// interview //
Fall 2013
The Prophetic Call of Truth and Chessed:
An Interview with Dr. Cornel West
Featuring Dr. Cornel West, with The Current’s Adam Shapiro and David Fine. Introduction written by Adam Shapiro.
A public intellectual like Cornel West is almost expected to end his career by fading into the sunset at a university like Princeton. But approaching sixty years old, West decided to leave Princeton and return this past fall to the Union Theological Seminary where he started his career 36 years ago (and is rumored to be taking a hefty pay cut in the process). Seemingly contradicting his very job title, the new UTS Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice is in the midst of teaching a course and writing a book not on Christianity, but on Judaism. Specifically, about the Kabbalistic and Hassidic writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th Century European rabbi who made his home at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, right across the street from West’s UTS office.
When The Current sat down with Dr. West and inquired whether his interest in Jewish thought or Rabbi Heschel was at all motivated by some form of pluralism, he quickly swatted the notion aside: “Judaism constitutes a moral revolution in the human species—you don’t get it in Homer, Aristotle, Plato or any of the Pagans—that to be human is to spread Hessed… It’s a whole new conception of how human beings ought to engage the world.” It’s admittedly incongruous to watch West, with his trademark afro and his rhythmic manner of speaking, use the Hebrew word for loving-kindness so naturally. But as a Christian, West doesn’t actually view Judaism as foreign but as fundamental to his religious identity. To illustrate this point, West asked The Current to name the Fifth Commandment and before being able to put our Day School knowledge to good use, West bellows: “Honour thy father and mother!” and continues to explains that “Christianity has been wrestling with a sort of spiritual oedipal complex because Judaism is both father and mother to Christianity. And a recognition of that is being true to oneself.”
Looking around Dr. West’s office, the tomes lining his wall are dizzyingly disparate. Books about Hegel compliment Hendrix biographies. Heschel however occupies a particularly special place for West, who he describes as one of his three deepest “soul mates” along with Anton Chekhov and John Coltrane. As he reflects on his first time reading Heschel as a twenty year old at Harvard, he recalls being struck by the beauty and power of Heschel’s prose: “he’s a poet in a deep sense… Most importantly, he’s a poet in the way Shelley talks about poetry, as an unacknowledged legislator of the world… the poet is not just a versifier but a human being who has the courage to use imagination and empathy to create an alternative world better than the present one. And he wants us to stay in contact with that other world even as we engage.”
It’s precisely this ability to shape the present while staying rooted in the past that really resonates with West. He draws a comparison between Heschel’s ideology and the Sankofa, the traditional African American symbol of a bird looking backwards, and explains that you must “refuse to look forward until you first look back. You make contact with the best of those in your past first, then you move forward. That’s why every text by Heschel starts with, which is typical of every Talmudic scholar”—West now changes his voice excitedly and starts pretending to sift through an imaginary book as if acting out the role of a Talmudist—”’let’s see what all the rebbes had to say and gather all the wisdom and sagacious formulations and then relate it to new circumstances and conditions.’ Yes! That’s the way we ought to proceed… Tradition makes that big a difference.” At the same time, tradition alone isn’t good enough for West and his admiration for Heschel stems from the fact that he was also open to at the time new and radical ideas, like girls having bat mitzvahs and women entering the Rabbinate.
As the divide between African American and Jewish communities has grown so wide that no one’s even talking about it, West is looking back. The famous picture of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel walking together during the Selma Civil Rights March is something, “which took courage and a willingness to sacrifice”. West reflects on Rabbi Heschel sending a bold telegram to President Kennedy ahead of a meeting he was mean to attend at the White House, in which he wrote religious leaders, “forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes.” But both the telegram and the famous picture of King and Heschel happened fifty years ago, and West has no illusions about how things have developed. He wistfully reflects on the fact that “no white, Jewish or any other leader with high visibility would send that telegram to a president today”. While that may largely be so, Cornel West has taken on his soul mate’s mantle down the street from where Heschel once taught— stridently criticizing another young, popular American president in the name of truth and Hessed.
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Current: You first discovered Rabbi Heschel while you were studying at Harvard. What was that first encounter like?
West: It was in the bookstore and it was “God in Search of Man”. I was in Cambridge on a fellowship, I must have been about 20 years old. And when I first read him I said to myself, here’s a soulmate: he is a poet and a philosopher who is not just religious but profoundly spiritual, he was a scholar and I found out later he was also an activist.
Current: You never met him, did you?
West: No, I never did. I wish I had met him.
Current: In that first reading, do you remember what was the first passage or idea that grabbed you?
West: I just started reading the book through. The language is just so rich. The density of meaning, beauty in use of the metaphor, and the rhythm. He’s a poet in a deep sense, know what I mean? And most importantly, he’s a poet in the way Shelley talks about poetry, as an unacknowledged legislator of the world. He was conceiving of a different world, a better world than the one I was living in. That’s what every great poet does. So the poet is not just a versifier but a human being who has the courage to use imagination and empathy to create an alternative world better than the present one. And he wants us to stay in contact with that other world even as we engage. So it’s not escape, but it is alternatives.
Current: An appreciation of the ineffable?
West: An appreciation of the ineffable, of awe, of radical amazement, of wonder. All of the childlike things we adults like to cast away.
Current: Was he the first major Jewish writer that you encountered?
West: Well, you got Hebrew scripture– a whole lotta competition there, brother! I grew up in Black Baptist Church though, man, so I’ve been wrestling with the Jewish poetic genius: Job, Jonah, Song of Songs and we can go on and on. But it’s true into the modern. I had read Buber. But you gotta keep in mind, I’ve got Jewish poetic geniuses like Stanley Cavell, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Wittgenstein who I never met but for the others, these are people I’d studied with, been in their classes and read much of their work. But the thing about Heschel is, he’s one of the great gifts of Eastern European Jewry to the New World. Like Berlin, Gershwin, probably Sondheim’s mother and father came from the same place. He’s part of this whole wave of great gifts of Eastern European Jewry to the USA. But his foot remained rooted in it, in his Hasidism, his piety– by piety I mean remembrance, reverence and resistance all at the same time. Memory is fundamental to Heschel in keeping alive the best of a great tradition. See, I think prophetic Judaism in general is not just a great tradition but constituted a moral revolution in the human species– you don’t get it in Homer, Aristotle, Plato or any of the Pagans– that to be human is to spread loving-kindness, hesed: especially to the orphan, widow, mother, father, 37 references to love of neighbour, one great reference to love of stranger. It’s a whole new conception of how human beings ought to engage the world. And Heschel builds on that.
Current: You come back for the first year to UTS, did you debate whether you should be teaching the writings of a Black or Christian thinker rather than a Rabbi?
West: For me, there’s three fundamental soul mates that I have. The first would be Chekhov, the second would be Coltrane and the third would be Heschel. The fourth would be Sondheim and the fifth would be Tennessee Williams in a way. But those are the top 3. And I figure it’s the time in my life to start engaging my soul mates. I can’t teach a course on Chekhov, that’s like teaching a course on my mother. It’s just too close to you. Coltrane is the same way. Heschel has been the same way for about forty years, so I figure time to make my move. It’s like the CC course at Columbia, right? The legacy of Athens, Socratic legacy, legacy of Sophocles, legacy of Aristophanes. The questioning of Socrates on the one hand, that unbelievable look in the darkness, that kind of hard steely realism of Sophocles and then Aristophanes the comic with the frank speech. But then the legacy of Jerusalem, and that’s Judaism. You see, Christianity–and I’m a Christian, a prophetic Christian, that we are a rich footnote to prophetic Judaism; we fell in love with a particular Jewish brother, it wasn’t Hillel. Hillel was a good candidate. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, and he is not only rooted in, but comes from, the very seed of prophetic Judaism with all of the richness that goes into it. But it’s a very rich footnote because there’s love of neighbour, then love of enemy. Then another Jewish brother comes along and tries to broaden it to gentiles and everybody else. But it’s still the spirit of prophetic Judaism that sits at the center of the best of it. Even though of course, you know, Christianity has a very vicious anti-Jewish hatred that’s part and parcel of its formation, precisely because of those early years when the struggle goes on about ‘will the Jews accept or not accept,’ you see.
