“Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.” ~ Thomas Merton

As most of you know, next to Jesus, Abraham Heschel is my Rabbi of choice and much of that has to do with my resonance with his understanding of what it means to be human. In his book Who Is Man?, based on lectures he gave at Stanford University in 1963, he makes it clear that there is a qualitative difference between human being and being human. He writes, “I am born a human being; what I have to acquire is being human.” Elsewhere he states, “Human being demands being human.”

It is important to note that human being can only demand being human because, for Heschel, human life and living are fundamentally religious in nature. Paradoxically, the divine element in human existence is what enables the word “human” to refer to the essence of “human being.” It is God, and not just any God but the God of pathos, as Heschel asserts, who infuses the word human with nobility and meaning and in whose image persons are made.

Heschel stresses that whereas human being is a given, a biological fact, being human is a vocation, task, responsibility, and destiny. “Human being,” says Heschel, “is a disclosure of the divine. The grandeur of human being is revealed in the power of being human.” Human being is a reality. Being human is an opportunity. Human being is an actuality. Being human is a possibility and a surprise. The former is a known fact, the latter “is always a trial, full of risk, precarious,” . . . . “an incalculable series of moments and acts.” The opportunity to become human is simultaneously our greatest inheritance and privilege, and our greatest responsibility and challenge.

Already made in the image of God, our “greatest responsibility and challenge” is not to become godly, but to become human. The more not the less human we become, the more we live as the sacred image that we are. The difference between human being and being human is rooted in the biblical view of the human person as “image of God.” It only becomes apparent as persons discover the divine gratuity and human responsibility inherent in this multifarious term.

Minimally, to be the image of God means that we are more than just a biological entity, “a mass of protoplasm, a complicated robot, a tool-making animal.” According to the Torah, humans were divinely spoken and breathed into being and, therefore, there is something sacred at stake in human existence. To be the image of God means that the teleology of human being is theological in nature. Being human implies “a direction of being.” To be the image of God means that God is both the source of our dignity and the goal that lies beyond our self. “What is spiritual dignity?” asks Heschel. He answers: “The attachment of the soul to a goal that lies beyond the self, a goal not within but beyond the self.” In this sense, religious living always follows the path of return as the goal and the source are revealed to be one and the same. T.S. Eliot describes this discovery in the fourth quartet, “Little Gidding,” of his poem The Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The soul is nostalgic. It carries within it a memory of and a longing for home. Thus from the human perspective, becoming human is by nature a going home, and from the divine perspective a homecoming.

Dan