Abraham Joshua Heschel

Born into Hasidic aristocracy in Warsaw — descended from the Apter Rov and named for him — educated in Berlin, deported in 1938, and from 1946 a professor in New York who marched at Selma and wrote The Sabbath and God in Search of Man.

⭐⭐ The bridge by which Hasidic sensibility entered American religious life outside the courts entirely. He wrote his last book on the Kotzker Rebbe alongside one on the prophets, and he said of Selma that his legs were praying. ⚠ Note what travelled and what did not: the sense of radical amazement and the moral urgency crossed over; the tzimtzum dispute, the tzaddik and the sparks did not.