Heschel was particularly spurned by his colleague Mordechai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and many students who attended JTS in the 1950s sympathized with Kaplan over Heschel.

Judaism views God as being radically different from humans, so Heschel explores the ways that Judaism teaches that a person may have an encounter with the ineffable.

Heschel then goes on to explore the problems of doubts and faith ; what Judaism means by teaching that God is one ; the essence of humanity and the problem of human needs ; the definition of religion in general and of Judaism in particular ; and human yearning for spirituality.

: Heschel wrote a series of articles, originally in Hebrew, on the existence of prophecy in Judaism after the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

In the early 1980s, when speaking at Oberlin College Hillel, Susannah Heschel was introduced to an early feminist Haggadah that suggested adding a crust of bread on the seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians ( as some would say there's as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate ).

Heschel felt that to put bread on the seder plate would be to accept that lesbians and gay men violate Judaism like chametz violates Passover.

Neo-Hasidism is a name frequently given to the significant revival of interest in Hasidic Judaism on the part of non-Orthodox Jews in different decades due to the writings of non-Orthodox teachers of Hasidic Judaism like Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Lawrence Kushner, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green.

There have been many biographical and research texts about him, such as the work Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus by Susannah Heschel ( 1998 ), which chronicles Geiger's radical contention that the New Testament illustrates Jesus was a Pharisee teaching Judaism.

Lest this statement be construed as anti-religion, he cites Paul Tillich ( Protestantism ), Gustav Weigel ( Catholicism ), and Abram Heschel ( Judaism ) as noted religious scholars who are also in agreement with him on this point.

In The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe, Abraham Joshua Heschel evokes the world of Eastern European Jewish life.

In 2009, a highway in Missouri was named " Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel Highway " after a Springfield, Missouri area Neo-Nazi group cleaned the stretch of highway as part of an " Adopt-A-Highway " plan.

The Friday night gathering included speeches by Martin Luther King III and Susannah Heschel ( whose father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, had been a close comrade of Dr. King ).

Abraham Joshua Heschel ( January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972 ) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was descended from preeminent European rabbis on both sides of the family.

His father, Moshe Mordechai Heschel, died of influenza in 1916.

Heschel later taught Talmud there.

Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe.

Heschel arrived in New York City in March 1940.

Heschel married Sylvia Straus, a concert pianist, on December 10, 1946, in Los Angeles.

Their daughter, Susannah Heschel, is a Jewish scholar in her own right.

Heschel explicated many facets of Jewish thought including studies on medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Hasidism.

Heschel saw the teachings of the Hebrew prophets as a clarion call for social action in the United States and worked for black civil rights and against the Vietnam War Heschel was an activist for civil rights in the United States.

Heschel is among the few widely read Jewish theologians.

At the Vatican Council II, as representative of American Jews, Heschel persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned the Jews, or expected their conversion to Christianity.

In this book Heschel discusses the nature of religious thought, how thought becomes faith, and how faith creates responses in the believer.

In it Heschel forwards what would become a central idea in his theology: that the prophetic ( and, ultimately, Jewish ) view of God is best understood not as anthropomorphic ( that God takes human form ) but rather as anthropopathic — that God has human feelings.

In his book The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the unique aspect of the Jewish prophets as compared to other similar figures.

Whereas other nations have soothsayers and diviners who attempt to discover the will of their gods, according to Heschel the Hebrew prophets are characterized by their experience of what he calls theotropism — God turning towards humanity.

Heschel argues for the view of Hebrew prophets as receivers of the " Divine Pathos ," of the wrath and sorrow of God over his nation that has forsaken him.

Heschel demonstrated that this view is not altogether accurate.

Well-known non-Orthodox Jewish philosophers include Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Will Herberg, and Emmanuel Lévinas.

* Praying with their Feet: Remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King

As a result of this, Martin became well acquainted with prominent Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Abraham Heschel, during 1961 and 1962.

In his 2007 book Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, Edward K. Kaplan confirmed that Martin cooperated with the American Jewish Committee during the Council for a mixture of motives, both lofty and ignoble.

Kaplan further acknowledges that the kiss and tell book about the internal workings of the Council, The Pilgrim by Michael Serafian, was requested from Martin by Abraham J. Heschel, who also arranged the book to be published by Roger W. Straus, Jr .' s Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing company.

This led to the end of friendly relations between Martin and Heschel and Straus.

The sympathizers of this movement include such religious thinkers and scholars as Otto A. Piper, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Zalman Shazar, Hugo Bergmann, Zvi Yehuda Kook, André Chouraqui, and Yisrael Meir Lau.

* December 23 – Abraham Joshua Heschel, theologian

This prayerbook presents a complete liturgy, restoring many traditional prayers that had not been included in the Silverman or Harlow editions of the mahzor, yet also offers options to use the creative liturgical developments presenting the theology and gender-equality of non-Orthodox Judaism.

It can hardly be said that the division of the matter treated is very logical and systematic, nor indeed does the work lay any claim to originality ; but in presenting the beautiful moral and religious truths of Judaism in homely form, Aboab supplied to the average reader a great need of the time.

As the title indicates, the author's perspective is Hegelian, presenting Judaism and Islam in terms of thesis and antithesis.