[noises of a crowd] POLICE: [screams] NARRATOR: On the front lines of the historic Civil Rights March in Selma, Alabama, standing along with Martin Luther King, Jr., is one of the most remarkable religious figures of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

CONGRESSMAN LEWIS: I think they became friends.

But more than friends, they became brothers.

ANDREW YOUNG: He was the authority on the prophets but on this occasion, he was the prophet.

[chuckles] NARRATOR: Abraham Heschel is plucked from the fire of the Holocaust that will take the life of his mother and sisters.

And in 1940 he arrives in America.

CORNEL WEST: And he's already come out of this magnificent dynasty of rabbis that goes back for centuries.

He's part of a dynastic royalty... SHAI HELD: He lived in excruciating ways with the reality that as the world and the family he grew up in was destroyed in Europe, most of the world was in fact indifferent.

ABRAHAM HESCHEL: [applause] NARRATOR: Over the next three decades, Heschel fights indifference through his vision of a God who seeks to partner with humanity.

MICHAEL LERNER: To be in real connection to God was to be in awe and radical amazement at the universe that God had created.

NARRATOR: And his love for the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who dared speak truth to power.

SHARON BROUS: Heschel taught that each of us has a choice to make, what side of history do we ultimately want to land on.

TAYLOR BRANCH: He was kind of a theological Hemingway.

He wrote in short, pithy aphorisms of enormous power.

NARRATOR: Heschel plays a pivotal role in reshaping the contentious relationship between Catholics and Jews.

ABRAHAM HESCHEL: But I also have to remind them that my being Jewish is so sacred to me that I am ready to die for it.

NARRATOR: And he risks being in the forefront of the protests against what he believes is an immoral war in Vietnam.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: My father was attacked for so many of the public positions that he took.

My father wouldn't be quiet.

No one could silence him.

ABRAHAM HESCHEL: I am an optimist against my better judgment.

And somehow, I believe in God and somehow, I believe and am convinced that He will have mercy and pity, more than we deserve.

♪♪ ANNOUNCER: Major funding for this program was provided by Lilly Endowment.

Additional funding provided by... [marchers singing "We are not afraid"] NARRATOR: On March 7, 1965, a day that would be known as America's "Bloody Sunday", Civil Rights activists take to the streets in Selma, Alabama.

They march because so many Black Americans are being denied the right to vote.

SHERIFF CLARK: NARRATOR: When the demonstrators cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge they are met on the other side with a show of force.

ANDREW YOUNG: But Dr. King himself said that you have to be certifiably insane to think that this handful of crazy young people with no power and no money can change America.

NARRATOR: And on this day, trying to change America will be very painful.

ANDREW YOUNG: They decided that evidently that they wanted to teach us a lesson.

POLICE: YOUNG: Before anybody could do anything, they just charged into the group on horseback, they started throwing tear gas, and they just beat up everybody they could.

[screams, gas canisters explode] CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS: After we had been beaten and left bloody; I had a concussion on the bridge.

I thought, I was going to die.

I thought...I saw death.

[yelling from crowd] YOUNG: It was such a visible expression of hatred and disregard that it awakened the conscience of the nation.

NARRATOR: Martin Luther King Jr. understands a public response, a public outcry, is called for.

CONGRESSMAN LEWIS: And Martin Luther King Jr. made this unbelievable appeal for religious leaders to come to Selma.

Many rabbis, priests, nuns, and ministers came.

[clapping?]

NARRATOR: Over the next two weeks, thousands make their way to Selma.

One clergyman the movement feels is critical to attend is a writer and theologian from New York, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

ABRAHAM HESCHEL: There's an old tradition in Judaism saying, "That if I see evil in another human being it is an indication there must be something of that evil in myself and vice versa, if I see something good in a person it is a sign there is something of that same good in me."

CORNEL WEST: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was the real thing when it comes to prophetic witness.

[screams] WEST: He was told, others were told if you go down there you may not come back.

You make sure you make arrangements with your family if you don't make it.

[yelling and screaming] POLICE: Move off, move off... SUSANNAH HESCHEL: These were moral issues, these were moral decisions, and moral commitments.

And it was clear what you have to do.

TAYLOR BRANCH: Dr. King wanted a presence that would suggest something larger than only a Black-led movement.

You know, his greatest skill in my view was that he always put one foot in the Constitution and one foot in the Scriptures.

He always said this is about right and wrong, this is about justice.

This is not just about Black and White.

[marchers singing "Freedom"] NARRATOR: And for the Civil Rights movement, Heschel's presence holds a special significance.

CONGRESSMAN LEWIS: We in the African American church would from time to time would compare ourselves to the Children of Israel.

We identified with that struggle; we have been held as slaves, held in bondage.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: The Children of Israel had been reduced to the bondage of physical slavery.

They were exploited economically, dominated politically and humiliated by the power structure of Egypt.

Then came that glad day when God sent a Moses.

