The Study of Heschel and Kadushin in Israel

Jonathan Matt

My father, Hershel Matt ז״ל (1922–87), used to say that he came to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)—where he was ordained in 1947—because of Mordecai Kaplan and stayed because of Abraham Joshua Heschel. I came to JTS because of Heschel and discovered Max Kadushin along the way. Since my ordination and aliyah in 1975, not a week passes without my noticing how much Israeli society could benefit from the insights of these two giants of Conservative/Masorti Judaism.

Most of Heschel’s writings have been translated into Hebrew, primarily by Dror Bondi, a lecturer at the Schechter Institutes of Jewish Studies, who has devoted much of his scholarly work to that enterprise and to producing and facilitating scholarship on Heschel. Bondi has also republished Torah min hashamayim baʾaspaqlariyah shel hadorot with chapter introductions and a revised version of volume 3 )based on newly discovered manuscripts(.1 He has been teaching Heschel in many contexts, including online courses offered by the Schechter Institute.

There have been a number of Heschel events in recent years. Three stand out among the most prominent. In December 2014, the Van Leer Institute and Schechter sponsored a three-day conference on Heschel. Speakers included Susannah Heschel, Eli Schweid, Arnold Eisen, Arthur Green, David Golinkin, Alex Even-Chen, Gordon Tucker, Michael Graetz, and Bondi. In June 2022, the World Zionist Organization organized a well-attended “Heschel Conference on Jewish Peoplehood” at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People (formerly beit hatefutsot). President Yizhak Herzog was among the speakers, as were Green, Bondi, and others. And, in December 2022, there were a number of events commemorating Heschel’s fiftieth yahrzeit. There is also an active Facebook group, Avraham Yehoshuʿa Heshel beYisraʾel.

Over fifty years ago, Avraham Holtz spent several summers teaching Kadushin’s writings to the central figures in the Shdemot/Oranim group, including Avraham Shapira. They encouraged Holtz to write Beʿolam hamaḥshavah shel ḥazal, which was published by Sifriat Poalim and JTS in 1978.2 Holtz’s book has been out of print for several years, with no plans to republish it. As far as I know, in Israel there have been no conferences on Kadushin, and there is no Facebook group.

Teaching Heschel and Kadushin in Israel

The study of Heschel and Kadushin is gradually emerging in Israel. For the past six years, I have been a participant and teacher in Maʿagalim, an Upper Galilee study group that includes Orthodox and non-Orthodox Israelis. In Maʿagalim, I taught a session on Heschel, followed by two sessions on Kadushin. The first part of this article is my report on these sessions, through which I discovered potential synergies between Heschel and Kadushin and a modest hope for the future of a healthy Israeli Judaism.

In the first session, I taught selections from The Prophets and from Torah min hashamayim. From the introduction to The Prophets: “By insisting on the absolutely objective and supernatural nature of prophecy, dogmatic theology has disregarded the prophet’s part in the prophetic act. Stressing revelation, it has ignored the response; isolating inspiration, it has lost sight of the human situation.”3 We discussed the connection between Heschel’s take on the prophets and his devotion to social action. Participants who had heard of Heschel had also encountered the iconic photo of Heschel marching in Selma with Martin Luther King., Jr.

From Torah min hashamayim, I taught the section on Shibber et haluḥot: The school of R. Ishmael follows the peshat of Exodus 32:18, with Moses shattering the tablets on his own initiative. R. Akiva contends that God commanded him to do so:

כתוב בתורה: וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר קָרַב אֶל הַמַּחֲנֶה וַיַּרְא אֶת הָעֵגֶל וּמְחֹלֹת וַיִּחַר אַף מֹשֶׁה וַיַּשְׁלֵךְ מידו [מִיָּדָיו] אֶת הַלֻּחֹת וַיְשַׁבֵּר אֹתָם תַּחַת הָהָר (שמות לב, יט). לפי הברייתא שהזכרנו למעלה, שיבר משה את הלוחות מדעתו. ואילו על פי רבי עקיבא, "לא שיבר משה את הלוחות, אלא שנאמר לו מפי הגבורה…" ⁴

In the Torah is written: “As Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and dances, Moses was angered, threw down the tablets, and shattered them at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:10). According to the baraita that we mentioned above, Moses shattered the tablets on his own initiative. But according to Rabbi Akiva, Moses shattered the tablets only after God told him to do so.