Current: So, would you say a deeper understanding of Heschel leads to a deeper understanding of the Christian self?
West: Absolutely. I mean, Christianity has been wrestling with a kind of spiritual oedipal complex, and Islam in it’s own way too. Christianity and Islam were given birth: Mom and Dad were Judaism. Now, what’s the fifth commandment? Honour thy father and mother! Christianity, will you honor Judaism? Islam, will you honor Judaism? Which is not to say you downplay your Socratic energy. Of course you’re going to critically engage. But I mean, Judaism critically engages itself, that’s part of it’s whole history from Mishnah, Talmud, commentary which is the dominant Jewish way of intellectually engaging the world. But the two children have to acknowledge Mom and Dad, because Judaism is both. And so in that sense, it’s a matter of being true to oneself. And see, as a Black man, as a Jesus-loving, free Black man, that when we Africans got off the ship and were looking for ways of preserving our sanity and humanity, many of us found it in Hebrew scripture. Daniel was the second most popular spiritual, only Jesus was more popular than Daniel. And Moses was number 3.
Current: The exodus narrative was Rabbi Heschel’s entrance into the civil rights movement, right? How do you think we can continue to share in that narrative today?
West: Well, I think Heschel’s message, which is in some ways is tied to the Exodus narrative, but is also tied to a larger narrative of freedom: freedom of self, freedom of community, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and so on. But for Heschel there are two fundamental pillars: how do you shatter callousness to catastrophe and how do you shatter indifference to criminality? And the Exodus is about a catastrophe. The Jewish experience begins with the catastrophic: it’s a vicious, imperial, colonial situation. And there’s going to be movement, deliverance and then remembrance. So, remember when you were in a catastrophic situation under the Egyptians. So that, you say to yourself- and here’s the best of secular and religious Jews in the pre-modern, medieval and modern world– is trying to shatter any kind of callousness to catastrophe. It could be impending ecological catastrophe, political catastrophe, social catastrophe, economic catastrophe of poverty, spiritual catastrophe, loss of your mother, betrayal of your girlfriend, I mean whatever it is. All those are catastrophic in that way, you see. You think of Kafka, that first line of The Metamorphosis. There’s that Jewish preoccupation with catastrophe! Gregor wakes up and finds himself transformed into an ugly, foul vermin. How you gonna deal with the catastrophe, Kafka? Are you gonna still have patience and perseverance? Are you gonna still love your sister Gretchen who plays the violin? Are you gonna still reach out to your parents? You see that hesed still working. And Kafka is not, in any way, religiously Jewish but he is profoundly Jewish in trying to wrestle with the catastrophic.
Current: What type of catastrophes do you feel the Jewish people are wrestling with today and how does that relate to other communities?
West: Well as citizens of the world, and that’s a broad metaphor because there is no world government. But just as inhabitants who care and are decent in the world, all the catastrophes I talked about like ecological catastrophes and so forth. But in terms of specifically Jewish identity, wrestling with the Israeli occupation and how do you tell a story that recognizes jumping out of a burning house that was Jew-hating Europe. Some Jews were already there, others landing in a land where there is also some Arabs. And the fundamental question of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Heschel as well: coexist versus dominate, coexist versus subjugate? In light of thousands of years of vicious treatment, pogroms, attacks, assault, murder. Therefore, security and safety somehow are going have to live alongside justice for others. Because you’re going to have to have security and safety, otherwise there’s not going to be a Jewish people. At all. And that’s crucial and something the rest of the world has to come to terms with. But on the other hand, the very tradition that produced you, at its best it’s saying that there’s hesed and there’s justice. And then you’ve got an internal debate among a Jewry, one third of whom have been annihilated, how do we keep alive the best of our tradition and also acknowledge that we’ve got some folk who are not being treated fairly.
Current: Heschel has high aspirations for Israel and Zionism. Do you understand where Heschel’s coming from? Do you like the Zionist idea in the broadest sense?
West: Well, I like the quest for self determination of any people because I’m a deep democrat. But at the same time I’m suspicious of any form of nationalism. So I’m in a creative tension. Why? Because of course as a deep democrat, I know democracy at its best is about self determination but it enters the modern world in the shell of the Nation-State. So democracy becomes subordinate to the Nation-State. Nationalism is the dominant ideology of modernity: American nationalism, Italian, German, even Black nationalism. Well, all these nationalisms I’m suspicious of. Because I’m an internationalist and a deep democrat and a Christian tied to internationalism. Which means for me, the cross is unarmed truth and unconditional love for everybody. But I need to be realistic enough to know I have to deal with nationalism. So, I live in America and while I’m not going to be a fervent American nationalist, I’m going to accent the moral, spiritual and political elements of American nationalism that are progressive. Like Martin King, Heschel, and others. Same would be true for Zionism. I look at Zionism as a form of nationalism, part of a modern nationalist project. And within that nationalist project there will be those who are very progressive tied to truth, justice for everybody; and then there’s going to be chauvinistic versions. And most likely the dominant form of most nationalisms– American, Italian, German, Jewish, Black, Chinese, whatever, I’m going to be profoundly suspicious of. Now I don’t fully agree with some of the things that Abraham Joshua Heschel has to say about Zionism, though I fully understand it.
Current: Where do you diverge?
West: I think if he had lived longer and had a chance to see the occupation unveil. We know from Susannah that he had some very critical things to say about how some of our Arab brothers and sisters were being treated, there’s no doubt about that. His hypersensitivity for those who suffer no matter what color they are, no matter what culture, I think would have led him to become much more critical of the occupation, it would not have meant he was not a Zionist, he would have remained a Zionist, but he would have become much more critical I think. Because I connect my critique of any nationals of any nationalism with domination, my hunch is he probably would have had more to say. At the very end of his life, he and Susannah had long discussions on the subject but he didn’t get a chance to publish it.
Current: As a realistic internationalist in the present day context, do you feel like the occupation has condemned the notion of a Jewish nation state?
West: I used to debate with my dear brother Edward Said on this. Edward had reached the conclusion that you could only have one secular state. And I think at a broad normative level, I would agree with Edward but I can’t conceive of how Jewish safety could be procured in such a state. That’s what I used to push him on all the time. At the deepest level of me, I believe that Jewish babies have the same status as Palestinian babies. No matter what. And so, as much as I could at a broad normative level say it would be nice if there is one secular state where the rights of all would be protected, I can’t conceive of how that could be done. And because of that, I still view myself as promoting a two-state solution where there are rights and liberties promoted on both sides. Where there is self determination in a state that puts a priority on the safety and security of Jews without having to subjugate anyone else. And I would have the same kind of challenge for the Palestinian state. I’d want it to be equal for everyone, and I’d recognize that there’d have to be borders that would have to be internationally coordinated. But the issue of the specificity of Jewish safety and security is something that I think has weight for me. Even as the Palestinian quest for justice for me is fundamental. And so I’m kind of caught betwixt and between here.
Current: From your perspective, would BDS help or hinder this outcome?
West: Depends how it’s done, what the spirit of it is. If in fact it has a King-like spirit or a Gandhi-like spirit in which you continually reach out across the bridge and there’s significant Jewish and Israeli participation, then I think it could be a force for good. If it’s done in a hateful, spiteful spirit, I couldn’t go with it.
Current: Many people in the Jewish community see the BDS movement as only moving towards a one state solution. And the BDS movement often quotes you in their literature, on their websites so people see you quoted often by them and wonder what your involvement exactly is?
[Editor’s Note: In a separate follow-up with The Current, Dr. West clarified that he would rather have said below in the first sentence of his response, “Only under these conditions have I supported the movement…”]
West: Oh I see; no, I haven’t come out and supported the movement. If they support me saying Palestinians have the same status as Jews and Jews have the same status as Palestinians then they should absolutely quote me. If they say Israeli occupation ought to come to an end, absolutely! But they should also say that the killing of innocent Jewish brothers and sisters by Hamas are crimes against humanity in the same way that the occupation for me is a crime against humanity. But people will be selective in what they have to say in that regard. But I haven’t made a stand one way or the other on it, because there are so many voices. Some of the voices are more King-like and Gandhi-like and some of the voices are hateful and spiteful. And therefore I tend to be reluctant in coming down one way or the other.
