Etty Hilessum and Abraham Joshua Heschel

About reacting and responding to God’s suffering

Abstract

 The rapprochement between the dynamics of an inner experience and an outer experience, both intimately linked present in the Etty Hillesum’s (1914-1943) writing and in the Abraham Joshua Heschel’s (1907-1972) philosophy of religion will adress two concepts developed by the jewish thinker constituted as two states constellated in the human soul, which are present in this young jewish woman’s letters and diaries written between 1941 and 1943 and which mach with her life crossing the Shoah: the wonder and the radical perplexity configured on the spiritual movement energized in the human condition miseraly absorbed on the reality of the mistery, that is in the condition of the man absorbed when recognizing a God who suffers and lives in search of this man.