Polish-born American rabbi, philosopher, and theologian — one of the leading Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the few whose influence extended well beyond the Jewish community into Christian theology, the civil rights movement, and interfaith dialogue. Heschel was descended from Hasidic rabbinical dynasties on both sides of his family, trained in the liberal Jewish scholarship of Berlin and Vilna, and expelled from Germany in 1938. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He spent the rest of his career at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where he wrote the works that established his reputation and became increasingly active in public life — marching with King at Selma (afterward he said he felt his "legs were praying"), opposing the Vietnam War, and working on interfaith relations with Catholic leaders during and after Vatican II.
Heschel's central philosophical contribution is the concept of "radical amazement" — the idea that the proper starting point for theology is not argument or doctrine but the experience of wonder at the sheer fact of existence. His theology begins not with God's attributes but with God's pathos — God's emotional engagement with the world, God's suffering at human suffering. This emphasis on divine pathos, drawn from his study of the Hebrew prophets, distinguishes Heschel from both rationalist theology (Maimonides, Aquinas) and existentialist theology (Tillich, Niebuhr). For Heschel, the prophets are not predictors of the future but people seized by God's concern for justice — and the appropriate human response is not belief in the philosophical sense but action, worship, and the sanctification of time.