Divine Pathos

An Interview with Rabbi Shai Held

“The spirit of the prophet, the message of the prophet is very much alive. He combined a very deep love, very powerful dissent, painful rebuke, with unwavering hope. The prophet is a witness to that great mystery, or to what I would call meaning beyond the mystery, namely, God could still be alive.” —Abraham Joshua Heschel

Pete Davis and Elias Crim co-host the podcast The Lost Prophets. In the introduction to the series, they make the following observation:

Here in the mid-2020s, we are lost in the woods. Most of us don’t feel like we are members of the places in which we reside, nor co-creators of the structures we inhabit, and as a result, loneliness and cynicism and unease abound.

How do we build community in the modern world? How should we relate to nature and to one another? Where to now?

Many of the questions that we’re asking today were also asked in the mid-twentieth century, when there was an explosion of reflection about big questions and visions. It was an era of prophecy.

In the inaugural episode of The Lost Prophets, Elias and Pete invite Rabbi Shai Held to reflect on the wisdom and insights of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

LOST PROPHETS: Abraham Joshua Heschel is a wonderfully improbable prophet; a big, bearded, funny-looking man, a very unlikely public intellectual with a theatrical manner. During his life in the mid-twentieth century, he addressed the American public, saying that what we need at this moment is personal transcendence and piety; the way to correct the secular age is through prayer, belief, righteous deeds, and practice.

Who would have believed he would find a big audience, or that he would have intersected with Martin Luther King Jr. and the black theology of liberation in its early stages in order to energize both communities with a shared vision of liberation? What an unlikely but wonderful story.