For some of the Orthodox participants in Maʿagalim, Heschel’s emphasis on the extreme pluralism of ḥazal was challenging. But I was encouraged that a well-known rav dati leʾumi who participated enjoyed Heschel’s insights.

My second teaching session was on a follow-up question: מה איחד את חז״לינו, למרות חילוקי הדעות? (“What united the Sages, in spite of their divergent opinions?”) I based my response on Kadushin’s analysis of rabbinic value concepts. Toward the beginning of The Rabbinic Mind, Kadushin explains what he means by “value concepts.”⁵ He contrasts value concepts with “defined concepts” and “scientific concepts.” So far, so good. But he confused me when he contrasted value concepts with what he calls “cognitive concepts,” which he defines as “terms we use in order to describe whatever we perceive through the senses.” But if you Google “cognitive concept,” you come up with something like: “processes that control mental functions, such as communication, learning, classification.” What might be a better term?

Luckily, I came across Heschel’s paragraph on “Descriptive and Indicative Words”:

The human mind is a repository of a variety of ideas, some of which are definite and expressive while others resist definition and remain ineffable. Correspondingly, there are two kinds of words: descriptive words, which stand in a fixed relation to conventional and definite meanings, such as the concrete nouns, chair, table, or the terms of science; and indicative words, which stand in a fluid relation to ineffable meanings and, instead of describing, merely intimate something which we intuit but cannot fully comprehend.⁶

Through Heschel I understood Kadushin: defined, scientific, and “concrete” concepts are descriptive; value concepts are indicative. Holtz’s musagim qognitiviyim became musagim muḥashiyim.

We then proceeded to examine midrashim from Meḥilta, Parashat Beshalaḥ on:

(שמות יג:יז) וַיְהִי בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה אֶת הָעָם וְלֹא נָחָם אֱ-לֹהִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא כִּי אָמַר אֱ-לֹהִים פֶּן יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה.

Then it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, “Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt” (Exodus 13:17).

I based my teaching on Kadushin’s A Conceptual Approach to the Mekilta,7 emphasizing the following elements:

• Examples of rabbinic value concepts.
• Emphatic trends.
• Ḥazal were aware of the difference between peshat and derash.
• A midrash uses an (often minor) stimulus to emphasize one or more value concepts.
• Indeterminacy of belief (emunah bilti mequbaʿat) supports midrashim that diverge from the peshat and from one another.
• Even when ḥazal disagree on halakhah or agadah, they share a common universe of value concepts.

This time, it was the kibbutzniks in Maʿagalim who struggled with a paradigm change. They had grown up on the Tanakh, focused on understanding the plain sense of narratives. Although they had learned aggadah, they judged the validity of a midrash by how close it was to the plain sense. Although some Haredim would probably be troubled by research that draws a dichotomy between peshat and derash, the Orthodox members of Maʿagalim had no problem with Kadushin on this issue.

The Maʿagalim theme for 5783 was yaḥid vetsibur (“individual and community”). Again, I taught Kadushin, this time drawing on one of my favorite Kadushin books, Worship and Ethics.8 We started off with a review of value concepts, learning the first mishnah in Peʾah (which has become part of shaḥarit):

אלו דברים שאדם אוכל פרותיהם בעולם הזה והקרן קימת לעולם הבא...

One of the participants was critical of this mishnah combining into one list interpersonal, bein adam leḥavero value concepts (for example, gemilut ḥasadim, welcoming visitors, visiting the sick) with those bein adam lamaqom (“between humans and God”), such as prayer and learning Torah. But that was exactly Kadushin’s point:

The scope of the moral life, we repeat, cannot be described by a formula, not even by the formula “between a man and his fellow man.” That phrase, or its equivalent, is used by the rabbis in one context and in one context only, and it is not a general designation for ethics or morality. However the statements in which the phrase occurs may differ in expression, the context in those statements is always the same, namely, the sins forgiven and the sins not forgiven by God.9

The “scope of the [Jewish] moral life” is mediated through the value concepts, not through generalizations.

