Two Prophets of American Faith Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Joshua Heschel were from different centuries and traditions. They both speak clearly to our dispirited world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Joshua Heschel. (Emerson from Culture Club via Getty Images; Heschel from Everett Collection Inc via Alamy)
Welcome back to our America at 250 faith series, where Free Press writers reflect on belief, history, and the freedoms that shape American life. On Wednesday, Matthew Walther wrote about our country’s religious kaleidoscope—and the history that birthed it. Today, Rabbi David Wolpe reflects on how two very brilliant but very different religious writers—the Boston Brahmin Emerson and Polish Hasidic émigré Heschel—strike so many similar notes of American faith. There’s no better moment to bring these “Apostles of Amazement” into your life. —The Editors
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and raised within the liberal Protestant culture of New England. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, scion of two Hasidic dynasties. Emerson was born into his language, crafting sentences whose sturdy majesty shaped the American idiom. Heschel learned English as an adult yet he, too, grew into an extraordinary American writer. Emerson left his position as a pastor and became an independent lecturer. Heschel remained a devout rabbi his entire life, tied to an academic institution, producing books of scholarship in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as more popular works in English...
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