Current: How should we as Jews deal with power, either in Israel or in America? Is it possible to be powerful and righteous?
West: Well, back to Heschel here. On one hand, he’s got the Kotzker. This is one of the great poles of Hasidism: Questioning how do you discard mendacity and mediocrity and how do you disregard self-regard? And these are relative ideals, never to be fully lived but something to be aspired and strived towards. Then you got the Ba’al Shem Tov on the other pole. These are the two great poles. You see, for me, Hasidism is one of the great movements of the modern world. It’s not just a Jewish affair, at all. Because you’re talking about a people who’ve already been led by false messiahs, you’ve got folk who are devastated economically, socially, and politically; and given all that terror and trauma, they generate the Ba’al Shem! Hey man! It doesn’t get too much deeper than that. When you’re hated in that way and you still produce a man of love like that? Or when you’re pushed against a corner in that way and you get the Kotzker? The Kotzker Rebbe is more radical in terms of his questioning than Hume’s skepticism or Descartes’ skepticism. Descartes’ is methodological skepticism and Hume’s skepticism allows him to still play backgammon when he doesn’t get the answer. The Kotzker ends up in seclusion for twenty years. He’s living this stuff. So, how do you talk about power on one hand and righteous on the other? Well Heschel says, maybe the dominant myth of Hasidism is that the truth is buried in the ground, but the thing is, we can’t get to the grave to find out what that truth is. But in the meantime all we got is the Ba’al Shem Tov, love, spontaneity, joy and so forth. And we’re forever pulled, forever pulled. And how does that relate to the political? Well it means you’re going to have a healthy suspicion of the operations of power, but at the same time you have to recognize that the world is a very dark place and therefore you have to have strong mechanisms of accountability for that operation of power. And so, every once in a while we might produce a Lincoln. And we know Barack Obama is no Lincoln. He’s lucky to be a Black version of Clinton. And Clinton is the masterful opportunist of our time, not a lot of principles. And Barack Obama is an opportunist. The speeches have some beautiful words and some beautiful ideals. He even invokes brother Martin in the speeches.
Current: He used King’s Bible.
West: Oh yeah, oh my gosh. We won’t even go into that. You know I’d just go ballistic! But people think I’m putting the brother down, I’m not putting him down. He is what he does. He’s Wall Street, Geithner, Summers, it’s banks versus homeowners, it’s drones, it’s the militarism and the National Defense Authorization Act. You detain American citizens without due trial and then you trot out your attorney general who says ‘due process is different than judicial process’. Please! My god, if Republicans said something like that The New York Times would go crazy. And actually, The New York Times has been somewhat principled about this thing. Which is surprising to me because usually they kowtow to the democrats in a way that I think is unprincipled. But we gotta keep pressure on Barack Obama in this regard.
Current: How do you do that from a place where you read Heschel’s poetry, and I think it comes through Dr. King, and you can be critical, and have righteous indignation, but it comes from a place of love–how do you do that?
West: Heschel really believes in this deeply Hassidic notion of not humiliating people in front of them to see their face blush. But rather, trying to have a righteous indignation that does disclose some painful truths, but is not personal. It’s about the deed and the subject matter.
Now again this is a regulative ideal, because you know I mean a lot of people say that Heschel really was hateful and spiteful. I don’t think so but he’s a human being so there probably was a number of instances.
And a whole lot of people say, “you must really hate Obama because you didn’t talk about Clinton in the way you talk about Obama. You call Obama a war criminal, you didn’t call Clinton a war criminal.” And I would say, well, in Clinton’s case, when you use that kind of language you have to be very careful. And refusing to stop a genocide in Africa, that doesn’t make somebody a war criminal, that just makes them cold and callous.
But when you know that your drones that you authorized have already produced 216 deaths of innocent people, you figure: okay three girls here, six girls, seven, nine, fifeteen–but you reach a certain point that you know it’s just collateral damage. You’re already at 216 children. I’m not talking about Bin Laden, that’s different. I mean Bin Laden being killed, that’s a different thing, I can understand that. But not the children, you see, and it continues every day. And so that’s part of my own defense in terms of why I would use that kind of language toward him, and that’s why I tie him to Nixon and tie him to the carpet bombing in Vietnam. I could tie him to Johnson, I could tie him to Bush.
I don’t really hate the brother, I don’t hate Barack Obama. In fact I would stand in the way if someone messed with his family or someone messed with him as a human being. And when Fox News at its worst tells lies about him, in the name of Kutzker, who is critical of lies and mendacity, you have to defend the truth and say, no you’re telling lies on the man, and quit lying about him, and defend him in that sense. A lot of people don’t really accent my defense of him vis-a-vis the right wing. It’s much more my critique of him from the left.
Current: What about those who say that the drone strikes and the more operations that we’ve seen under Obama are required for national security? There are many people, and obviously the Obama administration thinks this, so, again, you as that realistic internationalist, someone who recognizes the need for a nation-state, the need for nations to protect themselves, how does that figure into your critique?
West: Well, for one I want to affirm the fact that we do need to protect ourselves. We have to come up with various strategies and tactics, informed by some moral ideals that generate security and safety on behalf of Americans. But, you don’t do that with strategies and tactics that end up producing the killing of thousands of innocent people.
Now brother Martin used to say the bombs dropped in Vietnam landed in America, and tore up poor whites in Appalachia, had landed in poor brown barrios, poor black ghettos and so forth, and he’s right about that. Not just in terms of military budget generating more money that could be spent on education, jobs, so on, but in a deeply spiritual sense.
This is how Heschel used a wonderful line in that last book of his, where it says, “lying is the lynching of the soul.” You probably remember that line. It jumps out like so many lines in Heschel. Lying is the lynching of the soul and when you begin to live that lie there’s a soullessness. And you lose the soul of any democratic experiment when you think in the name of security that you can continually produce strategies and tactics that yield the state-sponsored murder, state-sanctioned execution of innocent people, especially some children. So you can have all the safety and security in the world without a soul.
This is part of the struggle in Israel right now. If in fact the occupation became so successful, so efficient that it produced safety and security, on the one hand I’ll say, I want the safety and security of my Jewish brothers and sisters, but the soul of the Israeli state will be so lynched, scarred, and bruised and tarred if you continue to subjugate a people in that way. And of course the great Israeli writers talk about this for a long time, ever since ’67 they’ve been the main ones. Because you can feel it in the society you can feel it in the homes, so forth and so on.
Martin said the same thing about the United States in the ‘60s, Vietnam as well as in America with Jim Crow. And so there’s that spiritual dimension that even the international realists, de Tocqueville talked about this in terms of the morals and the manners and the spirit of democracy. There’s something to be gained by giving weight and gravitas to the spirit and the soul of a nation relative to the ways it goes about generating its safety and security for its citizens.
Current: So let’s go back to Heschel for a bit, and his political activity. There’s a famous photo of him with Dr. King and that’s often seen as a source of pride in the Jewish community today.
West: —and it should be, it should be.
Current: —so in that context, considering that heritage, do we have the right to feel that pride?
West: Absolutely. Ever since 1964 when the white youth went down into Jim Crow gutbucket American South, fifty percent of the students who went down were Jewish students, and we know some of those precious Jewish students were killed. So, yes, there’s a good, good, good reason, good basis for that pride. Very much so.
The question is, that’s fifty years ago, and what are we doing now to build on that tremendous tradition ofHessed, and what I mean by Hessed, and the reason why I keep coming back to Hessed is that it’s not just about justice. Justice is very important, but you see that Heschel was like Martin King, like Coltrane, like Muriel Rukeyser, who is one of the great prophets of the 20th century, a secular Jewish sister, he was a militant for gentleness and a subversive for sweetness and a radical for tenderness. And of course Susannah would tell you how tender he was.
You usually don’t get this in the lives of a lot of radicals. A lot of radicals are strong in the public, but in private are cold as can be. Heschel believed in tenderness and sweetness and gentleness.
Current: You see so many of the other activists who are fighting the same causes you are, do it from a place of pure anger, who are secular, do you think that’s it? That’s the element? The spirituality of Dr. King or Heschel that allowed them to do it from a place of love?
