God in Search of Man

Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the most important thinkers of Jewish religious thought in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, a poet and philosopher who authored many works of thought and poetry. His writings have found wide resonance among Jews, and also among Christians, and are of interest in Europe and South America as well. They have been translated into Italian, French, German, and Spanish, and Hebrew.

Heschel was highly versed in the Bible, Midrash, and Hasidism. He developed a method he called “depth theology,” in which he elaborated a distinctive interpretation of interiorization arising from the contemporary human situation. He is considered a thinker of religious existentialism. In his thought he is especially close to Reinhold Niebuhr; at times he is also compared to Paul Tillich, Gabriel Marcel, and Søren Kierkegaard in the Christian world, or to Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, André Neher, and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in the Jewish world.