[choir singing "Let My People Go"] YOUNG: The Black church was almost always grounded in Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt.

And that was the metaphor, the storyline that Dr. King brought over into the Civil Rights Movement.

So, we adopted the Old Testament story as our story.

NARRATOR: Heschel is the person who, through his studies and writings, brought to life Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos.

YOUNG: Now, we knew Rabbi Heschel.

His very presence was a kind of a spiritual authority.

We had read his book on The Prophets.

He was the authority on the prophets but on this occasion, he was the prophet.

[chuckles] And it was almost like, you had somebody that walked out of the Old Testament and got in the front of the line.

SHARON BROUS: He saw and knew, and understood that you can't take Torah seriously, you can't take the Hebrew Bible seriously and not then translate the encounter between Moses and Pharaoh into the immediate, into understanding what was happening with race relations in America.

[marchers singing] WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: It is a great wonder that given the incredible pedigree that Heschel had, how he came to understand the biblical text from below and how he was able to engage with questions of social justice and oppression.

BRANCH: But for the people around Dr. King, they were always interested in ecumenical relationships beyond the Black church because it was a movement that was trying to reach out.

And Heschel struck them immediately as somebody who was reaching out farther than they were.

ARNOLD EISEN: There is a story that when Heschel went with a delegation of rabbis to Birmingham Alabama, they were met at the airport by the local rabbis who said, "Please turn around and go home because you're going to make life really hard for us.

We understand where your sympathies are and we might agree with those sympathies, but we have to live in this reality and you're going to cause massive anti-Semitism and we're going to be the victims of it."

ANTI-DEMONSTRATOR: "There can be no compromise.

We can only have law and order as long as the White man rules."

YOUNG: You always worried about violence.

In fact, we were told by the Justice Department that they didn't want Dr. King to march because they had word that there were snipers along the way, planning to kill him.

And he didn't pay any attention to it.

JESSE JACKSON: And a lot of people didn't want to be in the front line.

They were afraid to be victims in the first line of attack.

Heschel had no problem being on the front line, identifying with the struggle.

He said, "The best of Judaism is fighting against racism."

[marchers sing] NARRATOR: For Heschel, marching becomes a form of prayer.

He would later say, "I felt my legs were praying."

JAMES RUDIN: And he said if Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah were here, they would be shaking the finger at the community.

Always remember, the prophets chastised the people but they loved the people of Israel.

Well, Heschel, and I would say Dr Martin Luther King and obviously, they loved America...

But they thought America was not living up to its potential greatness.

BENJAMIN SAX: Prophets are the ones that take people out of their sense of comfort and complicity.

The prophets are ones that see an injustice in one place and see that as an injustice everywhere.

HESCHEL: Man is not man because what he has in common with the earth but because of what he has in common with God.

The Greeks sought to understand man as a part of the universe.

The prophets sought to understand man as a partner of God.

NARRATOR: Heschel understands that he and other Jewish leaders are being called to create community with other Christians despite the fact that a generation earlier, too many Christians were indifferent during the Holocaust.

BROUS: We cannot exist separate and apart from the rest of humanity.

And this is a particularly potent and powerful call especially in light of the Holocaust and the sense of abandonment that so many Jews felt when it seemed like the rest of the world, you know didn't lift a finger to help and support our community.

♪♪ S. HESCHEL: My father was living in Nazi Germany where the Christian theologians were debating whether they should throw the Old Testament out of the Bible because it's a Jewish book.

To come to America and to meet someone like Martin Luther King, who made the Hebrew Bible central to the Civil Rights Movement.

M.L.

KING JR.: The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

S. HESCHEL: And who drew from this incredibly rich tradition of African-American religiosity and theology that makes the prophets and the Exodus central.

This is completely new for my father.

BROUS: His insistence that Jews needed to show up and show up on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement, the movement for Black equality and Black rights in America was something that many of his colleagues and many Jews of that generation did not agree with or believe.

SAX: The racism in itself is, for Heschel, a great sin.

It's evil.

And he is talking about this in the '50s and '60s at a time where the word "structural racism" doesn't exist.

S. HESCHEL: My father used to say, "If there's any hope for the future of Judaism in America, it lies with the Black church."

Why?

Because there's a piety, a religiosity that he remembered from when he was growing up in Warsaw.

♪♪ [streetcar bell] NARRATOR: Abraham Joshua Heschel is born in Warsaw, Poland, 1907.

The family is poor, but Heschel descends from a line of Orthodox Jewish royalty, Hasidic rebbes dating back centuries.

S. HESCHEL: Because of his ancestry and the role of a rebbe in a community, adults would rise when he would enter the room.

He would be lifted up on a table and he would give a sermon at the age of 5, 6, 7 years old.

A little boy and he would speak.

He was brilliant.

SAX: Hasidism is not any one particular movement.

It means "the pious ones."

It is a blending of a medieval mystical tradition into a traditionalist mitzvah commandment-driven lifestyle.

