September 1, 2022
Heschel’s Transformative Hasidism
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) is well known as one of the greatest Jewish-American thinkers and social activists. It is much less widely known that he had been destined to become a Hasidic rebbe, a fate eliminated by circumstance, but revisited in his final work, A Passion for Truth, which explored the relevance of Hasidism in modernity. In this online class we will read passages from this work in order to understand Heschel’s interpretation of Hasidism as the source of his own philosophy and activism.