Kadushin has a beautiful section on berakhot as gemilut ḥasadim (“blessings” as “acts of lovingkindness”), 10 which I used to teach the wedding sheva berakhot for my topic “Zug, tsibur, vehaqadosh barukh hu” (“The Couple, the Community, and God”). Kadushin points out that, in the fifth berakhah,

[t]he zibbur as a whole engaged in an act of gemilut ḥasadim when, through the ḥazzan as deputy, it prayed for the bride and groom. “O make these loved companions greatly to rejoice, even as of old Thou didst gladden Thy creature in the Garden of Eden. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who makest bridegroom and bride to rejoice.”11

Asking God to gladden the couple is a powerful example of gemilut ḥasadim.

So far, we have encountered several comparisons between the works of Heschel and Kadushin. Next, I would like to consider some more comparisons, with some surprising results.

Academic Rigor with Spiritual Relevance

It was important for both Heschel and Kadushin that their works be judged by academic standards. Because Judaism covers such a long time span, most academic scholars concentrate on (at most) one phase of Jewish history: biblical, rabbinic, medieval, or modern. But, as Samuel Dresner wrote of Heschel, “[h]e contributed major works in fields each of which required their own separate disciplines: Bible, rabbinics, philosophy, Hasidism, theology and ethics, among others.”12 Heschel and Kadushin both faced a number of religious challenges while remaining faithful to the academic context: drawing into their academic writings the reality of God that each experienced, searching for connections among the various stages of Judaism, and enabling moderns to find spiritual insight from our classic sources.

Heschel’s doctorate, Die Prophetie limited its scope to the biblical prophets.13 But the introduction he wrote when it was translated and adapted as The Prophets foreshadows the influence this work had on Heschel’s social activism and on the civil rights movement: “The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.”14 In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel argued that rabbinic Judaism can be viewed as typified by divergence between the schools of R. Akiva and R. Ishmael. Although his starting point was the rabbinic period, Heschel found this schema useful for organizing later stages in Judaism into these two schools. For example, the rationalism of Maimonides is reminiscent of R. Ishmael and the Zohar and the Hasidism of R. Akiva. Fritz Rothschild wrote of Heschel: “In his writings on religion he combines the yearning for holiness and spirituality of his Hasidic ancestors with the yearning for free inquiry and objective truth of the modern Western scholar.”15

Kadushin’s background was Kaplanian rather than Hasidic.16 But, as Jacob Neusner writes, “Kadushin left Kaplan’s secularism for the sake of his own fidelity to rabbinic Judaism.”17 Kadushin’s “fidelity to rabbinic Judaism” was the sometimes frustrating substructure of both of my classes with him during my years at JTS (1971–75). On several occasions, we students would ask how one might integrate the world of rabbinic value concepts into a modern Judaism. I do not recollect Kadushin’s exact response, but it was probably something like “First make sure that you understand rabbinic Judaism.”

Theodore Steinberg writes that Kadushin’s personal Judaism was firmly rooted in rabbinic Judaism:

On the closing page of Organic Thinking, Kadushin cautiously stated his emerging understanding of the nature of religious change and reinterpretation. Unlike Kaplan, he wrote not of a deliberate, experimental search for modern equivalents of old values—the heart of the Reconstructionist approach—but rather of an intricate, even mysterious process “…whereby the old organic complex is transposed in its entirety to a new level.” In his subsequent books, Kadushin never mentioned the subjects of theological change and modernization, the two central themes of Reconstructionism.

Had Kadushin become a religious conservative? Years later, he reflected on this shift in his thinking, and stated that he had not become a “conservative,” but rather an “unreconstructed partisan of tradition.” His studies convinced him that the classical Judaism of the rabbinic era was neither outmoded nor anachronistic, but, on the contrary, quire durable and perennially relevant.18

All of Kadushin’s works—but especially Worship and Ethics—are great aids to the spiritual life.