It is the understanding that God plays a role in every aspect of one's life.

But also in that the Hasidim see a lot of joy in the relationship with God.

[singing] MICHAEL LERNER: Hasidism was taking Judaism and bringing it to life for ordinary people who didn't necessarily have the background that these scholars had, through dancing, through singing, through chanting and through um, genuine expressions of love.

NARRATOR: Heschel would later write that although he was born in Warsaw, he felt his cradle was in a small town in Ukraine where the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, lived his last years.

JAMES RUDIN: The Baal Shem Tov which means "the master of the good name," that was a rabbi of the 18th century in Eastern Europe who rebelled against the, you would say the classicism, the rigidity that he saw in traditional Judaism of his day.

And so, he brought to Judaism a sense of wonderment, of joy, not just of a serious Talmudic studies.

[chanting] HELD: Where I think that the Hasidic influence is with him all the time is in that almost you know...acutely, almost physical sense that God is there.

Eastern European Jews, kind of not as affected or transformed by the modern world, had a much keener sense of "Oh, God is here."

[chugging of train] ♪♪ [streetcar bell] [police whistles] [murmur of footsteps] NARRATOR: In 1927, at the age of 20, Heschel leaves Poland to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, Germany.

JOHN CONNELLY: Germany again was thought of being a Mecca for liberal education in that period, so in the 1920s and '30s.

It had a philosophical, scientific, academic tradition going back generations.

It's, it's where people came from across the world to be educated.

[singing in Hebrew] NARRATOR: While studying at the university, Heschel, already an ordained rabbi, continues his Judaic studies by attending both the liberal hochschule and the traditional Orthodox seminary.

EISEN: Heschel, in his 20s already has this mastery of the entire Jewish canon.

Heschel walks in knowing the Talmud, knowing the Midrash, knowing the Hasidic stories, knowing the Hasidic tales.

[singing] HELD: He's walking around in Berlin, he's thinking about whatever philosophical questions came up in class that day and he notices the sun is setting.

And he says something like, "At that moment I remembered that as a Jew my job is to respond to the sunset."

So, he begins to pray.

Right?

And that's not your usual Berlin graduate student in philosophy and Bible...right, that's a very different picture.

[singing in Hebrew] BROUS: One of the things that Heschel charged us to do was really to hold the complexities, that there's a tendency to try to choose either spiritual depth or intellectual rigor.

And for Heschel, by nature both of those things were, were not only natural for him but were actually absolutely essential to him.

EISEN: And I think when you're coming from the Hasidic milieu, which had lived somewhat apart from the larger world, here's Heschel saying, "We have to be part of this larger world.

It's not a luxury that we can afford to be off on our own enclaves.

We've got to be out there in the world fighting for the world."

NARRATOR: So for Heschel, the theme he turns to for his doctoral work is a study of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Exploring their consciousness, the young Heschel discovers their passion not only for God's will but inner life, a God who cares for and needs humanity.

HESCHEL: I've learned from the prophets that I have to be involved in the affairs of men, in the affairs of suffering men.

The biggest message of the Bible and the prophets of Israel is that God takes man seriously.

HELD: For Heschel in many ways the core idea in a theology of the Hebrew Bible is the idea that God cares, what he calls it the Divine Pathos.

God is moved by people's suffering and God is offended by oppression and degradation.

And a prophet is someone who is so identified with God's pathos that it takes him over.

Prophets are overcome by God.

Jeremiah actually talks about feeling completely overcome by the force of God's passion.

RUDIN: Now when you say "prophet" to a person today, well...they think someone who predicts the future.

It's prophetic.

That's not what a Hebrew prophet was, the Hebrew word is navi.

Navi means truth-teller.

Telling the truth, facing the truth, coming to a community and telling the community things it doesn't always want to hear.

Prophets are not popular.

NARRATOR: Heschel observes that to humanity a single act of injustice injures the welfare of the people.

But to the prophet, even a minor injustice takes on what he calls "cosmic proportions."

SAX: The prophets are always there to remind us that you might be comfortable in what you're doing, you might be comfortable in your sense of right and wrong, but as long as there is violence in the world, as long as there is injustice in the world, we're all complicit in it.

Because as long as it's somewhere it's everywhere.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: He understood that the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew bible is about this God who has so entered into history with all of its aches, and pains, and hurts, and disappointments, and that this God remains faithful.

We have no other book like Heschel's on the prophets because he dares to think that this poetic testimony by the prophets is the truth of who God is.

NARRATOR: But as Heschel finishes his work on The Prophets, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists are on the rise across Germany.

They stoke centuries-old contempt for the Jewish faith and add a newer component of disdain for Jews as a people.

CONNELLY: The theory behind all of this is that the Jews belonged to a reprobate people, to a people who had been cursed by God because of killing God.

That's in some ways the center of Christian anti-Judaism is the idea that Jews collectively were responsible for the killing of Christ.