West: Absolutely. It’s like I had my class yesterday, I started the class off, we listened to Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” that’s his signature song. One of the greatest jazz musicians in the history of the genre first brought in Billie Holiday, of course. When you listen to “Nightmare,” and you know Shaw is really Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, you know like Berlin and Gershwin they’ve got different names now. They Americanize their names. And you see how dark things are, then the tenderness of that clarinet comes in, and wow, that’s like the blues, but there’s a longer history to the blues, it’s not 244 years of slavery and ninety of Jim Crow. No, the Jewish blues—2,000 years.
That’s what klezmer and all of these different elements manifest in Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” and he saw it as a Hassidic soul being expressed. Now, for Heschel, Heschel is more Hassidic than Shaw can conceive of. He’s from the royal dynasty of spiritual giants, the rebbes all the way back on both sides. Masha and Rivka. I mean it goes all the way back. You see what I mean. Yet you feel that tenderness in the Shaw that you see in Heschel’s poetry and his language, and his sensitivity and so forth, and that’s what I think separates him and Martin and the others from a lot of the other radicals.
There’s a difference between hating injustice and loving people. You can hate injustice and be a radical, but a deeply genuine radical both hates injustice but loves the people, and even loves the people committing the injustice, because they have the potential to be better. And hatred of them trumps their ability or potential to change. What that does in the end is of course it puts you in the same category, you know why? Because sooner or later each one of us is going to treat somebody unjustly. If they freeze that moment in our lives, we’re just gangsters for life, we’re gangsters for life.
If I say, “Oh, brother Adam, I’ve seen Adam do some wonderful things,” and they say, “no, no we’ve got him, we’ve got him.” If I say, “I’ve seen brother David do some wonderful things,” they say, “no we’ve got David stuck.” No, not it at all, David and Adam got potential to be better.
Current: We share this tenderness and love, and from a dark place of our 2,000 years, and two-hundred and something years. What has happened since the friendship of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel that maybe on our part we’ve become indifferent, and I think that there’s a sense on the other side that “those 2,000 years are not the same as our 200 years, you have no right to identify”--
West: —well they are different.
Current: —but how do we get past--
West: —well one, we got very different peoples. During the 2,000 years you got a Jewish idenity that’s predicated on literacy, it’s predicated on access to texts, it’s predicated on interpretation of texts, it’s predicated on skills requisite to engaging commentary and so forth.
Whereas for black folk, we just learned how to read in the 1860s, four percent of our people were literate under slavery. And because of the vicious forms of anti-Jewish discrimination so many Jews were pushed into the cities when the cities were not the center, and yet modernity unveils in such a way that the urban centers become the very place where you have access to resources. Well we’re country folk until the 1930s, that’s not that long.
So, basically we’re country folk, whereas the history of Jews is much more complicated vis-a-vis urban centers and rural centers, and so on. So you get letters on one hand, urbanity on the other hand, very different. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of overlap, and of course when it comes to creating American popular culture, it’s a Black-Jewish thing. It’s Sondheim and Ellington.
Current: So what’s gone wrong today?
West: Well what’s happening is one, of course you got the triumph of our dear brother Podhoretz’s ideology, making it, making it, making it, which is not a Jewish thing, it’s an American thing. Money, money, money, cash, cash, cash, status, status, status, wealth, wealth, wealth, living large and living large, trophy wives and trophy husbands, that’s America to the core. But Podhoretz in the ‘60s said, “what? All this talk about justice among the Jewry? We’ve been duped! Let’s make it, let’s make it. Let’s be Americans like the Americans are Americans.”
No. Heschel, already crying in the grave. All of that blood, sweat, and tears, just for American Jews to make it? No, great-great-grandmom says, “Hessed, remember when, this is fleeting. They said that in Alexandria, they said that in Weimar, there’s been other moments where we’ve said now we can really make it and become part and parcel, no, there is no promised land for the Jews.”
That’s part of the voices. I resonate with those voices, you see. You are still in exile in America. “I wouldn’t know that.” You really are, don’t be duped. But the acceptance, the movement into the upper-middle-classes, now you got some top dogs, right? You’ve got a number of top dogs now, right? “Oh, this must be the place.” No, this is not the place. Your home is in your texts. Your home is in your relationships. Your home is in theHessed, your love. Your home is in your service. It’s not in your suburban spaces, not in the big jobs you have, it’s not in your big bank account, whether it’s here or the Cayman Islands. And this is of course a message for the world, it’s not just for Jews. But it is also for Jews that we all can be in some ways seduced by the rule of money in the land of dollars, seduced by the wrong things, what traditionally we call idolatry.
And so you figure, “No God before me,” but also that Fifth Commandment, the favorite commandment of Chekhov, “Honor thy mother and thy father,” and I’m not just talking about your immediate ones. Where’s your ancestor appreciation? Heschel always begins at ancestor appreciation. Black folk call it sankofa bird. You refuse to look forward until you first look back. You make contact with the best of those in your past, then you move forward.
That’s why in every text by Heschel, which is typical for any Talmudic scholar, “let’s see what all the rebbes have to say and let’s gather all the wisdom and sagacious formulations, and then relate to new circumstances and conditions.” That’s the way we ought to proceed. Not just Hassidic Jews but I think that’s how all of us ought to proceed.
Tradition makes that big of a difference. But also, being open to the new makes that big of a difference. That’s why Heschel for example, he supported Sussanah having her bar mitzvah, and supported women in the rabbinical order. Now that’s a radical break from his past, because when he was a little boy, he’d walk in and everybody would stand up and the women would walk out of the room. He came a long way. That’s part of the best of America. Because America has something to teach Heschel and the rest of us too. That’s what the feminist movement has to teach us. You don’t get feminism at the core of Orthodox Jewry. Or you don’t get feminism at the core of Orthodox Hassidic practice—something to teach all of us.
Current: Looking at that photo of Heschel and Dr. King, looking at that grand history, that both of our people have during the ‘60s, working together for civil rights, and you fast forward today and there are such fissures between the communities. Some of it on our part probably has to do with Norman Podhoretz and making it, as you said, but what do you see in the black community that’s contributing to this, and how do we work to better relations and heal those fissures?
West: One is that, of course, in the black world, when you have both minority groups, one minority group moving into the upper-middle-classes seemingly doing very well, the other one having a slice of the middle classes, but the vast majority are not doing very well, that generates envy and resentment, and those are odious vices, envy and resentment, and it is to be fought.
But we have to keep in mind, in the ‘60s is the overlap of the prophetic elements in the black community and the prophetic elements in the Jewish community. There are still large numbers of Jewish brothers and sisters who are deeply prophetic who are actually involved in various kinds of work in black and brown and other communities. The difference is that the conservative voices in the Jewish community are much stronger now than they were in the ‘60s. And especially the Jewish establishment voices, but the Jewish establishment voices do not speak for large numbers of American Jews.
Now, back in the black community, in the black community you had stronger prophetic voices. Prophetic voices in black America are weaker now. They’re feeble now. But there are still large numbers of black folk working with Jews saying the kinds of things that Heschel and King would do; but they are not as visible, and the black establishment is louder, much more centrist, and not as progressive.
So the right-wing movement in the country has affected both communities. That’s part of what I’m saying. The conservative sensibilities have affected both communities. People say, “yea, but they’re two such liberal groups, anyway.” Well, they are voting for centrists and neo-liberals. A vote for Obama doesn’t make you some progressive. I mean the son of William F. Buckley voted for Obama, brother Christopher. I’m glad he did, but that lets you know that it doesn’t take a whole lot to vote for an Obama. The same would be true for any other “liberal Democrat” these days. Whereas when Heschel stood with Martin in the ‘60s, that took a level of courage and willingness to sacrifice and not only that.
I will never forget his [Heschel’s] telegram that he wrote to Kennedy. He wrote to him for the meeting of religious leaders, he tells Kennedy, he says, “religious leaders should forfeit worship if they continue to in any way condone the humiliation of negroes.” Now there is no white Jewish or any other leader with high visibility who would send that telegram to a president today. This is a meeting he was supposed to attend!
You say, “well Heschel, he’s serious.” And he’s not doing it because of the way we talk about Latinos today, “the numbers are increasing,” he’s concerned with what is right and just and moral. So, he would have said the same thing about anyone, the same across the board, you see that’s what deep spirituality and morality is really all about.
