The great surprise in most of the writings collected here is that they exist at all. Abraham Joshua Heschel continued to publish scholarly monographs and essays in Jewish publications in the first years of the Third Reich. Although Jews were driven from the larger realm of academia and publishing, they were permitted to continue intellectual life within a tightly segregated and supervised circle. Herschel was deeply learned in Western philosophy and history as well as Talmudic studies. In his goal of recontextualizing tradition, he can speak to readers beyond his intended Jewish audience. History for him was the medium of human encounter with the divine. Some of his thoughts are just as worth hearing today: “How much energy we spend in constructing a car with absolute precision, and yet how minimal, indeed almost negligible, are our efforts to form the inner person.”
