Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism by Abraham J. Heschel

Author:Abraham J. Heschel [Heschel, Abraham J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00414TTL2
Published: 2018-08-02T23:38:40+00:00

We are free at rare moments. Most of the time we are driven by a process ; we submit to the power of inherited character qualities or to the force of external circumstances. Freedom is not a continual state of man,

“a permanent attitude of the conscious subject.” It is not, it happens.

Freedom is an act, an event. We all are endowed with the potentiality of freedom. In actuality, however, we only act freely in rare creative moments.

Man’s ability to transcend the self, to rise above all natural ties and bonds, presupposes further that every man lives in a realm governed by law and necessity as well as in a realm of creative possibilities. It presupposes his belonging to a dimension that is higher than nature, society, and the self, and accepts the reality of such a dimension beyond the natural order. Freedom does not mean the right to live as we please. It means the power to live spiritually, to rise to a higher level of existence.

Freedom is not, as is often maintained, a principle of uncertainty, the ability to act without motive. Such a view confounds freedom with chaos, free will with a freak of unmotivated volition, with subrational action.

Nor is freedom the same as the ability to choose between motives.

Freedom includes an act of choice, but its root is in the realization that 149

Part III: Man and His Needs the self is no sovereign, in the discontent with the tyranny of the ego.

Freedom comes about in the moment of transcending the self, thus rising above the habit of regarding the self as its own end. Freedom is an act of self-engagement of the spirit, a spiritual event.

Integrity is the fruit of freedom. The slave will always ask : What will serve my interests? It is the free man who is able to transcend the causality of interest and deed, of act and the desire for personal reward. It is the free man who asks : Why should I be interested in my interests? What are the values I ought to feel in need of serving?

But inner freedom is spiritual ecstasy, the state of being beyond all interest� and selfishness. Inner freedom is a miracle of the soul. How could such a miracle be achieved?

The course in which human life moves is, like the orbit of heavenly bodies, an ellipse, not a circle. Vve are attached to two centers : to the focus of our self and to the focus of God. Driven by two forces, we have both the impulse to acquire, to enjoy, to possess and the urge to respond, to yield, to give.

It is the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God, the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement that conjures power out of a weary conscience, that, striking the bottom out of conceit, tears selfishness to shreds. It is the sense of the ineffable that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests, helping us to realize the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end.

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