Vigils: Weekday

RELIGION IN A FREE SOCIETY
By Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel 3
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Little does contemporary religion ask of man. It is ready to offer comfort;
it has no courage to challenge. It is ready to offer edification; it has no courage
to break the idols, to shatter callousness. The trouble is that religion has
become…institution, dogma, ritual. It is no longer an event. Its acceptance
involves neither risk nor strain. There is no substitute for faith, no alternative
for revelation, no surrogate for commitment. We define self-reliance and call it
faith, shrewdness and call it wisdom, anthropology and call it ethics, literature
and call it Bible, inner security and call it religion, conscience and call it God.
However, nothing counterfeit can endure forever…

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for
the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame
religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but
because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely
replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today
is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom
rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority
rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
The primary task of religious thinking is to rediscover the questions to which
religion is an answer, to develop a degree of sensitivity to the ultimate questions
which its ideas and acts are trying to answer…

The most serious obstacle which modern men encounter in entering
discussion about the ideas of the Bible, is the absence from man’s consciousness
of the problems to which the Bible refers. The Bible is an answer to the
question, “What does God require of man?” But to modern man, this question
is suppressed by another one, namely, “What does man demand of God?”
Modern man continues to ponder: “What will I get out of life?” What escapes
his attention is the fundamental, yet often forgotten question, “What will life
get out of me?”

Absorbed in the struggle for the emancipation of the individual we have
concentrated our attention upon the idea of human rights and overlooked the
importance of human obligations… Oblivious to the fact of his receiving
infinitely more than he is able to return, man began to consider his self as the
only end… We can ill afford to set up needs, an unknown, variable, vacillating,
and eventually degrading factor, as a universal standard, as a supreme, abiding
rule or pattern for living. This, indeed, is the purpose of our religious traditions:
to keep alive the higher Yes as well as the power of man to say, “Here I am”; to
teach our minds to understand the true demand and to teach our conscience to
be present…

It is an inherent weakness of religion not to take offense at the segregation
of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls. Religion has suffered from
the tendency to become an end in itself, to seclude the holy, to become
parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human
nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the
body of doctrines. It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle
for truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular. Yet the task of
religion is to challenge the stabilization of values. Religion is not for religion’s
sake but for God’s sake.

3 Excerpted and quoted from The Insecurity of Freedom (New York: Schocken Books, 1959, 1960,
1963, 1964,1966), pp.1-23. Accessed online, July 5, 2023.