To this end, it is worth reading Abraham Heschel's Between God and Man (Free Press, 1997). How Heschel could have the moral insight and courage to rise above his cultural milieu and, among other things, march with Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights movement, can be understood through his writings on Judaism.

To try and explain the power of this book would be like trying to convey the beauty of Shakespeare through paraphrases. One must experience Heschel in his own words to get any sense of the glory. So here are a few of his thoughts on wonder, knowing God, selfishness, godliness, prophets, providence, prayer, evil, religious teaching, and Sabbath.

"Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder." (p.41)

"The sense for the 'miracles which are daily with us,' the sense for the 'continual marvels,' is the source of prayer. . . Wishing to eat bread or fruit; to enjoy a pleasant fragrance or a cup of wine; on tasting fruit in season for the first time; on seeing a rainbow; or the ocean; on noticing trees when they blossom; on meeting a sage in Torah or in secular learning; on hearing good or bad tidings - we are taught to invoke His great name and our awareness of Him. . . This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things." (p.43)

"The perception of the glory is a rare occurence in our lives. We fail to wonder, we fail to respond to the presence. This is the tragedy of every man: 'to dim all wonder by indifference.' Life is routine, and routine is resistance to the wonder. 'Replete is the world with a spiritual radiance, the eye hides it all,' said the Baal Shem. 'Just as a small coin held over the face can block out the sight of a mountain, so can the vanities of living block out the sight of the infinite light.'"(p.58)

"The Bible is primarily not man's vision of God but God's vision of man. The Bible is not man's theology but God's anthropology, dealing with man and what He asks of man rather than with the nature of God." (p.112)

"Entering the meditation about the ultimate, we must rid ourselves of the intellectual habit of converting reality into an object of our minds. Thinking of God is totally different from thinking about all other matters. We often fail in trying to understand Him, not because we do not know how to extend our concepts far enough, but because we do not know how to begin close enough. To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him. Religion begins where experience ends, and the end of experience is a perception of our being perceived. . . God is neither a thing nor an idea; He is within and beyond all things and all ideas. Thinking of God is not beyond but within Him. The thought of Him would not be in front of us, if God were not behind it. . . To the philosopher God is an object, to men in prayer He is the subject. Their aim is not to possess Him as a concept of knowledge, to be informed about Him, as if He were a fact among facts. What they crave for is to be wholly possessed by Him, to be an object of His knowledge and to sense it. The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated with it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us; not to judge and to assert but to listen and to be judged by Him." (p.113-4)

"Faith is an act of man who transcending himself responds to Him who transcends the world. Such response is a sign of man's essential dignity. For the essence and greatness of man do not lie in his ability to please his ego, to satisfy his needs, but rather in his ability to stand above his ego, to ignore his own needs; to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of the holy." (p.66)

"It is the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God, the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement that conjures power out of a weary conscience, that, striking the bottom out of conceit, tears selfishness to shreds. It is the sense of the ineffable that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests, helping us to realize the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end." (p.150)

"It is the [good] deed that carries us away, that transports the soul, proving to us that the greatest beauty grows at the greatest distance from the center of the ego." (p.190)

"When God becomes our form of thinking we begin to sense all men in one man, the whole world in a grain of sand, eternity in a moment. To worldly ethics one human being is less than two human beings, to the religious mind if a man has caused a single soul to perish, it is as though he had caused a whole world to perish, and if he has saved a single soul, it is as though he had saved a whole world." (p.102)

"Sympathy, then, is the essential mode in which the prophet responds to the divine situation. . . It is no mere listening to, and conveying a divine message which distinguishes his personal life. The prophet not only hears and apprehends the divine pathos; he is convulsed by it to the depths of his soul. . . The pathos of God is upon him. It moves him. It breaks out in him like a storm in the soul, overwhelming his inner life, his thoughts, feelings, wishes, and hopes. It takes possession of his heart and mind, giving him the courage to act against the world. The words of the prophet are often like thunders; they sound as if he were in a state of hysteria. But what appears to us as wild emotionalism must have seemed like restraint to him who has to convey the emotion of the Almighty in the feeble language of man. His sympathy is an overflow of powerful emotion which comes in response to what he sensed in divinity. Like a scream in the night is the prophet's word. The world is at ease and asleep, while the prophet is hit by a blast from heaven. No one seems to hear the distress in the world; no one seems to care when the poor is suppressed. But God is distressed, and the prophet has pity for God who cares for the distressed." (p.125)

"God's grace resounds in our lives like a staccato. Only by retaining the seemingly disconnected notes do we acquire the ability to grasp the theme." (p.71)

"The Bible has shattered man's illusion of being alone. God does not stand aloof from our cries; He is not only a pattern, but a power, and life is a response, not a soliloquy." (p.249)

"Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose. Prayer makes visible the right, and reveals what is hampering and false. In its radiance, we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hopes, and the meaning of our deeds. Envy and fear, despair and resentment, anguish and grief, which lie heavily upon the heart, are dispelled like shadows by its light." (p.199)

"Prayer is an emanation of what is most precious in us toward Him, the outpouring of the heart before Him. It is not a relationship between person and person, between subject and subject, but an endeavor to become the object of His thought. . . To pray is to behold life not only as a result of His power, but as a concern of His will, or to strive to make our life a divine concern. For the ultimate aspiration of man is not to be a master, but an object of His knowledge. To live 'in the light of His countenance,' to become a thought of God - this is the true career of man." (p.200)

"Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God." (p.201)

"Halakhah [law] is an answer to a question, namely: What does God ask of me? The moment that question dies in the heart, the answer becomes meaningless. That question, however, is agadic [devotional], spontaneous, personal. It is an outburst of insight, longing, faith. It is not given; it must come about. The task of religious teaching is to be a midwife and bring about the birth of the question. Many religious teachers are guilty of ignoring the vital role of the question and condoning spiritual sterility. But the soul is never calm. Every human being is pregnant with problems in a preconceptual form. Most of us do not know how to phrase our question for meaning, our concern for the ultimate. Without guidance, our concern for the ultimate is not thought through and what we express is premature and penultimate, a miscarriage of the spirit." (p.177)

"Jewish tradition, though conscious of the perils and pitfalls of existence, is a constant reminder of the grand and everlasting opportunities to do the good. We are taught to love life in this world because of the possibilities of charity and sanctity, because of the many ways open to us in which to serve the Lord. 'More precious, therefore, than all of life in the world to come is a single hour of life on earth - an hour of repentance and good deeds.'" (p.196)

"To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern." (p.214)

"One of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word kadosh, holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine. Now what was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an altar? It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word kadosh is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: 'And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.' There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness." (p.217)

"Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses. . . 'The day of the Lord' is more important to the prophets than 'the house of the Lord.' Mankind is split into nations and divided by states. It is a moment in time - the messianic end of days - that will give back to man what a thing in space, the Tower of Babel, had taken away." (p.218, 225)

"The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments." (p.215)

"The faith of the Jew is not a way out of this world, but a way of being within and above this world; not to reject but to surpass civilization. The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization. . . To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature - is there any institution which holds out a greater hope for man's progress than the Sabbath?" (p.222)

"The essence of the world to come is Sabbath eternal, and the seventh day in time is an example of eternity. . . [Judaism] seeks to displace the coveting of things in space for coveting the things in time, teaching man to covet the seventh day all days of the week." (p.224, 227)