escaped the Holocaust in Europe through the help of Hebrew Union College and ultimately joined the faculty of Jewish Theological Seminary, became famous not only for his many religious and philosophical commentaries, but also for his social activism and support of the civil rights movement. In the 1950s and '60s, the two most famous scholars at Jewish Theological Seminary were Heschel and Mordechai Kaplan (1881–1983). Gordon Tucker began his studies at Jewish Theological Seminary at a time when both Kaplan and Heschel were living. Both Kaplan and Heschel confronted more traditional elements within Conservative Judaism, but each of them sought to redefine Judaism in different ways. While Kaplan favored a positivist, rationalist, and scientific approach to Judaism, Heschel's approach was philosophical, mystical, and spiritual. In effect, Heschel and Kaplan offered competing approaches to the liberalization of Jewish theology. Gordon Tucker's liberalism could be said to reflect Heschel's own political activism. According to Neil Gillman, a historian of Conservative Judaism, "Heschel insisted that his turn to political activism was prompted by his experience of living in Europe in the decades before World War II. He had been a personal witness to political oppression and was painfully aware that many otherwise good people stood on the sidelines and did not intervene. He was not going to repeat that pattern in America." Heschel's mystical spirituality lead him to become a champion within American Jewry of liberal causes and political activism. But Tucker is not a follower of Heschel, in the same sense that Kaplan had followers within Conservative Judaism. Rather, he is a follower of what he understands to be Heschel's tradition. For Tucker, Jewish law cannot be expressed solely through a positivist legal framework. It is motivated by an underlying and evolving sense of God's will through a process in which human beings play a critical role. To find precedent for changing Jewish law, Tucker analyzes evolving Jewish moral and legal traditions. Just as Heschel did, he turns to aggadah, the non-legalistic writings that are part of the oral and written tradition of Torah scholarship. He writes that Judaism has developed a precedent over time that rejects "the practice of punishing people, and causing them undue suffering, for things they are not responsible for." Ultimately, his proposal for a new halakhic response to homosexuality was based on this precedent. Proposed takkanah on homosexuality Tucker's prominence as both a political and theological liberal