He’s not going to allow for any catastrophe, any criminality to be hidden and concealed, though he’s still a human being like all of us so he’s going to have his own failings and flaws here and there. But there’s just nobody like the brother, I tell you. He’s…he’s something. He’s something.
Current: One more thing briefly: we always ask our Current interviewees, your favorite Woody Allen movie?
West: Lord, It would have to be the one in Paris, “Midnight in Paris.” Oh, I love that movie. He’s another genius.
When The Current sat down with Dr. West and inquired whether his interest in Jewish thought or Rabbi Heschel was at all motivated by some form of pluralism, he quickly swatted the notion aside: “Judaism constitutes a moral revolution in the human species—you don’t get it in Homer, Aristotle, Plato or any of the Pagans—that to be human is to spread Hessed… It’s a whole new conception of how human beings ought to engage the world.” It’s admittedly incongruous to watch West, with his trademark afro and his rhythmic manner of speaking, use the Hebrew word for loving-kindness so naturally. But as a Christian, West doesn’t actually view Judaism as foreign but as fundamental to his religious identity. To illustrate this point, West asked The Current to name the Fifth Commandment and before being able to put our Day School knowledge to good use, West bellows: “Honour thy father and mother!” and continues to explains that “Christianity has been wrestling with a sort of spiritual oedipal complex because Judaism is both father and mother to Christianity. And a recognition of that is being true to oneself.”
Looking around Dr. West’s office, the tomes lining his wall are dizzyingly disparate. Books about Hegel compliment Hendrix biographies. Heschel however occupies a particularly special place for West, who he describes as one of his three deepest “soul mates” along with Anton Chekhov and John Coltrane. As he reflects on his first time reading Heschel as a twenty year old at Harvard, he recalls being struck by the beauty and power of Heschel’s prose: “he’s a poet in a deep sense… Most importantly, he’s a poet in the way Shelley talks about poetry, as an unacknowledged legislator of the world… the poet is not just a versifier but a human being who has the courage to use imagination and empathy to create an alternative world better than the present one. And he wants us to stay in contact with that other world even as we engage.”
It’s precisely this ability to shape the present while staying rooted in the past that really resonates with West. He draws a comparison between Heschel’s ideology and the Sankofa, the traditional African American symbol of a bird looking backwards, and explains that you must “refuse to look forward until you first look back. You make contact with the best of those in your past first, then you move forward. That’s why every text by Heschel starts with, which is typical of every Talmudic scholar”—West now changes his voice excitedly and starts pretending to sift through an imaginary book as if acting out the role of a Talmudist—”’let’s see what all the rebbes had to say and gather all the wisdom and sagacious formulations and then relate it to new circumstances and conditions.’ Yes! That’s the way we ought to proceed… Tradition makes that big a difference.” At the same time, tradition alone isn’t good enough for West and his admiration for Heschel stems from the fact that he was also open to at the time new and radical ideas, like girls having bat mitzvahs and women entering the Rabbinate.
As the divide between African American and Jewish communities has grown so wide that no one’s even talking about it, West is looking back. The famous picture of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel walking together during the Selma Civil Rights March is something, “which took courage and a willingness to sacrifice”. West reflects on Rabbi Heschel sending a bold telegram to President Kennedy ahead of a meeting he was mean to attend at the White House, in which he wrote religious leaders, “forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes.” But both the telegram and the famous picture of King and Heschel happened fifty years ago, and West has no illusions about how things have developed. He wistfully reflects on the fact that “no white, Jewish or any other leader with high visibility would send that telegram to a president today”. While that may largely be so, Cornel West has taken on his soul mate’s mantle down the street from where Heschel once taught— stridently criticizing another young, popular American president in the name of truth and Hessed.
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Current: You first discovered Rabbi Heschel while you were studying at Harvard. What was that first encounter like?
West: It was in the bookstore and it was “God in Search of Man”. I was in Cambridge on a fellowship, I must have been about 20 years old. And when I first read him I said to myself, here’s a soulmate: he is a poet and a philosopher who is not just religious but profoundly spiritual, he was a scholar and I found out later he was also an activist.
Current: You never met him, did you?
West: No, I never did. I wish I had met him.
Current: In that first reading, do you remember what was the first passage or idea that grabbed you?
West: I just started reading the book through. The language is just so rich. The density of meaning, beauty in use of the metaphor, and the rhythm. He’s a poet in a deep sense, know what I mean? And most importantly, he’s a poet in the way Shelley talks about poetry, as an unacknowledged legislator of the world. He was conceiving of a different world, a better world than the one I was living in. That’s what every great poet does. So the poet is not just a versifier but a human being who has the courage to use imagination and empathy to create an alternative world better than the present one. And he wants us to stay in contact with that other world even as we engage. So it’s not escape, but it is alternatives.
Current: An appreciation of the ineffable?
West: An appreciation of the ineffable, of awe, of radical amazement, of wonder. All of the childlike things we adults like to cast away.
Current: Was he the first major Jewish writer that you encountered?
West: Well, you got Hebrew scripture– a whole lotta competition there, brother! I grew up in Black Baptist Church though, man, so I’ve been wrestling with the Jewish poetic genius: Job, Jonah, Song of Songs and we can go on and on. But it’s true into the modern. I had read Buber. But you gotta keep in mind, I’ve got Jewish poetic geniuses like Stanley Cavell, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Wittgenstein who I never met but for the others, these are people I’d studied with, been in their classes and read much of their work. But the thing about Heschel is, he’s one of the great gifts of Eastern European Jewry to the New World. Like Berlin, Gershwin, probably Sondheim’s mother and father came from the same place. He’s part of this whole wave of great gifts of Eastern European Jewry to the USA. But his foot remained rooted in it, in his Hasidism, his piety– by piety I mean remembrance, reverence and resistance all at the same time. Memory is fundamental to Heschel in keeping alive the best of a great tradition. See, I think prophetic Judaism in general is not just a great tradition but constituted a moral revolution in the human species– you don’t get it in Homer, Aristotle, Plato or any of the Pagans– that to be human is to spread loving-kindness, hesed: especially to the orphan, widow, mother, father, 37 references to love of neighbour, one great reference to love of stranger. It’s a whole new conception of how human beings ought to engage the world. And Heschel builds on that.
Current: You come back for the first year to UTS, did you debate whether you should be teaching the writings of a Black or Christian thinker rather than a Rabbi?
West: For me, there’s three fundamental soul mates that I have. The first would be Chekhov, the second would be Coltrane and the third would be Heschel. The fourth would be Sondheim and the fifth would be Tennessee Williams in a way. But those are the top 3. And I figure it’s the time in my life to start engaging my soul mates. I can’t teach a course on Chekhov, that’s like teaching a course on my mother. It’s just too close to you. Coltrane is the same way. Heschel has been the same way for about forty years, so I figure time to make my move. It’s like the CC course at Columbia, right? The legacy of Athens, Socratic legacy, legacy of Sophocles, legacy of Aristophanes. The questioning of Socrates on the one hand, that unbelievable look in the darkness, that kind of hard steely realism of Sophocles and then Aristophanes the comic with the frank speech. But then the legacy of Jerusalem, and that’s Judaism. You see, Christianity–and I’m a Christian, a prophetic Christian, that we are a rich footnote to prophetic Judaism; we fell in love with a particular Jewish brother, it wasn’t Hillel. Hillel was a good candidate. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, and he is not only rooted in, but comes from, the very seed of prophetic Judaism with all of the richness that goes into it. But it’s a very rich footnote because there’s love of neighbour, then love of enemy. Then another Jewish brother comes along and tries to broaden it to gentiles and everybody else. But it’s still the spirit of prophetic Judaism that sits at the center of the best of it. Even though of course, you know, Christianity has a very vicious anti-Jewish hatred that’s part and parcel of its formation, precisely because of those early years when the struggle goes on about ‘will the Jews accept or not accept,’ you see.
Current: So, would you say a deeper understanding of Heschel leads to a deeper understanding of the Christian self?