From the Tanakh to Modern Judaism

Not only do scholars of Judaism tend to concentrate on one phase of Jewish history, they often seem to feel that it is not valid to mention two different stages in the same breath. It is here that we encounter further common ground between Heschel and Kadushin. Kadushin’s take on midrash, mentioned above, recognizes that connections between biblical peshat and rabbinic derash can be extremely tenuous. The rationale of derash is to emphasize rabbinic value concepts. However, Kadushin argues that “there is no rabbinic concept that does not have its roots in biblical thought.”19 He describes three types of rabbinic concepts, as far as their relationship to the Bible is concerned: First are concepts having conceptual terms that are not to be found in the Bible but are foreshadowed in the Bible. Second, concepts for which the conceptual term is the same as the biblical but with wider, more universal, connotations. And, finally, concepts for which the term appears in the Bible but for which there is no definite connection between the biblical term and the rabbinic term (goy, nes, and tsedakah, for example).

In general, “A living bond unites the Bible with rabbinic thought. Even though rabbinic thought possesses its own concepts, it remains in a state of continuous dependence on the Bible.”20 Many of Heschel’s books span more than one period. The Sabbath draws on biblical, rabbinic, and mystical aspects of Judaism to suggest Shabbat as a spiritual cure for modern Jewry and Western civilization in general.21 God in Search of Man builds a philosophy of Judaism on the entire range of Jewish sources. And Torah min hashamayim focuses on the rabbinic period. But, as baʾaspaqlariyah shel hadorot (“as refracted through the generations” 22) implies, Heschel argues that the approaches of Akiva and Ishmael offer an insightful way of categorizing post-rabbinic Judaism as well. Thus, both Heschel and Kadushin have managed to bridge the gaps between periods of Jewish history.

Kadushin and Heschel on Maimonides

There are both similarities and differences between Kadushin and Heschel on Maimonides. Above, I referred to Kadushin’s criticism of Maimonides on the issue of bein adam lamaqom/ bein adam leḥavero. Although Kadushin points out that Maimonides himself qualifies the dichotomy in the Guide, there are many issues on which Kadushin emphasizes how greatly Maimonides and other philosophers diverge from rabbinic Judaism; see, for example, The Rabbinic Mind on the question of anthropomorphism.23

Heschel wrote a very sympathetic biography of Maimonides.24 Yet he points out that “It was not the codifier and ‘guide’ Maimonides but the commentator Rashi who became the shaper, teacher, and educator of his people; it was not the metaphysics of Maimonides but the Cabala and Hasidism that molded the future.”25 In The Prophets, Heschel clearly diverges from Maimonides’s denial of divine pathos, describing the prophetic response as one of sympathy with the divine pathos.26 Rothschild points out that, on this issue, Heschel “has propounded a truly revolutionary doctrine, challenging the whole venerable tradition of Jewish and Christian metaphysical theology from Philo, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas to Herman Cohen, Etienne Gilson, and Paul Tillich.”27

Torah min hashamayim is a work of research rather than a book of Heschel’s philosophy. Yet, for one who grew up on Man is not Alone and God in Search of Man, reading Torah min hashamayim involves an ongoing search to discover on which issues Heschel’s personal philosophy of Judaism was closer to Akiva or to Ishmael.28 Similarly—regarding Heschel’s numerous citations of the works of Maimonides, often identifying him with the school of R. Ishmael—it is intriguing to speculate on Heschel’s personal preference.29 A systematic explication of this topic is beyond the scope of this article.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ḥazal and Ḥasidut

When Blaise Pascal died in Paris in 1662, found sewn into the lining of his coat was a sheet of paper on which was written: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.” Such a note in the lining of Heschel’s coat might have read “The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ḥazal and Ḥasidut, not of the philosophers and the scholars.” Heschel wrote:

Where an idea is the father of faith, faith must conform to the ideas of the given system. In the Bible the realness of God came first, and the task was how to live in a way compatible with His presence. Man’s coexistence with God determines the course of history.30

There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.31

Although Kadushin did not write a personal philosophy of Judaism, he gave the impression that rabbinic Judaism filled his spiritual needs. He described the nonphilosophical approach to the God of rabbinic Judaism as “normal mysticism.”