Anti-Semitism itself was a word that was invented in the 1870s to describe a modern phenomenon, which was contempt for Jews as a people.

NARRATOR: Under the Nazis, anti-Semitism becomes the law of the land.

Jewish property is confiscated.

Jewish professors and civil servants lose their jobs.

Concentration camps, once for political prisoners, are expanding.

In October 1938, Heschel and other Polish Jews are arrested and deported.

Within weeks, Jewish synagogues and businesses are systematically torched.

Heschel's future hangs in the balance.

[music, cheering] EISEN: The story of American Judaism in the 20th century is a story of immigration.

And all of them are in some way or another fleeing oppression.

NARRATOR: In the late 1930s, thousands of Jews are desperately trying to escape Europe.

Too few are allowed to enter the United States.

BROUS: So much of Jewish history is about movement, about living in a place, making it a home, and then ultimately being exiled or expelled from that place after persecution and needing to go and establish a new place.

And so, this becomes kind of core to Jewish identity.

I believe on some level, Heschel was the embodiment of that journey.

NARRATOR: By early 1940, the German army has already begun to bring its reign of terror and murder across Europe.

Like so many institutions, the Catholic Church was unable or unwilling to offer effective resistance.

CONNELLY: Under Pius XII who became Pope in January 1939 that the papacy did not speak out strongly against the Nazi regime.

The reason was concern that this would lead to the destruction of the Catholic Church as an entity throughout Central Europe.

If there had been an open criticism of the Nazi regime it would have had severe repercussions for Catholics.

NARRATOR: And with the Nazi efforts to discredit the Hebrew Bible, German Jews are effectively stripped of the voice of their prophets.

S. HESCHEL: So in part it was my father's dissertation, was to repudiate that tradition of German theology that denigrated the prophets.

And really it's a terribly unfortunate thing because they made it impossible for Germany to call on the prophetic tradition of justice, social justice.

They didn't give them the resources to protest when Hitler was coming to power.

[Hitler talking] NARRATOR: In March 1940, Julian Morgenstern, President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, secures visas for Heschel and four other Jewish scholars to leave Europe and teach in America.

Heschel's mother and three sisters remain in Europe.

SAX: When he lands in Cincinnati as an Assistant Professor of Jewish theology at the Hebrew Union College, Reform Jewish Seminary, he finds that most of the students and teachers aren't terribly interested in Hasidic piety.

They're not interested in mitzvoth, commandments.

They're not interested even in the study of Jewish law, so much so that you couldn't get kosher food in their cafeteria.

[upbeat jazz music] NARRATOR: And America itself is a culture shock for Heschel.

SAX: Whereas in Germany, he was reading Goethe, and Hegel, and Kant, and discussing the finer aspects of music theory, culture, art, etc.

In America, they're talking about televisions, automobiles, homes, and it seems spiritually vacuous.

[jazz music continues] [soda pops] HESCHEL: Man is willing to define himself as a seeker of the maximum degree of comfort for the minimum expenditure of energy.

He feels, acts and thinks as if the sole purpose of the universe were to satisfy his needs.

[music fades] RUDIN: Heschel was very grateful obviously to be in the United States, his life saved during World War II, but he was not happy, he was not compatible with the ethos, the religious ethos.

[piano music] NARRATOR: At a social gathering in Cincinnati, Heschel meets a woman from California, Sylvia Straus.

S. HESCHEL: She was gifted as a pianist.

And my mother played and my father thought my mother was quite wonderful and invited her out.

NARRATOR: They date, and there is a spark, but Sylvia returns to the west coast and the two will not meet again for several years.

EISEN: Heschel's going to come to the United States and rouse this generation of Jews which knows that like him, it's privileged to be alive.

He calls himself "a brand plucked from the fire," but in that way all of the Jews in America to some extent know that because they're reading the newspapers and they're watching their cousins, literally their cousins, who were caught in Europe being gassed.

[somber music] HESCHEL: I'd kill Hitler because I don't consider him human anymore.

I would kill Hitler because he is a beast, a dangerous beast.

[gunshots] According to an ancient Jewish dictum, "He who saves one man is regarded as if he had saved all men.

He who destroys one man is regarded as if he destroyed all men."

HELD: This is a person who was forced to watch as his whole world, the world he grew up in, the world he was educated in, his family, his teachers, all of it was obliterated while the world essentially sat silently by.

He had an incredibly keen, almost excruciating sense of the moral consequences of indifference.

The Jews were murdered.

No one did anything.

So, he saw his own war on indifference as a kind of reaction to the horror of living in a world where indifference was rampant.

NARRATOR: By the end of the war, Heschel will lose his mother and three sisters to the Nazi horror, adding to the millions of others who perished.

Many ask, where was God?

Heschel would respond.

HELD: Why are you bringing that question to God?

God should bring that question to you?

You want to say to God, "Where were you?"