West: Absolutely. I mean, Christianity has been wrestling with a kind of spiritual oedipal complex, and Islam in it’s own way too. Christianity and Islam were given birth: Mom and Dad were Judaism. Now, what’s the fifth commandment? Honour thy father and mother! Christianity, will you honor Judaism? Islam, will you honor Judaism? Which is not to say you downplay your Socratic energy. Of course you’re going to critically engage. But I mean, Judaism critically engages itself, that’s part of it’s whole history from Mishnah, Talmud, commentary which is the dominant Jewish way of intellectually engaging the world. But the two children have to acknowledge Mom and Dad, because Judaism is both. And so in that sense, it’s a matter of being true to oneself. And see, as a Black man, as a Jesus-loving, free Black man, that when we Africans got off the ship and were looking for ways of preserving our sanity and humanity, many of us found it in Hebrew scripture. Daniel was the second most popular spiritual, only Jesus was more popular than Daniel. And Moses was number 3.
Current: The exodus narrative was Rabbi Heschel’s entrance into the civil rights movement, right? How do you think we can continue to share in that narrative today?
West: Well, I think Heschel’s message, which is in some ways is tied to the Exodus narrative, but is also tied to a larger narrative of freedom: freedom of self, freedom of community, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and so on. But for Heschel there are two fundamental pillars: how do you shatter callousness to catastrophe and how do you shatter indifference to criminality? And the Exodus is about a catastrophe. The Jewish experience begins with the catastrophic: it’s a vicious, imperial, colonial situation. And there’s going to be movement, deliverance and then remembrance. So, remember when you were in a catastrophic situation under the Egyptians. So that, you say to yourself- and here’s the best of secular and religious Jews in the pre-modern, medieval and modern world– is trying to shatter any kind of callousness to catastrophe. It could be impending ecological catastrophe, political catastrophe, social catastrophe, economic catastrophe of poverty, spiritual catastrophe, loss of your mother, betrayal of your girlfriend, I mean whatever it is. All those are catastrophic in that way, you see. You think of Kafka, that first line of The Metamorphosis. There’s that Jewish preoccupation with catastrophe! Gregor wakes up and finds himself transformed into an ugly, foul vermin. How you gonna deal with the catastrophe, Kafka? Are you gonna still have patience and perseverance? Are you gonna still love your sister Gretchen who plays the violin? Are you gonna still reach out to your parents? You see that hesed still working. And Kafka is not, in any way, religiously Jewish but he is profoundly Jewish in trying to wrestle with the catastrophic.
Current: What type of catastrophes do you feel the Jewish people are wrestling with today and how does that relate to other communities?
West: Well as citizens of the world, and that’s a broad metaphor because there is no world government. But just as inhabitants who care and are decent in the world, all the catastrophes I talked about like ecological catastrophes and so forth. But in terms of specifically Jewish identity, wrestling with the Israeli occupation and how do you tell a story that recognizes jumping out of a burning house that was Jew-hating Europe. Some Jews were already there, others landing in a land where there is also some Arabs. And the fundamental question of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Heschel as well: coexist versus dominate, coexist versus subjugate? In light of thousands of years of vicious treatment, pogroms, attacks, assault, murder. Therefore, security and safety somehow are going have to live alongside justice for others. Because you’re going to have to have security and safety, otherwise there’s not going to be a Jewish people. At all. And that’s crucial and something the rest of the world has to come to terms with. But on the other hand, the very tradition that produced you, at its best it’s saying that there’s hesed and there’s justice. And then you’ve got an internal debate among a Jewry, one third of whom have been annihilated, how do we keep alive the best of our tradition and also acknowledge that we’ve got some folk who are not being treated fairly.
Current: Heschel has high aspirations for Israel and Zionism. Do you understand where Heschel’s coming from? Do you like the Zionist idea in the broadest sense?
West: Well, I like the quest for self determination of any people because I’m a deep democrat. But at the same time I’m suspicious of any form of nationalism. So I’m in a creative tension. Why? Because of course as a deep democrat, I know democracy at its best is about self determination but it enters the modern world in the shell of the Nation-State. So democracy becomes subordinate to the Nation-State. Nationalism is the dominant ideology of modernity: American nationalism, Italian, German, even Black nationalism. Well, all these nationalisms I’m suspicious of. Because I’m an internationalist and a deep democrat and a Christian tied to internationalism. Which means for me, the cross is unarmed truth and unconditional love for everybody. But I need to be realistic enough to know I have to deal with nationalism. So, I live in America and while I’m not going to be a fervent American nationalist, I’m going to accent the moral, spiritual and political elements of American nationalism that are progressive. Like Martin King, Heschel, and others. Same would be true for Zionism. I look at Zionism as a form of nationalism, part of a modern nationalist project. And within that nationalist project there will be those who are very progressive tied to truth, justice for everybody; and then there’s going to be chauvinistic versions. And most likely the dominant form of most nationalisms– American, Italian, German, Jewish, Black, Chinese, whatever, I’m going to be profoundly suspicious of. Now I don’t fully agree with some of the things that Abraham Joshua Heschel has to say about Zionism, though I fully understand it.
Current: Where do you diverge?
West: I think if he had lived longer and had a chance to see the occupation unveil. We know from Susannah that he had some very critical things to say about how some of our Arab brothers and sisters were being treated, there’s no doubt about that. His hypersensitivity for those who suffer no matter what color they are, no matter what culture, I think would have led him to become much more critical of the occupation, it would not have meant he was not a Zionist, he would have remained a Zionist, but he would have become much more critical I think. Because I connect my critique of any nationals of any nationalism with domination, my hunch is he probably would have had more to say. At the very end of his life, he and Susannah had long discussions on the subject but he didn’t get a chance to publish it.
Current: As a realistic internationalist in the present day context, do you feel like the occupation has condemned the notion of a Jewish nation state?
West: I used to debate with my dear brother Edward Said on this. Edward had reached the conclusion that you could only have one secular state. And I think at a broad normative level, I would agree with Edward but I can’t conceive of how Jewish safety could be procured in such a state. That’s what I used to push him on all the time. At the deepest level of me, I believe that Jewish babies have the same status as Palestinian babies. No matter what. And so, as much as I could at a broad normative level say it would be nice if there is one secular state where the rights of all would be protected, I can’t conceive of how that could be done. And because of that, I still view myself as promoting a two-state solution where there are rights and liberties promoted on both sides. Where there is self determination in a state that puts a priority on the safety and security of Jews without having to subjugate anyone else. And I would have the same kind of challenge for the Palestinian state. I’d want it to be equal for everyone, and I’d recognize that there’d have to be borders that would have to be internationally coordinated. But the issue of the specificity of Jewish safety and security is something that I think has weight for me. Even as the Palestinian quest for justice for me is fundamental. And so I’m kind of caught betwixt and between here.
Current: From your perspective, would BDS help or hinder this outcome?
West: Depends how it’s done, what the spirit of it is. If in fact it has a King-like spirit or a Gandhi-like spirit in which you continually reach out across the bridge and there’s significant Jewish and Israeli participation, then I think it could be a force for good. If it’s done in a hateful, spiteful spirit, I couldn’t go with it.
Current: Many people in the Jewish community see the BDS movement as only moving towards a one state solution. And the BDS movement often quotes you in their literature, on their websites so people see you quoted often by them and wonder what your involvement exactly is?
[Editor’s Note: In a separate follow-up with The Current, Dr. West clarified that he would rather have said below in the first sentence of his response, “Only under these conditions have I supported the movement…”]
West: Oh I see; no, I haven’t come out and supported the movement. If they support me saying Palestinians have the same status as Jews and Jews have the same status as Palestinians then they should absolutely quote me. If they say Israeli occupation ought to come to an end, absolutely! But they should also say that the killing of innocent Jewish brothers and sisters by Hamas are crimes against humanity in the same way that the occupation for me is a crime against humanity. But people will be selective in what they have to say in that regard. But I haven’t made a stand one way or the other on it, because there are so many voices. Some of the voices are more King-like and Gandhi-like and some of the voices are hateful and spiteful. And therefore I tend to be reluctant in coming down one way or the other.
Current: How should we as Jews deal with power, either in Israel or in America? Is it possible to be powerful and righteous?