There is an experience of God in an act of rabbinic worship. To the individual who says a berakah, God seems so near that he addresses God with the pronoun “Thou,” just as he would address a person facing him. “Thou” is the only word which can express the sense of God’s nearness, yet the feeling of God’s nearness is obviously different from anything the individual may feel when he addresses a fellow human being with the same pronoun…. We have, therefore, called the rabbinic experience of God normal mysticism.32

Heschel and Kadushin seem to be of one mind that experience of God—rather than philosophy—is the essence of Judaism.

Kadushin, Akiva, and Ishmael

Volumes 1 and 2 of Torah min hashamayim were published during Heschel’s lifetime. Those volumes were a pleasure to read, but I felt the lack of a conclusion that put the differences between the schools of Akiva and Ishmael into a conceptual framework. David Feldman expressed this lack in his introduction to Heschel’s posthumously published volume 3:

אלה שהגו בכרכים הראשונים העלו להם ידיעה רחבה בגלגול השיטות—אלא שלא מצאו בזה סיפוק כל צרכם. הם צמאו למשהו יותר קבוע ומכריע, למסקנות יותר מוחלטות של המחבר.³³

Those who studied the first volumes acquired a broad understanding of the two schools—but were left unsatisfied. They were thirsty for something more decisive, for more definitive conclusions of the author.34

But I still felt the lack of a conceptual conclusion after reading that 1990 version of volume 3. In 2021, Bondi published a revised version of volume 3 as part of the republication of the entire set.35 He discovered that significant parts of volume 3 had been omitted, which he restored from Heschel’s manuscripts. But, in spite of Bondi’s restoration (and incisive foreward, chapter introductions, and summaries), I still felt the lack of a top-level conceptual context that would give coherence to each of the two schools.

I then began to reread Torah min hashamayim through the eyes of Kadushin, hoping that perhaps his categories might provide a conceptual context for the differences between the schools of Akiva and Ishmael. So far, I have found only partial success, which I share below. I am not alone in my quest to see Heschel through Kadushin, as attested in a footnote in Shai Held’s Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Call of Transcendence.36

The Otherness of God

In The Rabbinic Mind, Kadushin examines whether Ḥazal were troubled by anthropomorphisms in the Tanakh. “...the Rabbis apparently object to biblical statements about God that appear to limit Him…. ‘And the Lord went before them by day (Exod. 13:21)’—is it possible to say so? Has it not been said: “Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord” (Jer. 23:24)?”37 Kadushin’s conclusion is:

One of the prime characteristics of normal mysticism is…that God is like none other….”38 But though these passages express the idea of the otherness of God, and hence do cultivate it, they do not stress it. The idea, in these instances, only serves as background, and against that background are stressed God’s love and His justice.39

Throughout all of his works, Kadushin is careful to differentiate between rabbinic conceptual terms (here midat hadin, or God’s quality of justice, and midat raḥamim, or God’s quality of love) and his own terminology, such as the “idea” of the otherness of God.

My sense is that the school of Ishmael could be described as emphasizing the otherness of God to a greater extent than the school of Akiva.40 For example:

'ואהבת את ה׳ א-להיך' (דברים ו, ה). לפי פשוטו של מקרא, אהבת א-להים היא כלות הנפש אל הבורא, דבר שבלב. כנגד זה פירשוה בבית מדרשו של רבי ישמעאל כדרך שפירשו את דבר הדביקות: אהבה היא מידת העושים מעשים טובים…כנגד זה פירש רבי עקיבא את הכתוב כפשוטו, ואמר על עצמו: "רחמתיה בכל לבי…" 41

“Love the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:5). According to the plain sense of the text, love of God is the yearning of one’s soul for the Creator, a matter of the heart. But contrary to this, the school of Rabbi Ishmael explained it as they did the matter of clinging to God: love [of God] is the quality of those who perform good deeds. However, Rabbi Akiva explained the verse according to its plain sense, and said of himself: “I loved Him with all my heart.”

