Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) said of his participation in the 1965 civil rights march at Selma, Alabama, “I felt that my legs were praying,” and thereby expressed much of himself. Prayer for him was “as necessary as faith,” writes Edward K. Kaplan; but prayer had for him a capacious sense, including the civil rights and antiwar work to which he devoted abundant time and intense energy. The following sections from his great antiwar sermon “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam”—first published in Fellowship in September 1966—show him in both capacities, the first being a Jewish prophet’s denunciation of the Vietnam War, the second a mostly secular-humanist critique of it.
Heschel was born in Warsaw, his father being a Hasidic rebbe, the son soon clearly a prodigy—but one who sought, and found, a secular education as well, in Vilna and Berlin. He published Yiddish poems, Hebrew commentaries, and German monographs, and had in the European Jewish community a standing comparable to that of Martin Buber, whom in 1937 he replaced as codirector of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. He was expelled from Germany in 1938, worked briefly in Warsaw, fled to London, was invited in 1940 to teach at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, joined the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1945, and was naturalized in that same year; he became the leading American exponent of Jewish tradition, and unlike most of his contemporaries remained alive and inspiring for the younger Jews who in the late 1960s and early 1970s were founding the Jewish Renewal movement and writing the Jewish Catalogues. Reinhold Niebuhr predicted in a 1951 review, “[Heschel] will become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.” Correct but too limited; Heschel’s influence mattered outside America as well, in particular in the 1965 Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate, with its radically new willingness to accept Judaism on its own terms.
ON January 31, 1967, clergymen and laymen concerned about Vietnam assembled in Washington, D.C. At the worship service, I offered the following meditation on the words of the prophet Ezekiel (34:25–31):
Ours is an assembly of shock, contrition, and dismay. Who would have believed that we life-loving Americans are capable of bringing death and destruction to so many innocent people? We are startled to discover how unmerciful, how beastly we ourselves can be.
So we implore Thee, our Father in heaven, help us to banish the beast from our hearts, the beast of cruelty, the beast of callousness.
Since the beginning of history evil has been going forth from nation to nation. The lords of the flocks issue proclamations, and the sheep of all nations indulge in devastations.
But who would have believed that our own nation at the height of its career as the leader of free nations, the hope for peace in the world, whose unprecedented greatness was achieved through “liberty and justice for all,” should abdicate its wisdom, suppress its compassion and permit guns to become its symbols?
America’s resources, moral and material, are immense. We have the means and know the ways of dispelling prejudice and lies, of overcoming poverty and disease. We have the capacity to lead the world in seeking to overcome international hostility.
Must napalm stand in the way of our power to aid and to inspire the world?
To be sure, just as we feel deeply the citizen’s dilemma, we are equally sensitive to the dilemma confronting the leaders of our government. Our government seems to recognize the tragic error and futility of the escalation of our involvement but feels that we cannot extricate ourselves without public embarrassment of such dimension as to cause damage to America’s prestige.
But the mire in which we flounder threatens us with an even greater danger. It is the dilemma of either losing face or losing our soul.
At this hour Vietnam is our most urgent, our most disturbing religious problem, a challenge to the whole nation as well as a challenge to every one of us as an individual.
When a person is sick, in danger or in misery, all religious duties recede, all rituals are suspended, except one: to save life and relieve pain.
Vietnam is a personal problem. To speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous.
When you spread forth your hands
I will hide my eyes from you;
Yea when you make many prayers,
I will not hear—
Your hands are not clean.
In the sight of so many thousands of civilians and soldiers slain, injured, crippled, of bodies emaciated, of forests destroyed by fire, God confronts us with this question:
Where art thou?
Is there no compassion in the world? No sense of discernment to realize that this is a war that refutes any conceivable justification of war?
The sword is the pride of man; arsenals, military bases, nuclear weapons lend supremacy to nations. War is the climax of ingenuity, the object of supreme dedication.
Men slaughtering each other, cities battered into ruins: such insanity has plunged many nations into an abyss of disgrace. Will America, the promise of peace to the world, fail to uphold its magnificent destiny?
The most basic way in which all men may be divided is between those who believe that war is unnecessary and those who believe that war is inevitable; between those to whom the sword is the symbol of honor and those to whom seeking to convert swords into plowshares is the only way to keep our civilization from disaster.
Most of us prefer to disregard the dreadful deeds we do over there. The atrocities committed in our name are too horrible to be credible. It is beyond our power to react vividly to the ongoing nightmare, day after day, night after night. So we bear graciously other people’s suffering.
O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.
We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.
Prayer is our greatest privilege. To pray is to stake our very existence, our right to live, on the truth and on the supreme importance of that which we pray for. Prayer, then, is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God.
In such awareness we pray . . .
We do not stand alone. Millions of Americans, millions of people all over the world are with us.
At this moment praying for peace in Vietnam we are spiritually Vietnamese. Their agony is our affliction, their hope is our commitment.
God is present wherever men are afflicted.
Where is God present now?
We do not know how to cry, we do not know how to pray!
Our conscience is so timid, our words so faint, our mercy so feeble.
O Father, have mercy upon us.