West: Well, back to Heschel here. On one hand, he’s got the Kotzker. This is one of the great poles of Hasidism: Questioning how do you discard mendacity and mediocrity and how do you disregard self-regard? And these are relative ideals, never to be fully lived but something to be aspired and strived towards. Then you got the Ba’al Shem Tov on the other pole. These are the two great poles. You see, for me, Hasidism is one of the great movements of the modern world. It’s not just a Jewish affair, at all. Because you’re talking about a people who’ve already been led by false messiahs, you’ve got folk who are devastated economically, socially, and politically; and given all that terror and trauma, they generate the Ba’al Shem! Hey man! It doesn’t get too much deeper than that. When you’re hated in that way and you still produce a man of love like that? Or when you’re pushed against a corner in that way and you get the Kotzker? The Kotzker Rebbe is more radical in terms of his questioning than Hume’s skepticism or Descartes’ skepticism. Descartes’ is methodological skepticism and Hume’s skepticism allows him to still play backgammon when he doesn’t get the answer. The Kotzker ends up in seclusion for twenty years. He’s living this stuff. So, how do you talk about power on one hand and righteous on the other? Well Heschel says, maybe the dominant myth of Hasidism is that the truth is buried in the ground, but the thing is, we can’t get to the grave to find out what that truth is. But in the meantime all we got is the Ba’al Shem Tov, love, spontaneity, joy and so forth. And we’re forever pulled, forever pulled. And how does that relate to the political? Well it means you’re going to have a healthy suspicion of the operations of power, but at the same time you have to recognize that the world is a very dark place and therefore you have to have strong mechanisms of accountability for that operation of power. And so, every once in a while we might produce a Lincoln. And we know Barack Obama is no Lincoln. He’s lucky to be a Black version of Clinton. And Clinton is the masterful opportunist of our time, not a lot of principles. And Barack Obama is an opportunist. The speeches have some beautiful words and some beautiful ideals. He even invokes brother Martin in the speeches.
Current: He used King’s Bible.
West: Oh yeah, oh my gosh. We won’t even go into that. You know I’d just go ballistic! But people think I’m putting the brother down, I’m not putting him down. He is what he does. He’s Wall Street, Geithner, Summers, it’s banks versus homeowners, it’s drones, it’s the militarism and the National Defense Authorization Act. You detain American citizens without due trial and then you trot out your attorney general who says ‘due process is different than judicial process’. Please! My god, if Republicans said something like that The New York Times would go crazy. And actually, The New York Times has been somewhat principled about this thing. Which is surprising to me because usually they kowtow to the democrats in a way that I think is unprincipled. But we gotta keep pressure on Barack Obama in this regard.
Current: How do you do that from a place where you read Heschel’s poetry, and I think it comes through Dr. King, and you can be critical, and have righteous indignation, but it comes from a place of love–how do you do that?
West: Heschel really believes in this deeply Hassidic notion of not humiliating people in front of them to see their face blush. But rather, trying to have a righteous indignation that does disclose some painful truths, but is not personal. It’s about the deed and the subject matter.
Now again this is a regulative ideal, because you know I mean a lot of people say that Heschel really was hateful and spiteful. I don’t think so but he’s a human being so there probably was a number of instances.
And a whole lot of people say, “you must really hate Obama because you didn’t talk about Clinton in the way you talk about Obama. You call Obama a war criminal, you didn’t call Clinton a war criminal.” And I would say, well, in Clinton’s case, when you use that kind of language you have to be very careful. And refusing to stop a genocide in Africa, that doesn’t make somebody a war criminal, that just makes them cold and callous.
But when you know that your drones that you authorized have already produced 216 deaths of innocent people, you figure: okay three girls here, six girls, seven, nine, fifeteen–but you reach a certain point that you know it’s just collateral damage. You’re already at 216 children. I’m not talking about Bin Laden, that’s different. I mean Bin Laden being killed, that’s a different thing, I can understand that. But not the children, you see, and it continues every day. And so that’s part of my own defense in terms of why I would use that kind of language toward him, and that’s why I tie him to Nixon and tie him to the carpet bombing in Vietnam. I could tie him to Johnson, I could tie him to Bush.
I don’t really hate the brother, I don’t hate Barack Obama. In fact I would stand in the way if someone messed with his family or someone messed with him as a human being. And when Fox News at its worst tells lies about him, in the name of Kutzker, who is critical of lies and mendacity, you have to defend the truth and say, no you’re telling lies on the man, and quit lying about him, and defend him in that sense. A lot of people don’t really accent my defense of him vis-a-vis the right wing. It’s much more my critique of him from the left.
Current: What about those who say that the drone strikes and the more operations that we’ve seen under Obama are required for national security? There are many people, and obviously the Obama administration thinks this, so, again, you as that realistic internationalist, someone who recognizes the need for a nation-state, the need for nations to protect themselves, how does that figure into your critique?
West: Well, for one I want to affirm the fact that we do need to protect ourselves. We have to come up with various strategies and tactics, informed by some moral ideals that generate security and safety on behalf of Americans. But, you don’t do that with strategies and tactics that end up producing the killing of thousands of innocent people.
Now brother Martin used to say the bombs dropped in Vietnam landed in America, and tore up poor whites in Appalachia, had landed in poor brown barrios, poor black ghettos and so forth, and he’s right about that. Not just in terms of military budget generating more money that could be spent on education, jobs, so on, but in a deeply spiritual sense.
This is how Heschel used a wonderful line in that last book of his, where it says, “lying is the lynching of the soul.” You probably remember that line. It jumps out like so many lines in Heschel. Lying is the lynching of the soul and when you begin to live that lie there’s a soullessness. And you lose the soul of any democratic experiment when you think in the name of security that you can continually produce strategies and tactics that yield the state-sponsored murder, state-sanctioned execution of innocent people, especially some children. So you can have all the safety and security in the world without a soul.
This is part of the struggle in Israel right now. If in fact the occupation became so successful, so efficient that it produced safety and security, on the one hand I’ll say, I want the safety and security of my Jewish brothers and sisters, but the soul of the Israeli state will be so lynched, scarred, and bruised and tarred if you continue to subjugate a people in that way. And of course the great Israeli writers talk about this for a long time, ever since ’67 they’ve been the main ones. Because you can feel it in the society you can feel it in the homes, so forth and so on.
Martin said the same thing about the United States in the ‘60s, Vietnam as well as in America with Jim Crow. And so there’s that spiritual dimension that even the international realists, de Tocqueville talked about this in terms of the morals and the manners and the spirit of democracy. There’s something to be gained by giving weight and gravitas to the spirit and the soul of a nation relative to the ways it goes about generating its safety and security for its citizens.
Current: So let’s go back to Heschel for a bit, and his political activity. There’s a famous photo of him with Dr. King and that’s often seen as a source of pride in the Jewish community today.
West: —and it should be, it should be.
Current: —so in that context, considering that heritage, do we have the right to feel that pride?
West: Absolutely. Ever since 1964 when the white youth went down into Jim Crow gutbucket American South, fifty percent of the students who went down were Jewish students, and we know some of those precious Jewish students were killed. So, yes, there’s a good, good, good reason, good basis for that pride. Very much so.
The question is, that’s fifty years ago, and what are we doing now to build on that tremendous tradition ofHessed, and what I mean by Hessed, and the reason why I keep coming back to Hessed is that it’s not just about justice. Justice is very important, but you see that Heschel was like Martin King, like Coltrane, like Muriel Rukeyser, who is one of the great prophets of the 20th century, a secular Jewish sister, he was a militant for gentleness and a subversive for sweetness and a radical for tenderness. And of course Susannah would tell you how tender he was.
You usually don’t get this in the lives of a lot of radicals. A lot of radicals are strong in the public, but in private are cold as can be. Heschel believed in tenderness and sweetness and gentleness.
Current: You see so many of the other activists who are fighting the same causes you are, do it from a place of pure anger, who are secular, do you think that’s it? That’s the element? The spirituality of Dr. King or Heschel that allowed them to do it from a place of love?
West: Absolutely. It’s like I had my class yesterday, I started the class off, we listened to Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” that’s his signature song. One of the greatest jazz musicians in the history of the genre first brought in Billie Holiday, of course. When you listen to “Nightmare,” and you know Shaw is really Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, you know like Berlin and Gershwin they’ve got different names now. They Americanize their names. And you see how dark things are, then the tenderness of that clarinet comes in, and wow, that’s like the blues, but there’s a longer history to the blues, it’s not 244 years of slavery and ninety of Jim Crow. No, the Jewish blues—2,000 years.
