Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness.

Abraham Joshua Heschel Prophetic Witness Edward K. Kaplan and Sammuel H. Dresner Yale University Press, $35, 402 pp.

This book is simply stunning! I know that it goes against the rules of reviewing to make such an uncritical statement, but I can't help it. What Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner have done in this biography is so remarkable that the regular rules of reviewing have to be suspended.

The book is remarkable on two counts. The first is the incredible research on display. It reads as if every scrap of paper that Abraham Heschel ever wrote or that anyone else ever wrote referring to him has somehow been found by these two. The sheer volume of the details of Heschel's life in Warsaw, in Vilna, in Berlin, and in Frankfort is astonishing. For example, there are photographs of Heschel at every age and that have never been published before. Kaplan and Dresner have unearthed the very first hiddushei torah that the young Heschel wrote in his childhood and have interviewed people who were able to describe the home and the street of his youth. They don't just tell us that he traveled from New York to Cincinnati; they say: "shortly before midnight on 9 April 1940, Heschel boarded an all-night train to Cincinnati, Ohio. He arrived at Hebrew Union College the next afternoon and settled in a dormitory room, the lodgings Morgenstern had promised."

Tracking down every detail of Heschel's life, every postcard and letter that he wrote, is in itself an enormous achievement. But this in itself could have led to a petty and a pedantic book. The authors do much more than accumulate data. They have a profound understanding of Heschel's inner life and they use all this information in order to craft a powerful portrait of a human being. For example, I knew that Heschel left Warsaw and moved to Vilna in his late teens. I never understood the reason: that it was in order to make contact with the world outside without embarrassing his family. I knew that Heschel was lonely in Berlin, but I didn't realize the depth of the poverty that he endured or the isolation he must have felt, living between two worlds, learning Western philosophy while holding on bravely to his Jewish commitment and to its central affirmation--that God is real and not just a symbol, that God cares, that God reaches out, and that God speaks--ideas that were absurd to his philosophy teachers who were willing to grant God the status of a hypothesis but not of a real being.

I also knew that Heschel had an ambivalent relationship to Martin Buber, but the book brings that ambivalence out clearly by letting us read the letters and even the postcards that Heschel wrote to Buber, who was richer, older, more famous, and more powerful than he was. Heschel wrote with deference but with the courage to affirm his own faith and to challenge the master. I knew that the Hebrew Union College had rescued Heschel and a number of others from Nazi Europe and I knew that Heschel was forever grateful. I didn't know how difficult a task that rescue was, how stubbornly Julian Morgenstern, president of the college, had to lobby the State Department until he got the visas for the teachers and students that he was determined to save, and therefore why Heschel never forgot what Hebrew Union College did for him.

There is material in this book for a dozen novels. One would tell how the prince of a Hassidic dynasty became a Yiddish poet. One would tell how a Yiddish poet somehow learned enough German and math and literature to gain admittance to a university in Berlin. One would tell how a scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy in the university became a comforter and a teacher to the bewildered Jews of Germany in the time of the Nazis. And one would tell about how all these different facets of his education came together to produce the mind that arrived in America, a mind trained and ready to teach reverence for the human being, in theory and in practice, to Jews and to all America.

Some stories in this book are so dramatic that only the authors' meticulous attention to detail makes them credible. When Heschel was twelve or thirteen--his father had died a few years before--the hassidim treated this child prodigy as if he were already their rebbe. But Heschel didn't want to be a rebbe; he wanted to enter the modern world. He knew that the gateway to the modern world was to learn Polish and so he begged his mother to buy him a Polish grammar. She did and he devoured it quickly. When he asked her to buy him a second volume, she turned him down, because they were so poor, and because she understood what learning Polish meant. He came to the synagogue that Sabbath very upset, and decided to ask one hassid who prayed there and who was fond of him to give him the money for a Polish grammar. But when he walked into the synagogue, Sabbath had already begun. And one does not ask for material things on the Sabbath. Even though it was Sabbath, Heschel was so distraught that he came to the hassid after the services and asked for the money with which to buy the book. The next morning the hassid handed him a book of the sayings of Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz. Heschel opened the book--and there was the money between the pages! Heschel had never in his life seen anyone handle money on the Sabbath. He says that he dropped the book, the way one would drop hot fire. And he asked the hassid: How could you do such a thing? How could you give me money on the Sabbath? The hassid explained: violating the Sabbath is a sin, a great sin. But melancholy, depression, on the Sabbath is an even greater sin. A person who is depressed cannot really observe the Sabbath. And so I gave you the money, even though it was the Sabbath, so that you would know that you have it to use after the Sabbath.

Heschel never got over that act of friendship. It taught him that observance is not an end in itself, that it must always be accompanied by intention, and that lifting the spirits of another human being is a mitsvah. Forever afterwards he fought for an understanding of Judaism that included law and love in inseparable combination.

There is more, much more, in this fascinating biography, which traces Heschel's life from his earliest years in Warsaw to the day he arrived in Cincinnati. Now we eagerly await the second volume, which will recount the story of how the man who was raised in a shtiebl became a moral force in the civil rights movement in America, a negotiator with the pope in Rome, a spokesman for the Jews of Russia, and "Father Abraham" to so many Catholic and Protestant theologians. That second volume should also tell how Heschel was able to translate the central insights that he learned in his childhood into a language that spoke to the minds and souls of so many in this land.

Jack Riemer is the rabbi of Congregation Beth Tikvah of Boca Raton. He is the chair of the National Rabbinic Network, a support system for rabbis across the denominational lines, and the co-editor of So That Your Values Live On (Jewish Lights).