What Would Heschel Say?

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. In the shadow of the war with Iran, Israel is doing terrible things in Lebanon: demolishing homes, killing more than one thousand people, displacing close to a million from their homes and perhaps pushing the country toward civil war. To discuss all this, our guest will be Rami Khouri, a deeply knowledgeable commentator on Lebanese and international politics. He is Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, Director of the Anthony Shadid Archives Research Project, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington and author of the Rami G. Khouri Substack. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

I’m grateful to Dr. Dror Bondi, Corcoran Visiting Chair in Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College, who brought the Heschel quote about Abravanel to my attention. He cites it in this lecture.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with。)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen details the way Israel is using the current war to seize more Palestinian land in the West Bank.

On the It Could Happen Here podcast, Dana El Kurd explores intra-Palestinian debates about armed resistance.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked with Sari Bashi, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, about the dismissal of charges against five Israeli soldiers who were filmed violently abusing a Palestinian detainee in the Sde Teiman detention facility.

Appearances

On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

Partnership

Starting today, all paid subscribers of The Beinart Notebook get a 50 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter. I’ve known and respected Bob for decades — my earliest appearance on his show will turn 20 this year, and the latest happened earlier this month. He’s a rare voice of reason on questions ranging from foreign policy to psychology of tribalism to AI, and I think you’ll find a lot of value in his writing. The NonZero Newsletter is part of a broader effort Bob has been building called the NonZero Network — a group of independent Substack voices, including mine, as well as Glenn Loury, Kaiser Kuo, and others with whom I may not always agree on substance, but who share a commitment to intellectual honesty and reasoned analysis.

Reader Comment

A listener (who asked that their name be withheld) commented on last week’s video, in which I argued that synagogues should remove the “We Stand with Israel” signs that dot their lawns.

They write:

“I think you mischaracterize attacks on Zionist institutions. I have seen these attacks’ defenders on social media, and their line is not support for attacks of synagogues as such. It is, rather, support (or at least apologia) for attacking institutions that align themselves with the Israeli state. I saw some people claiming that Temple Israel [in Michigan] was sending money to the IDF. That sounds dubious—I’m not intimately familiar with the Israeli military’s funding strategies, but it seems unlikely that American congregations play a major role—but it is certainly true that many Jewish American institutions’ support for Israel goes beyond the purely notional. To say, then, that one should not attack Americans who ‘share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race,’ with some disfavored foreign country—in this case, Jews and Israel—is to box with a strawman. To the attack’s supporters, it’s not about Jewishness as such, under whichever of the four rubrics you name one wishes to conceive of it; it’s about Zionism, and it’s about Israel.”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I recently came across a quote that just kind of stopped me, like, dead in my tracks, kind of almost dumbfounded, because it reflected a view of how Jews should live and think, which is so radically in contrast to the views propounded by the leadership of the organized American Jewish community today.

The quote is from a biography that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of a remarkable Portuguese 15th century figure named Isaac Abravanel. Now, Abravanel was an advisor to the Portuguese king, as well as being a very distinguished commentator on the Bible and philosopher of Jewish thought—really a remarkable synthesis of the kind that you were able to have on the Iberian Peninsula for a period of time.

And then in some ways reflects the kind of possibilities that might be imaginable in the United States today, in which Jews have the freedom to both wield political power and also study Torah in a serious way. And this is what Heschel writes about Abravanel and the Jews of his period in the Iberian Peninsula.

Heschel writes, ‘the Jews, who had held imposing positions in the state, left their Spanish homeland. Had they remained on the Iberian Peninsula, they most probably would have taken part in the enterprises of the conquistadors.’ And then he says, this is the most astonishing line, then Heschel says, ‘the desperate Jews of 1492 could not know that a favor had been done them. That a favor had been done them.’

What Heschel is saying is that the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were lucky to have been expelled because it meant that people like Abravanel, who had these positions of great power, that they then did not become morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the Spanish and the Portuguese were to commit as conquistadors in the New World.

Now, one can very legitimately argue with Heschel’s perspective, I mean, it is quite radical, and I’m not sure even I would necessarily endorse his view that one should say thank you for having been expelled from one’s home because it means that then one is not morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the kind of empire in which you played a prominent role has committed. It’s a very, very audacious thing to say. I don’t think I would go as far as what Heschel is saying.

But it is just an astonishing, astonishing contrast to contrast that moral perspective that Heschel is offering to the dominant attitude in the organized American Jewish community today. And if you look at the leaders of America’s most influential Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, but also the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, others, they’ve all been, in recent months, basically saying the same thing.

Which is that American Jews, because we’re in an era of rising antisemitism—which is true—that Jews have a responsibility only to themselves. Jonathan Greenblatt, in particular, has this new slogan, which he likes to repeat, which is, put your own mask on first. That basically, because we are in a precarious moment for Jews, and because, allegedly, other groups have abandoned Jews, you know, American Jews, in our hour of need, by which people like Greenblatt mean they didn’t wholeheartedly support the destruction and genocide in Gaza, therefore, Jews are relieved of their moral responsibilities to fight for other people in the United States, no matter what they’re going through.

Now, this is a radical contrast to the perspective that Heschel is offering in his biography of Abravanel. And one might be tempted to say, well, you know, I mean, this is a completely otherworldly, profoundly naive perspective. How could someone, make this argument, you know? But Heschel wrote his biography of Abravanel in Berlin in 1937 under the rule of the Nazis. In 1937, Heschel wrote those words, right?

And so, you just think a man who could write those words about Jewish moral responsibility, about the necessity that Jews not participate in the brutalization and of oppression of others, what right on earth do we have to tell Heschel that he’s naive for writing that? Because we’re worried about antisemitism in the United States in 2026. He’s writing in Berlin in 1937, and yet he still was not saying, let’s put on our own mask first, right? He was actually saying something radically the opposite.

Again, not to say that Heschel wasn’t concerned about the preservation of Jewish life. He himself escaped from Nazi Germany. Of course, he was profoundly concerned about that, but not at the expense of the notion that Jews had a responsibility to care about others. And I think what he’s saying by writing about Abravanel, and focusing on a Portuguese Jew who is, for a period of time at least, has great influence in the kingdom in which he lives is to suggest that when you have greater power, you have an even greater moral obligation to try to oppose the crimes that are being committed, to not be complicit, right?

I mean, I don’t think Heschel could have imagined a figure like Stephen Miller. I think he would have literally… it would have shaken him to the core to imagine America producing a Jew like Stephen Miller, with his power doing what he’s doing today. But in writing about Abravanel, he was in some ways warning about that possibility and making a kind of remarkable, even extreme statements about the importance of Jews never allowing ourselves to create figures like we, in the American Jewish community, have now created in Stephen Miller.

I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine what Abraham Joshua Heschel would say were he alive today about the people who claim to speak for the organized American Jewish community, people who have so radically repudiated his moral fervor in his belief that Jews have a profound, fervent responsibility to take moral responsibility for all of the people in the societies in which they live.

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