Our God, add our cries uttered here to the cries of the bereaved, crippled, and dying over there.
Have mercy upon all of us.
Help us to overcome the arrogance of power. Guide and inspire the President of the United States in finding a speedy, generous, and peaceful end to the war in Vietnam.
The intensity of the agony is high, the hour is late, the outrage may reach a stage where repentance will be too late, repair beyond any nation’s power.
We call for a covenant of peace, for reconciliation of America and all of Vietnam. To paraphrase the words of the prophet Isaiah (62:1):
For Vietnam’s sake I will not keep silent,
For America’s sake I will not rest,
Until the vindication of humanity goes forth as brightness,
And peace for all men is a burning torch.
Here is the experience of a child of seven who was reading in school the chapter which tells of the sacrifice of Isaac:
Isaac was on the way to Mount Moriah with his father; then he lay on the altar, bound, waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even faster; it actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifted the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly, the voice of the angel was heard: “Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God.” And here I broke out in tears and wept aloud. “Why are you crying?” asked the Rabbi. “You know that Isaac was not killed.”
And I said to him, still weeping, “But, Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?”
The Rabbi comforted me and calmed me by telling me that an angel cannot come late.
An angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, may be.
RESPONSIBILITY is the essence of being a person, the essence of being human, and many of us are agonized by a grave crisis of responsibility. Horrified by the atrocities of this war, we are also dismayed by the ineffectiveness of our protests, by the feebleness of our dissent. Have we done our utmost in expressing our anguish? Does our outcry match the outrage?
This is a unique hour in human history. It is within our might to decide whether this war is a prelude to doom, the beginning of the end, or whether to establish a precedent of solving a most complex crisis by abandoning slogans and clichés.
There is no alternative, we are told. Yet have we really exhausted all possibilities of negotiation? Is the state of humanity so overcome by insanity that all rationality is gone and war left as the only way? Is it really so simple? Are we Americans all innocent, righteous, full of saving grace, while our adversaries are all corrupt, wicked, insensitive to human rights?
Collision between states is not always due to a conflict of vital interests. It is often due to the tendency toward self-enhancement inherent in the monstrosity of power.
Worse than war is the belief in the inevitability of war. There is no such thing as inevitable war. And certainly the war in Vietnam was not inevitable. It came about as a failure of vision, as a result of political clichés, of thinking by analogies, of false comparisons, of blindness to the uniqueness of an extraordinary constellation. This war will not end by dropping bigger and better bombs, by an increase in ferocity, and by the merciless use of force. Vietnam is primarily a human problem, a human emergency, human anguish. There are no military solutions to human problems; violence and bloodshed are no answer to human anguish.
We feel alarmed by a policy that continues to be dogmatic, devoid of elasticity. The root of the tragedy is in the combination of global power and parochial philosophy, of most efficient weapons and pedestrian ideas. New thinking is called for; new contacts must be made. Leaders not directly involved in present operations must be consulted.
Let the American presence in Vietnam be a presence of understanding and compassion. America’s war potential is great, but America’s peace potential is even greater. Let there be an effort for friendship for Vietnam. Modern war is a mechanical operation. But peace is a personal effort, requiring deep commitment, hard, honest vision, wisdom and patience, facing one another as human beings, elasticity rather than dogmatism.
Would not sending a Peace Corps prove more helpful than sending more armed divisions?
We have entered an age in which military victories are tragic defeats, in which even small wars are exercises in immense disaster.
The public enemy number one is the nuclear bomb, the population explosion, starvation, and disease. It is the fear of nuclear war that unites men all over the world, East and West, North and South. It is fear that unites us today. Let us hope that the conquest of fear and the elimination of misery will unite us tomorrow.
This war, I am afraid, will not leave the nation where it found it. Its conclusion may be the beginning of a grave alienation. The speed and the spirit in which this war will end will fashion our own lives in the years that lie ahead.
On January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson in his address to the Senate uttered a point of view which we pray President Lyndon Johnson would adopt as his own: “It must be a peace without victory.” Let our goal be compromise, not victory.
In the name of our kinship of being human, the American people meet the Vietnamese face to face. Only few men are marble-hearted. And even marble can be pierced with patience and compassion. Let us create a climate of reconciliation. Reducing violence and tension, acts of goodwill are necessary prerequisites for negotiations. We must seek neither victory nor defeat. Our aim is to enable the South Vietnamese to find themselves as free and independent people.
The initiative for peace must come from the strong, out of a position of strength.
We will all have to strain our energies, crack our sinews, tax and exert our brains, cultivate understanding, open our hearts, and meet with all Vietnamese, North as well as South.
This is the demand of the hour: not to rest until—by excluding fallacies, stereotypes, prejudices, exaggerations which perpetual contention and the consequent hostilities breed—we succeed in reaching the people of Vietnam as brothers.
There is still time to unlearn old follies, there is still time to seek honest reconciliation. A few months from now it may be too late; a few months from now our folly may be beyond repair, sin beyond repentance.
It is not for man to decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall kill and who shall sigh. May no one win this war; may all sides win the right to live in peace.