God's answer is "Well, where were you?"

The way we live and conduct ourselves in the world has to be a counter testimony to Auschwitz.

Has to be a radical alternative to that way of being.

If modernity, in his mind, leads to the degradation of human beings, what it means to be a Jew in the modern world to a significant degree is to fight with everything we have for the dignity of people who are degraded.

[music fades] NARRATOR: In 1945, Heschel leaves Hebrew Union College and joins the faculty at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of New York.

JTS will be Heschel's home for the rest of his career, although it's not without its challenges.

HELD: It's a place that focused on Talmud and history.

His colleagues don't really understand what he's doing or why he's doing it.

He wants to talk about piety, they want to talk about textual scholarship.

LERNER: He was a professor of mysticism.

This was the last thing in the world that they wanted.

[chuckles] You know...

They...they were trying to say, we're serious scholars we want to be considered the Harvard of the Jewish world.

NARRATOR: From his new post, Heschel gains insight into Judaism across America.

One of his chief concerns is for the future of institutional religion in the modern world.

BROUS: The centerpiece of Heschel's attack or criticism on the religious establishment was the synagogue, these institutions that were established to hold the sacred, but he claimed over the course of time had become empty and void and vapid.

And he even at one point writes, "Has the synagogue become the graveyard where prayer is buried?"

And his claim was not that we should do away with these institutions, but that we had to reclaim them.

NARRATOR: In New York, Heschel rekindles his relationship with Sylvia Straus and in 1946, they marry.

SAX: She gives him a sense of home in which he can reorient his theological wanderings.

It's said even in Jewish tradition that the great Jewish thinkers don't fully get a sense of their potential until they're married.

Because how could you talk about a partnership with God and doing the work of creation with God if you don't actually have a living partner in time.

S. HESCHEL: My mother's ideal was for her to sit down at the piano first thing in the morning and just play for hours and hours.

That's what she wanted to do and he wanted to go to his desk.

So in that sense they were very compatible.

My mother had her piano, my father had his writing.

[singing "Return Again"] NARRATOR: 1948 marks an historic moment for Jews around the world, the founding of the state of Israel.

[cars honking] LERNER: So, Israel was seen as though one place where many Jews thought they could find safety.

We could no longer count on the good ethical consciousness of the world when the ethical consciousness wasn't there.

NARRATOR: Israel, Heschel insists, is not atonement, and to call it compensation, he says, would be blasphemy.

"We do not worship the soil.

Instead, Israel is endowed with the power to inspire moments in which God's presence is palpable."

[song continues] EISEN: But Heschel wanted it to be a Jewish State, not just the fact that a majority were Jews but it was living up to Jewish tradition the way that Heschel understood Jewish traditions.

NARRATOR: Back home in America, Heschel begins a remarkably prolific period of writing and his work is reaching a wider audience.

1951, Man is Not Alone explores how human beings can only express wonder, awe and what he calls "radical amazement" at the world around them.

LERNER: He was famous for talking about the ineffable, God as that which cannot be expressed.

Um, and sometimes people at the Seminary would laugh behind his back and say, "Well, if it can't be expressed, how come he's got so many books about it?"

But the truth is, is that the books were pointing at a reality that you could only fully understand by having the experience that he was talking about.

HELD: Wonder for Heschel is the alternative to expediency.

He essentially says, "People face a choice, we can live in what he calls the way of expediency, where we go through the world asking how the world can serve us, how we can use things, exploit them.

Or we can choose the way of wonder, in which we are fundamentally filled with a sense of gratitude, of indebtedness, a sense that something is asked of us, a sense that we are called to serve."

NARRATOR: America's leading public theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary, writes a glowing review of Man is Not Alone, saying "Heschel is destined to become a commanding, authoritative voice in the religious life of America."

The two form a unique and lifelong friendship.

But it's Heschel's book on the Sabbath that reaches well beyond a Jewish audience.

He takes a core commandment of ancient Judaism and, through his prose and sense of mysticism, offers the Sabbath as an antidote for the modern world.

[chanting in Hebrew] SAX: The Sabbath, Shabbat in Hebrew, is the central aspect of Jewish practice, of Jewish halakha, Jewish law.

It's to create a cathedral in time, a day of rest.

It's a time in which you reconnect to creation.

It's a time in which you reconnect to God and the Torah.

The Gregorian calendar does not respect Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as the day of rest.

And in order to become part of a greater society, Jews in many ways were being forced to give up this very important part of religious life so that they could become part of a greater society.

NARRATOR: "The meaning of Sabbath," he writes, "Is to celebrate time rather than space.

Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space.

On the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time."

[singing in Hebrew] S. HESCHEL: And my mother and I would light the candles, kindle the lights and say the blessings.

And my father would bless me and then we would go into the living room.

The living room had windows facing the Hudson River and we would sit there and watch as the sun gradually would set over the Hudson River.