And from Heschel’s introduction to Torah min hashamayim:

זרה היתה למשנתו של רבי ישמעאל דעתו של רבי עקיבא, שהקדוש ברוך הוא משתתף בצערן של הבריות, בצרתם של יהודים ובצרה של האומה. דעה זו אינה הולמת את הכבוד, ועלולה להביא לידי כפירה בגבורותיו של הקדוש ברוך הוא. במשנתו של רבי ישמעאל, מידת הדין וגבורותיו של המקום עיקר, ולא מידת הרחמים.42

Rabbi Akiva’s position—that God shares in human pain, in the suffering of Jews, and in the suffering of the nation—was strange to the approach of Rabbi Ishmael. [According to Ishmael,] such a position does not suit God’s majesty and may lead to denying the powers of the Holy One, blessed be He. According to the approach of Rabbi Ishmael, midat hadin and the powers of the Omnipresent are primary, not midat haraḥamim.

It is tempting to generalize the preceding sentence into a claim that Akiva consistently emphasized midat raḥamim and Ishmael midat hadin. Such a generalization might have indicated that Kadushin’s “value concept” terminology is helpful in differentiating between the two schools.43 However, in Heschel’s chapter on bʾemah vepaḥad (“with fear and tembling”), we learn that the dichotomy is not consistent: בפנים שמחות, בפנים מסבירות לרבי ישמעאל; בפנים זועפות, בפנים הדופות לרבי עקיבא (“A pleasant expression on the face of Rabbi Ishmael; an angry expression on the face of Rabbi Akiva”).44 And again of Ishmael: הוא נטה כלפי חסד (“He tended toward lovingkindness”)45

Miracles

Another similarity between Heschel and Kadushin is the concept of miracles. Kadushin describes two phases of nes. One involves miracles that require a change in sidre Bereshit, and the other involves daily miracles. This second phase “also encompasses unusual happenings to the individual and striking events of importance to the nation, but these, too, are such as do not involve any change in sidre Bereshit.” 46 In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel writes:

דרשותיו של ר׳ עקיבא בדרך הפלגת הנסים לא היו תמיד לרצון בעיני חבריו. "וַתַּעַל הַצְּפַרְדֵּעַ וַתְּכַס אֶת אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם" (שמות ח, ב). רבי עקיבא אומר: צפרדע אחת היתה (והיא השריצה) ומלאה את כל ארץ מצרים. אמר לו רבי אלעזר בן עזריה עקיבא, מה לך אצל אגדות? כלה מדברותיך ולך אצל נגעים ואהלות! בעיקר התנגד רבי ישמעאל לדרשותיו אלה של רבי עקיבא.⁴⁷

The midrashim of Rabbi Akiva expanding [biblical] miracles did not always find favor in the eyes of his colleagues. “‘And the frogs [literally: frog] came up and covered the land of Egypt” (Exodus 8:2). Rabbi Akiva said: It was a single frog that spawned and filled the land of Egypt. Elazar the son of Azaria said to him: Akiva, Why are you involved with agadah? Stop speaking; go deal with [impurities related to] skin diseases and tents.” It was mainly Rabbi Ishmael who opposed such midrashim of Rabbi Akiva.

In a footnote to this passage, Heschel cites the pages in The Rabbinic Mind that refer to Kadushin’s description of the “rationalistic tendency” of some of the rabbis regarding the “change in sidre Bereshit” phase of nes, with Kadushin concluding: “The rationalistic tendency is not a dominant one.”48 In God in Search of Man, Heschel also writes of daily miracles:

The profound and perpetual awareness of the wonder of being has become a part of the religious consciousness of the Jew. Three times a day we pray:

We thank Thee…

For Thy miracles which are daily with us,

For Thy continual marvels….

