Ideology
Heschel explicated many facets of Jewish thought including studies on medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Hasidism. According to some scholars, he was more interested in spirituality than in critical text study, which was a specialty of many scholars at JTS. He was not given a graduate assistant for many years and was relegated to teach mainly in the education school or Rabbinical school, not in the academic graduate program. 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.
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.
He also specifically criticized what he called "pan-halakhism", or an exclusive focus upon religiously-compatible behavior to the neglect of the non-legalistic dimension of rabbinic tradition.
Read more about this topic: Abraham Joshua Heschel
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