And the view was beautiful and it was peaceful and I will tell you that from the time I was a child when I lit those candles, I felt transformed.

BRUEGGEMANN: His articulation helped us see that Sabbath is intensely Jewish, but then it's not Jewish at all, it's human.

NARRATOR: The Sabbath is followed by a work that dares to reimagine the very relationship between God and humanity, God in Search of Man.

WEST: This notion of divine pathos, what does it really mean to acknowledge that God needs us in the way we need God, and our calling is to be a partner with God to engage in tikkun olam, this amending of the world, repairing the damages of the world, transforming the world in light of the hurt, the pain, the misery, the suffering.

HESCHEL: What is the meaning of man?

To be a reminder of God.

God is invisible and since he couldn't be everywhere, he created man.

If you look at man, you are reminded of God.

As God is compassionate, let man be compassionate.

As God strives for meaning and justice, let man strive for meaning and justice.

♪♪ BRUEGGEMANN: The conventional, popular religion always wants to imagine that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, all the big absolutes.

And Heschel saw that as a complete misrepresentation of the biblical tradition, because the biblical tradition wants to portray God as so passionate for justice and so committed to love that God is willing to enter into the suffering of the world and by God's presence to transform that suffering.

[chanting in Hebrew] HELD: The core theological commitment that Heschel carried is not just that God needs people, but rather that God has chosen to need people.

God does not want to be the only actor in the world.

God doesn't want to redeem the world alone.

God wants partners, God wants covenant partners.

In Heschel's theology, God takes an enormous gamble.

If God relies on people, God can be sorely, devastatingly disappointed.

That's how the prophets talk.

NARRATOR: And in 1962, as the Civil Rights Movement is gaining urgency across America, Heschel chooses this moment to revise and translate into English his earlier dissertation on The Prophets.

This is the version that will inspire many of the Civil Rights leaders.

YOUNG: Every preacher there knew who he was.

And Dr. King's copy was all underlined.

It was almost as though he had memorized a lot of it.

BRUEGGEMANN: At the center of his great book on The Prophets is his study of the prophet Jeremiah and more than any other prophet in the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah dares to give voice to what it was like to be face to face with God.

[church bells ringing] NARRATOR: In 1962, Pope John XXIII summons leaders of the Catholic Church to Rome.

Over the next four years, the church will wrestle with issues intended to more closely connect the Church with the modern world.

One of the most challenging issues is how the Church will address its relationships with other faiths, in particular a 2,000 year history of what some have called a "teaching of contempt" toward the Jews.

MARY BOYS: There were bishops who carried some of the old stereotypes and misunderstandings, caricatures of Judaism that had developed over the ages.

NARRATOR: The Pope assigns Cardinal August Bea, a German Biblical scholar, to prepare a study.

It promises to be the most contested document the council will produce.

RUDIN: Cardinal Bea was a German Cardinal who had lived through World War I, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust.

And there was suspicion of him in the Jewish community because he was a German, a German Cardinal.

NARRATOR: The American Jewish Committee is invited to consult with the Council on the document.

Mark Tanenbaum heads the AJC delegation.

EISEN: Here's Tanenbaum who sees that there's this tremendous historical opportunity to get the Catholic Church to rewrite its teachings about Judaism.

And who better than Abraham Joshua Heschel to carry on this dialogue, because Heschel is totally learned, totally authentic, totally a part of the Jewish community.

His Jewish credentials cannot be questioned.

And yet, here's Heschel, who's convinced with every fiber of his being that God loves other people and not just Jews.

♪♪ CONNELLY: And it was clear very quickly that Heschel and Bea developed a very good rapport.

They were both senior scholars, they had read each other's work.

S. HESCHEL: My father wanted a repudiation of any effort to convert the Jews.

That was extremely important to him.

He wanted a rejection of anti-Semitism of course, but he also wanted something positive.

He wanted the church to have institutions that would foster an understanding of Judaism and working together.

NARRATOR: The Council members will now convene in Rome every fall, as committees advance the various documents throughout the year.

Back in the United States, Heschel is invited to speak at a groundbreaking conference on religion and race that brings together religious leaders from across America.

Here, he meets Martin Luther King, Jr. for the first time.

EISEN: I think when Heschel met King in 1963 at that conference on religion and race and they got to talking, he recognized not just a kindred soul but a kindred biography.

Here you have the son and grandson of Hasidic Rabbis and the son and grandson of Black Baptist preachers.

We have Heschel saying about the Civil Rights Movement, "That it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than it is for a Negro," he called them, "A Negro to walk across some campuses in the south."

NARRATOR: That Chicago gathering prompts President John Kennedy to bring the Religion and Race Conference to the White House in the hopes it might derail a planned summer march on Washington.

S. HESCHEL: And my father was invited to that and responded with a marvelous telegram that ends with the phrase, "I propose that you Mr. President declare a state of moral emergency.

The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity."