That’s what klezmer and all of these different elements manifest in Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” and he saw it as a Hassidic soul being expressed. Now, for Heschel, Heschel is more Hassidic than Shaw can conceive of. He’s from the royal dynasty of spiritual giants, the rebbes all the way back on both sides. Masha and Rivka. I mean it goes all the way back. You see what I mean. Yet you feel that tenderness in the Shaw that you see in Heschel’s poetry and his language, and his sensitivity and so forth, and that’s what I think separates him and Martin and the others from a lot of the other radicals.
There’s a difference between hating injustice and loving people. You can hate injustice and be a radical, but a deeply genuine radical both hates injustice but loves the people, and even loves the people committing the injustice, because they have the potential to be better. And hatred of them trumps their ability or potential to change. What that does in the end is of course it puts you in the same category, you know why? Because sooner or later each one of us is going to treat somebody unjustly. If they freeze that moment in our lives, we’re just gangsters for life, we’re gangsters for life.
If I say, “Oh, brother Adam, I’ve seen Adam do some wonderful things,” and they say, “no, no we’ve got him, we’ve got him.” If I say, “I’ve seen brother David do some wonderful things,” they say, “no we’ve got David stuck.” No, not it at all, David and Adam got potential to be better.
Current: We share this tenderness and love, and from a dark place of our 2,000 years, and two-hundred and something years. What has happened since the friendship of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel that maybe on our part we’ve become indifferent, and I think that there’s a sense on the other side that “those 2,000 years are not the same as our 200 years, you have no right to identify”--
West: —well they are different.
Current: —but how do we get past--
West: —well one, we got very different peoples. During the 2,000 years you got a Jewish idenity that’s predicated on literacy, it’s predicated on access to texts, it’s predicated on interpretation of texts, it’s predicated on skills requisite to engaging commentary and so forth.
Whereas for black folk, we just learned how to read in the 1860s, four percent of our people were literate under slavery. And because of the vicious forms of anti-Jewish discrimination so many Jews were pushed into the cities when the cities were not the center, and yet modernity unveils in such a way that the urban centers become the very place where you have access to resources. Well we’re country folk until the 1930s, that’s not that long.
So, basically we’re country folk, whereas the history of Jews is much more complicated vis-a-vis urban centers and rural centers, and so on. So you get letters on one hand, urbanity on the other hand, very different. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of overlap, and of course when it comes to creating American popular culture, it’s a Black-Jewish thing. It’s Sondheim and Ellington.
Current: So what’s gone wrong today?
West: Well what’s happening is one, of course you got the triumph of our dear brother Podhoretz’s ideology, making it, making it, making it, which is not a Jewish thing, it’s an American thing. Money, money, money, cash, cash, cash, status, status, status, wealth, wealth, wealth, living large and living large, trophy wives and trophy husbands, that’s America to the core. But Podhoretz in the ‘60s said, “what? All this talk about justice among the Jewry? We’ve been duped! Let’s make it, let’s make it. Let’s be Americans like the Americans are Americans.”
No. Heschel, already crying in the grave. All of that blood, sweat, and tears, just for American Jews to make it? No, great-great-grandmom says, “Hessed, remember when, this is fleeting. They said that in Alexandria, they said that in Weimar, there’s been other moments where we’ve said now we can really make it and become part and parcel, no, there is no promised land for the Jews.”
That’s part of the voices. I resonate with those voices, you see. You are still in exile in America. “I wouldn’t know that.” You really are, don’t be duped. But the acceptance, the movement into the upper-middle-classes, now you got some top dogs, right? You’ve got a number of top dogs now, right? “Oh, this must be the place.” No, this is not the place. Your home is in your texts. Your home is in your relationships. Your home is in theHessed, your love. Your home is in your service. It’s not in your suburban spaces, not in the big jobs you have, it’s not in your big bank account, whether it’s here or the Cayman Islands. And this is of course a message for the world, it’s not just for Jews. But it is also for Jews that we all can be in some ways seduced by the rule of money in the land of dollars, seduced by the wrong things, what traditionally we call idolatry.
And so you figure, “No God before me,” but also that Fifth Commandment, the favorite commandment of Chekhov, “Honor thy mother and thy father,” and I’m not just talking about your immediate ones. Where’s your ancestor appreciation? Heschel always begins at ancestor appreciation. Black folk call it sankofa bird. You refuse to look forward until you first look back. You make contact with the best of those in your past, then you move forward.
That’s why in every text by Heschel, which is typical for any Talmudic scholar, “let’s see what all the rebbes have to say and let’s gather all the wisdom and sagacious formulations, and then relate to new circumstances and conditions.” That’s the way we ought to proceed. Not just Hassidic Jews but I think that’s how all of us ought to proceed.
Tradition makes that big of a difference. But also, being open to the new makes that big of a difference. That’s why Heschel for example, he supported Sussanah having her bar mitzvah, and supported women in the rabbinical order. Now that’s a radical break from his past, because when he was a little boy, he’d walk in and everybody would stand up and the women would walk out of the room. He came a long way. That’s part of the best of America. Because America has something to teach Heschel and the rest of us too. That’s what the feminist movement has to teach us. You don’t get feminism at the core of Orthodox Jewry. Or you don’t get feminism at the core of Orthodox Hassidic practice—something to teach all of us.
Current: Looking at that photo of Heschel and Dr. King, looking at that grand history, that both of our people have during the ‘60s, working together for civil rights, and you fast forward today and there are such fissures between the communities. Some of it on our part probably has to do with Norman Podhoretz and making it, as you said, but what do you see in the black community that’s contributing to this, and how do we work to better relations and heal those fissures?
West: One is that, of course, in the black world, when you have both minority groups, one minority group moving into the upper-middle-classes seemingly doing very well, the other one having a slice of the middle classes, but the vast majority are not doing very well, that generates envy and resentment, and those are odious vices, envy and resentment, and it is to be fought.
But we have to keep in mind, in the ‘60s is the overlap of the prophetic elements in the black community and the prophetic elements in the Jewish community. There are still large numbers of Jewish brothers and sisters who are deeply prophetic who are actually involved in various kinds of work in black and brown and other communities. The difference is that the conservative voices in the Jewish community are much stronger now than they were in the ‘60s. And especially the Jewish establishment voices, but the Jewish establishment voices do not speak for large numbers of American Jews.
Now, back in the black community, in the black community you had stronger prophetic voices. Prophetic voices in black America are weaker now. They’re feeble now. But there are still large numbers of black folk working with Jews saying the kinds of things that Heschel and King would do; but they are not as visible, and the black establishment is louder, much more centrist, and not as progressive.
So the right-wing movement in the country has affected both communities. That’s part of what I’m saying. The conservative sensibilities have affected both communities. People say, “yea, but they’re two such liberal groups, anyway.” Well, they are voting for centrists and neo-liberals. A vote for Obama doesn’t make you some progressive. I mean the son of William F. Buckley voted for Obama, brother Christopher. I’m glad he did, but that lets you know that it doesn’t take a whole lot to vote for an Obama. The same would be true for any other “liberal Democrat” these days. Whereas when Heschel stood with Martin in the ‘60s, that took a level of courage and willingness to sacrifice and not only that.
I will never forget his [Heschel’s] telegram that he wrote to Kennedy. He wrote to him for the meeting of religious leaders, he tells Kennedy, he says, “religious leaders should forfeit worship if they continue to in any way condone the humiliation of negroes.” Now there is no white Jewish or any other leader with high visibility who would send that telegram to a president today. This is a meeting he was supposed to attend!
You say, “well Heschel, he’s serious.” And he’s not doing it because of the way we talk about Latinos today, “the numbers are increasing,” he’s concerned with what is right and just and moral. So, he would have said the same thing about anyone, the same across the board, you see that’s what deep spirituality and morality is really all about.
He’s not going to allow for any catastrophe, any criminality to be hidden and concealed, though he’s still a human being like all of us so he’s going to have his own failings and flaws here and there. But there’s just nobody like the brother, I tell you. He’s…he’s something. He’s something.
Current: One more thing briefly: we always ask our Current interviewees, your favorite Woody Allen movie?
West: Lord, It would have to be the one in Paris, “Midnight in Paris.” Oh, I love that movie. He’s another genius.