In fantasy we sometimes imagine our-selves living the life of a famous person, but the fantasy usually ends without any practical consequences. During the last decade I have conducted a workshop that enables us, using techniques adapted from the psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff, to “enter” the life of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish philosopher and theologian who was on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for many years. In this effort, participants write journals from within Heschel’s life, empathizing with it and, for all practical pur-poses, “becoming” him during the writing of the journal.

Ira Progoff is the creator of The Intensive Journal, an introspective instrument through which writers reflect upon their own lives. It is more than classical diary writing, which tends either to become repetitive and tedious, or requires a level of persistence that most people find hard to maintain. In The Intensive Journal the experience builds through the inter-play of various writing exercises which move a sophisticated process beyond the mere recording and describing of facts and events to levels of inner meditation and dialogue.

THE PROGOFF LIFE-STUDY TECHNIQUE

After Progoff developed The Intensive Journal, he created Life-Study (and wrote a book with that title) which builds on The Intensive Journall exercises. In Life-Study, instead of writing about one’s own life, the writer becomes a “trustee” for someone else’s and works on that life in the Life-Study Journal. In neither format does the writer need writing talent; nor is there any necessity to worry about syntax, punctuation, or spelling. All the writing is confidential, and sharing is voluntary. No one ever sees the material without permission. The group supplies a supportive atmosphere.

In the Progoff Life-Study workshop format, each participant chooses a different subject-person, usually a relatively famous person for whom sources are available. The leader introduces and guides the general process, which is applied to the subjects by the individual writers and which builds over the time-span of the workshop. The writer needs relatively little knowledge about the person chosen in order to get started. Errors regarding “fact” tend to eliminate themselves as the process unfolds. At the beginning, much of the writing is a projection from the writer’s own life into the interstices of the subject’s life. Gradually questions arise which send the writer back to available materials. Much of the writing, moreover, deals with areas which standard biographies neglect.

MY VERSION: STUDYING ONE LIFE

My own version of the Progroff Life-Study workshop takes a different tack. Instead of having everyone write on a different person, the whole group writes on the same person, in this case Professor Heschel. We use the various exercises created by Progoff to gain empathy with his life, finally entering it as we write his journal from the “inside.” In addition to the Progoff writing exercises, I also use storytelling, music, narration and discussion to create a group as well as an individual experience. Depending on the time available, I supply enough real biographical materials to get started and then feed in more as needed

I have given this workshop many times, every time except once on the life of Professor Heschel, the outstanding scholar and religious thinker who taught at JTS, influenced the religious understanding of Jews and Christians, and served as a moral exemplar in the Civil Rights movement and in the struggle against the war in Vietnam. Understanding his life in this manner con-tributes greatly to the comprehension of his writings and is intrinsically fascinating, too.

The workshop has several possible formats. Twice I have given it in the Seminary Graduate School as a full-semester course. I have presented it at a CAJE Conference as a three-session six-hour course and in the Seminary’s Lehrhaus program as a six-session, eight-and-one-half-hour course. I have also given three-hour and even one-and-one-half-hour versions, to both Jews and non-Jews, even to those who have a limited knowledge of Heschel’s life, or none. Once the method is learned, it can be applied to other lives.

At one CAJE Conference, I applied the method to the life of David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. It is probably one of the best ways to start to write a biography. But its main purpose is to develop a companion-resource for looking at our own lives from the perspective of someone else, a place to go when we need advice, most especially from some-one whose perspective can teach and inspire. There is something audacious in the effort, however limited, to experience the life of someone else, in this case, a great life such as that of Professor Heschel

IDENTIFYING WITH THE OTHER

While, at first, the process leans heavily on the psychological mechanism of projection, there is a crucial hump where writers, starting from their own real experience, come to identify with the “other” and approach a kind of felt oneness with the subject. One student, for example, a “Jew by choice,” chose to write about Heschel’s decision to leave his hasidic family to go to a secular gymnasium in Vilna for advanced studies (secondary school through undergraduate, preparing him eventually for his doctoral work in Berlin). This version of a choice point in Heschel’s life, stemming as it does from the student’s own experience of choosing against family and community pressures, was, I felt, powerfully insightful

Another writer imagines a dialogue at this very intersection. The dialogue is with Heschel’s father, who died when he was only nine-years-old, long before he made the decision to go to Vilna. The dialogue experience is one of the most compelling of the Progoff writing exercises, one toward which the workshops build. Dialogues take place with persons, with works, with characters in literature, with events in the person’s life. They are an exercise of the imagination reached through writing “from the pen,” after the build-up brought about by the preliminary journal exercises.

IMAGINATIVE CONSTRUCTS

An excerpt from this dialogue follows. Remember, it is an imaginative construction of what might have been said, drawing from what the student knows about Heschel and what has been learned from the earlier experiences of writ-ing in the Heschel journal. The writer writes both roles:

Hesehel:: I am going. I am filled with guilt. I am defiant.
Father::Who is stopping you?
Hesehel:You haven’t said anything. I only imagine what you would say.
Father: I am not saying anything. If all that I said before I died is not enough, then nothing I say now will matter.
Heschel: There. You try to make me feel guilty. All the family met. They said I could go. They put their trust in me. I am going.
Father: I am not stopping you. I am even a bit proud. Somehow I knew that you were different from the others, that just to be my succes-sor would never be enough. The world, the world; it never will be the same. Perhaps this is best. I am not stopping you. Go! I can’t say completely “with my blessing,” but go. It’s all right.
Heschel: Whatever I am is the result of what you gave me. You know that I will never lose that. I can’t. It’s not just a “hang-up” though. It only would be if I stayed.
Father:We are not in the “hang-up” business. That’s what hasidut is all about. Only if you lose the core, the inner Jew, only if you lose the heart, the song, the joy. Only then would I really be disappointed. Go, go, why do you still stand there? It’s all right, it’s all right!
Heschel: I will never know if I really can believe you when you say this to me.
Father: Maybe someday you will get over that problem. I cannot help you now.

Another student, an immigrant from a totalitarian country, wrote movingly about Heschel in Cincinnati. The Hebrew Union College had, in effect, saved Heschel from the Shoah with its invitation to join its faculty. Yet, what was Heschel, a pious East European Jew, doing in the citadel of American Reform Judaism? The student’s own experience served as the jumping-off place in this case, but there was a balance point reached, in which the personal narrative of the student, powerfully felt, merges into an authentic and imaginative understanding of what might well have been Heschel’s own.

The experience of a kind of personal revelation pervades the process, which may continue after the formal workshop is over, as insights are gained from working in the Journal life, with all its options and alternatives. I have suggested elsewhere (Lukinsky, 1990) that the approach is relevant to adult education and to schools which seek to nurture a personal involvement with history and its heroes.

Joseph Lukinsky is the Theodore and Florence Baumritter Professor of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Teachers College Columbia.