WEST: When Heschel talked about racism as Satanism and sent those historic telegrams to John F. Kennedy and said that, "We humiliate Negroes, we forfeit the right to worship."

One of the most precious rights, freedom of expression.

If you're treating Black people like this, then in fact you are forfeiting your own right to worship.

♪ [blowing of trumpets] ♪ NARRATOR: In Rome, the summer of 1963 brings the death of Pope John.

His successor is Pope Paul VI, who recommits to the work of the council.

The committee on the Catholic-Jewish document is working through various drafts, but there is a problem.

S. HESCHEL: When the second draft appeared, it called for a hope for the eventual conversion of the Jews.

My father was very upset about that and he called it "spiritual fratricide."

HESCHEL: One of the biggest scandals in the history of the church was to try to make Christians out of Jews.

Now Christianity is a religion for which I have very great respect.

I have great reverence for many Christians.

But I also have to remind them that my being Jewish is so sacred to me that I am ready to die for it.

And when a statement came out from the Ecumenical Council expressing the hope that Jews would eventually...join the Church, I came out with a very strong rebuke.

I said, "I would rather go to Auschwitz than give up my religion."

NARRATOR: With the document now in question, it's arranged for Heschel to fly to Rome and plead directly with the Pope.

S. HESCHEL: Well, my father was attacked of course, before the document even came out.

There were some who said, you shouldn't talk to them.

I remember somebody in a Jewish newspaper, a letter to the editor said, "If Rabbi Heschel wants to talk to the Pope, let the Pope come to him.

Why should we as Jews go do that?"

And my father said, "If what I'm doing will save one life... of course, I'll go to Rome."

NARRATOR: The Pope meets with Heschel but will not commit to changing the language of the document himself.

Instead, he prefers to leave it to the council.

CONNELLY: They had several days debate about precisely this document, sometimes called "the great debate", the thousand or so bishops actually got up and one after the other they spoke.

And virtually all those who spoke, spoke out in favor of a strong document condemning anti-Semitism and going back to the earlier document that had distanced itself from the agenda of conversion.

And that I think they had Rabbi Heschel's words ringing in their ears.

NARRATOR: In the fall of 1965, after four years of intense debate, the final document is passed by a wide margin.

It's called Nostra Aetate, Latin for "In Our Time" RUDIN: It called for mutual respect and understanding between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish people, it denounced anti-Semitism in all its forms, it called for a fraternal dialogue between Jews and Catholics, and repudiated the concept of Jews as the killers of Jesus of Nazareth.

NARRATOR: And there is no call for the conversion of the Jews.

BRANCH: And that was a tremendous moment in religious history.

Heschel played a clandestine role, because there were a lot of Jews that didn't want to have anything to do with what Christians were doing and a lot of Jews who thought it was dangerous.

NARRATOR: Now lauded for his pioneering interfaith work, that fall, Heschel is invited to be a visiting professor at the protestant-founded Union Theological Seminary, across the street from his own JTS.

BOYS: He became the first non-Christian to be invited to join the faculty.

They had to change the bylaws a bit for that.

And he gave this wonderful opening lecture on November 10th, 1965 called "No Religion is an Island."

HESCHEL: On what basis do we people of different religious commitments meet one another?

First and foremost we meet as human beings.

To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense the image of God, the presence of God.

The Lord said to Moses: "Where ever you see the trace of man, there I stand before you."

HELD: He came to think that religious diversity was God's will, that God wanted to be worshipped in a variety of ways, in a range of ways, in different languages, in different religious images.

WEST: Heschel understood when Amos talked about, "Let justice roll down like waters," that was not just for Israel, that was for nations all around the world.

It emerged out of Israel, but it had a universal vision.

[helicopter blades whirring] NARRATOR: Vietnam, the war will span three decades and tear at the very heart of the nation.

Many view America's intervention as a way to thwart Communist expansion.

Yet the more troops and funds committed, the more the anti-war movement grows.

S. HESCHEL: My father was not a pacifist and he was not a communist sympathizer by any means.

But killing civilians, that was unacceptable.

HESCHEL: What does God demand of us primarily?

Justice and compassion.

What does he condemn above all?

Murder, killing innocent people.

How can I pray when I have on my conscience the awareness that I am co-responsible for the death of innocent people in Vietnam?

NARRATOR: Heschel becomes co-chairman of a nationwide effort with over 50,000 clergy and laypersons calling for an end to the war.

EISEN: One of the things he said to me that has never left me, that if you're the heir to a great religious tradition it's your responsibility, it's your duty, not just your right, it's your duty to speak in the name of that tradition as best you can.

The most important religious issue of our time is to end the war in Vietnam.

NARRATOR: In April 1967, a major event is scheduled at New York's Riverside Church, nearby Jewish Theological Seminary.

The keynote speaker is Martin Luther King, Jr. At Heschel's urging, King will deliver a much-anticipated statement against the war.

M.L.

KING JR.: I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation.

The great initiative in this war is ours.

