Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the great Jewish theologians of the twentieth century, wrote in his classic God in Search of Man (1955):
“A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands to understand more than he does. Right living is the way to right thinking.”
As Heschel sees it, waiting for inspiration is as sensible as waiting until your house is on fire before looking for a fire escape—or waiting until you feel energetic before taking a walk. Much of life reverses the skeptic’s formula: not “I have to see it to believe it,” but “I have to do it to believe it.”
We often imagine thought comes first and action follows, but action can be a way of thinking. We learn patience by waiting and courage by doing the frightening thing. Generosity, too, is often learned by giving before we feel generous. Some truths can be understood only from within the life they require.
Failure to understand this lies at the heart of today’s culture wars and polarization. We increasingly demand right thinking while disregarding the experience that makes it intelligible.
Nothing is easier than forgetting that another point of view may contain something we have missed. We understand one another badly when we mistake understanding for reducing the other to our own way of seeing.
The life and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the grande dames of twentieth-century political thought, were shaped by what she called an “enlarged mentality”: the capacity to judge by imaginatively taking other standpoints into account. It combines sensitivity to context with principled judgment. In Nazi Germany, Arendt knew political catastrophe firsthand but resisted allowing even that experience to dictate her conclusions in advance.
Her controversial account of the Eichmann trial followed the same discipline. She tried to see what was actually before her rather than what prevailing assumptions told her she ought to see. For Arendt, good judgment required learning to think from where someone else stands without surrendering one’s own ground.
We think what we do, often without much thought. The neighborhood we choose, the school we prefer, the news we read, the restaurants we frequent, the people we invite to dinner—these habits become judgments about what is normal, admirable, safe, or suspect. Soon preference hardens into social prejudice, and people whose lives differ from ours begin to look not merely unfamiliar but wrong.
Heschel’s point reaches beyond religion. Right thinking does not always precede right doing. Sometimes we must cross the street, enter the room, share the meal, keep the promise, or perform the duty before the world looks different.
The leap of action is not a substitute for thought. It is one of the ways thought learns to see. Theodore Roethke put it more simply: “I learn by going where I have to go.” An evangelical friend put it more colloquially: “God can’t steer a parked car.”
We decry the rise of authoritarians without confronting what makes them attractive: the promise of order, certainty, and escape from ambiguity. Yet we repeat the same impulse whenever we treat our own moral judgments as beyond serious challenge.
On abortion, sexuality, and other contested questions, adversaries are easily reduced to monsters, cowards, bigots, or enemies of the good. More insidious are the polished ways we sanitize our own extremism, dressing coercion in the language of piety, academic propriety, principle, decency, or moral necessity.
Heschel’s point returns with force: right thinking requires practices that enlarge judgment, not merely arguments that confirm it. The authoritarian temptation is not limited to strongmen and movements. It begins whenever conviction makes further understanding seem unnecessary.
Civility, no less than good faith, is an ordeal, not an instinct. It asks us to submit our certainties, resentments, and loyalties to the discipline of living with people we cannot dismiss. The manners of pluralism may seem superficial or hypocritical, but they keep conviction from becoming domination. The danger begins when restraint is mistaken for weakness and aggression for courage.
Civility often comes without conviction, while conviction often comes without civility. Heschel’s challenge is not to think less deeply, but to live in ways that make deeper thought possible: convictions strong enough to act on, and disciplined enough to remain open to judgment.
Notes and reading
Abraham Joshua Heschel. Polish-born Jewish theologian and rabbi whose work joined religious practice, moral responsibility, and wonder; God in Search of Man (1955) is one of his central books.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A foundational study of modern totalitarianism, especially ideology, terror, mass society, and the destruction of political freedom.
Heschel, Arendt, and Aristotle. All three, in different ways, treat judgment and character as formed through practice and experience. Understanding does not simply precede conduct; it is acquired and tested within the conduct of life itself.
William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (2001), chapters 5 and 16. Desmond explores the space between self and other, resisting the impulse to make what is different fit our own way of seeing things. Understanding requires openness to an otherness we cannot possess or fully understand.
Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Cass R. Sunstein, Decisions and Social Norms (2026). A study of how norms, expectations, imitation, routines, and the behavior of others shape choices.
Luke 10:25–37. Asked to define the neighbor, Jesus answers not with a definition but with a story in which a Samaritan—an outsider and traditional enemy—becomes the moral exemplar. “Go and do likewise”: some truths are understood only by living them.
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
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