world of space moving through time –
from the Beginning to the End of Days.One good hour may be worth a lifetime; an instant in returning to God may restore what has been lost in years of escaping from Him.
It is the dimension of time wherein man meets God, wherein man becomes aware that every instant is an act of creation.
To witness the perpetual marvel of the world’s coming into being is to sense the Giver in the given, to realize that the source of time is eternity, that the secret of being is the eternal within time.
The Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means.
Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Sabbath from Amazon.com
The Sabbath
A Palace In Time [Chapter One] – 5.21 minutes
Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth;
on the Sabbath we particularly care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.The seventh day day is a palace in time which we build.
What was created on the seventh day? Tranquility, serenity, peace and repose.
Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Sabbath from Amazon.com
The Sabbath
Architecture of Time – Prologue – 5 minutes
There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information but to face sacred moments.
The main themes of faith lie in the realm of time. We remember the day of the Exodus from Egypt, the day when Israel stood at Mount Sinai;
and our Messianic hope is the expectation of a day,
of the end of days.
Keren Hannah
You can purchase The Sabbath from Amazon.com
The Sabbath
The Final Redemption – 13.47 minutes
Not only is Redemption necessary for man, man is a necessity to Redemption. His actions are vital and affect the course of the process. Man holds the key that can unlock the chains fettering the Redeemer.
The heart of the relationship of God and man is reciprocity, interdependence. The task is to humanize the sacred and to sactify the secular.
The hope is for universal Redemption, for ontological transformation. Yet it seems that fulfillment will come about by degrees. …The point in history at which that restoration [of His Kingdom] will take place remains the secret of the Father.
“It was a hatred without cause that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple. It will be love without cause that will save Israel and all mankind.”
~ First Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine/Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase Israel An Echo of Eternity from Amazon.com
Israel: An Echo of Eternity
Jerusalem And The Wall – 9.25 minutes
This is a city never indifferent to the sky. …Prayers are vibrant. The Sabbath finds it hard to go away. Here Isaiah heard:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of His glory. (6:3)No words more magnificent have ever been uttered. Here was the Holy of Holies.
Jerusalem has the look of a place that is looked at… “the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year till the end of the year.” (Deut 11:12)
Psalms inhabit the hills, the air is HalleluYah!What is the Wall? The unceasing marvel. Expectations.
The Wall will not perish. The Redeemer will come.Silence. I hug the stones; I pray. O Rock of Israel, make our faith strong and Your words luminous in our hearts and minds. Pour holiness into our moments.
Once you have lived a moment at the Wall, you never go away.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase Israel An Echo of Eternity from Amazon.com
Israel: An Echo of Eternity
The People And The Land – 9.50 minutes
Israel reborn represents a breakthrough into whole new areas of experience and understanding. It defies conventional conceptions, ordinary expectations.
Its essence is a proclamation.Israel is a miracle in disguise. Things look natural and conceal what is a radical surprise. Zion rebuilt becomes a harbinger of a new understanding, of how history is intertwined with mystery.
Israel is the opposite of commonplace, it is an extraordinary place, and it is on the verge of the extraordinary that we may encounter the marvel….It is an accord of a Divine promise and a human achievement.
To the Jewish people, Eretz Israel is home, hope and all they can call their own.
It is not only memory, our past, that ties us to the Land, it is our hope, our future.~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase Israel An Echo of Eternity from Amazon.com
Israel: An Echo of Eternity
Religion And Faith – 3.50 minutes
Religion for religion’s sake is idolatry.
True religion is for God’s sake.
The goal is “to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.”
All existence stands in the dimension of the holy…
There is no escape from God.~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase Man Is Not Alone from Amazon.com
Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy of Religion
Man Is Needed By God – 4.01 minutes [from Ch.20 The Essence of Man]
There is only one way to fumigate the obnoxious air of our world – to live beyond our own needs and interests.
…How can man succeed in breaking out of the circle of his self?Our needs are temporal, while our being needed is lasting.
The souls of men are candles of the Lord …and every soul is indispensable to Him.
~ Keren Hannah
You can purchase Man Is Not Alone from Amazon.com
Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy of Religion