The sense for the “miracles which are daily with us,” the sense for the “continual marvels,” is the source of prayer.49

Communication between Heschel and Kadushin

In April 1939, Heschel received a lifesaving invitation to join the faculty of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, and he reached the shores of America and joined the institution in the spring of 1940. Heschel was at HUC for five years before his appointment as Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at JTS in 1945.50

Kadushin published his first work, The Theology of Seder Eliahu in 1932.51 His following works—Organic Thinking (1938) and The Rabbinic Mind (1952)—were published by JTS.52 However, Kadushin became part of the JTS faculty only in 1960, as Visiting Professor of Ethics and Rabbinic Thought. Kadushin served in this capacity at JTS until his death in 1980.

Kadushin and Heschel corresponded in November 1943 as Kadushin sought to submit his article “Aspects of the Rabbinic Concept of Israel” to the Hebrew Union College Annual (HUCA). Kadushin sent a draft of the article to Heschel, asking him to recommend it for publication in HUCA. In box 3 of the Max Kadushin Papers is Heschel’s cordial response, with comments, and his conclusion: “I should be very glad to recommend your paper to the HUCA.”53 Kadushin’s article appeared in HUCA two years later, even though Kadushin had not implemented Heschel’s comment on Torah and haTorah.54

In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel cites Kadushin’s article. With his exemplary derekh erets, Heschel handles Kadushin’s decision not to implement his 1943 comment as follows: על פי דעתי, "התורה" משמע כל התורה, "תורה" מה שניתן בסיני (“In his opinion, hatorah implies the entire Torah, torah [only] what was given at Sinai”).55 Also intriguing in the 1943 letter is Heschel’s “Some day I hope to have the opportunity of discussing with you the method which you apply in this paper.” The opportunity was certainly there between 1960, when Kadushin joined the JTS faculty and Heschel’s death in 1972. Although I have not yet discovered specific reports of close friendship between Heschel and Kadushin, Michael Graetz writes of the JTS faculty during those years: “There was friendship between all of them…. They lived close to each other, and usually we students would walk them home after Shabbat services (often with an invitation for schnaps or herring, etc.).”56 There is at least one additional cross-reference to Kadushin in Torah min hashamayim.57 In Kadushin’s writings, I have come across two cross-references to works of Heschel.58

The Future of Heschel and Kadushin in Israel

Heschel is Heschel, and most of his major writings are now accessible in Hebrew, with Bondi now preparing a translation of The Prophets. Although it is unlikely that these volumes will become part of high school curricula under the current government, Bondi, Graetz, Green, and others are teaching Heschel to interested adult Israelis. In spite of all that Kadushin has to offer, Holtz’s beʿolam hamaḥshavah shel ḥazal is out of print, with no plans to republish. I would like to translate Worship and Ethics into Hebrew and have begun exploring that option.

From teaching Heschel and Kadushin in Israel, I know that the insights of both can be helpful to Israelis searching for a Judaism that is both intellectually honest and spiritually inspiring. It is important that both become more influential in Israeli society. Are there signs of hope? Are there things we can do to encourage the process? Although Masorti has much in common with Israeli Reform, Israelis with a dati leʾumi background seem to connect more easily with Masorti scholarship than with Reform. As Heschel and Kadushin were both on the JTS faculty, our continuing support of Schechter and Masorti congregations is certainly a part of the process. The upcoming Rabbinical Assembly convention in Israel will certainly contribute to the process.

The Israeli world has changed drastically since I wrote my first draft of this article in the summer of 2023. On October 8, my wife Noa and I drove out of our (Lebanese-border) Kibbutz Malkiya, warned that what happened on the Gaza border could also happen up north. We are now at Kibbutz Kramim in the eastern Negev, a relatively safe area. What brought us to Kramim was the combination of a government-funded stay at their country lodging with wanting to help Noa’s daughter and her family, who live there. We are also developing friendships with refugees from the Gaza envelope to whom Kramim has opened its doors and its hearts. Although Kramim is not a kibbuts dati, it has an active beit knesset. It is a value-laden and pluralistic kibbutz, with members of all ʿedot and levels of observance. Israelis like those at Kramim give me further hope for the future of Israeli Judaism.

Jonathan Matt was ordained at JTS in 1975, and made Aliyah that summer. At times of peace, he and his wife Noa live at Kibbutz Malkiya, on the Lebanese border.

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