The initiative to stop it must be ours.

CONGRESSMAN LEWIS: There were people within SCLC, within Dr. King's organization, on the Board, saying you cannot mix your concern with ending the war in Vietnam with Civil Rights; you could lose your influence.

HELD: Vietnam, he thought, was completely unjustifiable, and he knew that King had leverage in America in a way that he would never have.

M.L.

KING JR.: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

[applause] BRANCH: And it electrified the audience that was there and was immediately denounced by everybody across the country.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, what's he talking about war?

He should stick with Civil Rights, he doesn't know anything about it.

He's... lost his moral standing, for sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.

NARRATOR: That same night, Heschel adds his own plea.

HESCHEL: We are assembled here because our own integrity as human beings is decaying.

The blood we shed in Vietnam makes a mockery of all our proclamations, dedications, commitments and celebrations.

No triumph is worth the price of the terror which we commit in that land.

S. HESCHEL: People came to see my father from the Israeli Embassy and said you should be quiet about Vietnam.

You'll endanger U.S. support for Israel, be quiet.

My father wouldn't be quiet, no one could silence him.

SAX: It's not simply that one takes a position that you disagree with, if it's one that is so deeply unpopular like going against the Vietnam War, people then used it as the lens to interpret your theological work, your philosophical work, your teaching, all as the means to this unjust end.

That he's putting at risk his life's work to do the right thing.

HESCHEL: The moral substance of America is at stake.

Remember, in a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.

[applause] S. HESCHEL: My father had a heart condition and his health was fragile.

I knew it from childhood.

And I was frightened.

NARRATOR: During the next months King and Heschel remain close.

Often it's the war that brings them together.

Exactly one year to the day after the Riverside speech, King will be assassinated.

S. HESCHEL: Dr. King had come just ten days before to speak at a gathering honoring my father, a convention of conservative rabbis in the Catskills at a hotel, the Concord Hotel.

And when Dr. King came that night and walked into the auditorium, we all stood up and we crossed arms and held hands and we sang "We Shall Overcome" in Hebrew.

NARRATOR: In 1969, the 62-year-old Heschel suffers a life-threatening heart attack and is hospitalized for three months.

But once he recovers, he returns to his teaching and advocacy work.

In particular he campaigns to raise awareness for the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union.

HESCHEL: A Jew in Russia who is oppressed, we here are also hurt.

To feel it deeply, to feel it all the time is our task.

HELD: The Soviet Jewry movement was really important to him because Heschel was a Jew who wanted to struggle for the dignity of Jews.

He wanted to make sure that the way that Jews were indifferent, or many Jews were indifferent while World War II was going on, they would not be indifferent IN the face of Soviet Jewry.

HESCHEL: For us to be silent is the crime of indifference, the crime of silence.

The Jews in Soviet Russian cannot cry out.

It is our task to be their voice, to be their cry.

[somber music] S. HESCHEL: I was home that Friday, we had a Shabbat dinner with guests and my father was exhausted and then we all went to sleep.

And the next morning my mother woke me up screaming that my father had died, that he couldn't wake up.

She couldn't wake him.

[piano music] People say in Jewish tradition that to die in your sleep, especially on the Sabbath, is a kiss from God.

[gentle music] NARRATOR: Abraham Joshua Heschel dies December 1972 at the age of 65.

Over his lifetime he forged a new path for modern Judaism that honored the piety and traditions of his faith as he confronted the great injustices of his day.

His commitment to embody the covenant between God and humanity to renew the world remains an inspiration for Jews and non-Jews alike.

RUDIN: If there's one word that would cover Abraham Heschel, it was passion.

BRUEGGEMANN: He never doubted the truth and the reality of God's holiness.

LERNER: So whereas, I don't think he ever thought of himself as a prophet, he became a prophet for everyone else.

SAX: Most synagogues have his picture up on their walls, even when their leadership forty, fifty years ago, took real issue with some of Heschel's political leanings.

HELD: The sentence that I think he writes more than any other over the course of his writing is a very simple sentence, "Something is asked of us."

S. HESCHEL: When he talks about wonder and awe and radical amazement it is as if suddenly we discover, "Yes, there are other dimensions to my life as a human being that I can explore."

EISEN: In this day and age, if you asked young, committed Jews who the most important Jew of the 20th century was for them it would undoubtedly be Abraham Joshua Heschel.

BROUS: Even in the midst of European Jewry burning to the ground, he had the audacity to remind us of the great dream of thousands of years, the dream of a world redeemed.

♪♪ ♪ Return again, return again ♪ ♪ Return to the land of your soul ♪ ♪ Return again, return again ♪ ♪ Return to the land of your soul... ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major funding for this program was provided by Additional funding provided by... A DVD of this film including bonus materials is available online at mpt.org/shop or call the number onscreen.

Voice: For more information about this program, or the educational materials available about Abraham Heschel, visit journeyfilms.com.

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