THE CHARACTERISTIC OF SUDDENNESS©
Dr. Zadok Krouz
Abstract
The article part 3 will continue discuss the aspects of the dialogue meeting. Rozenzweig changes the historical meeting (revelation at Mt. Sinai) to a personal one. The meeting is real, factual, not figurative, and does not depend on what happened before. It is a suddent event, an axis between the past creation and the future redemption. The present time makes the reality of the meeting firm. The meeting takes man from the pole of pessimism to that of optimism. The dialogue gives man purpose. Love arises out of the dialogue between man and God. Understand this view of love explains the inner certainty of faith that a man experiences and the reality of such dialogue for the man.
Suddenness guarantees the vitality of the meeting
The piece of parchment that was found spoke of the religious experience of man, his communication with God as a sudden event. The experience of Pascal is comparable to the framework of the experience of Rosenzweig. It is a significant confirmation since it indicates precisely the basis of the vital characteristic of the meeting—the sudden, of the momentary occurrence which seizes man with all the vigor of the full moment:
. . . fire!
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob (Toldot HaPhilosophia 192).
Fire and the exclamation point after it indicates the power of the vitalizing surprise of the meeting. The meeting appears unknowingly and unintentionally as a present of pure truth resulting from the depths of the soul of a man of faith. Speech in the meeting is vital since something unexpected and new penetrates with each response. It is this which guarantees its vitality. Thus, Rosenzweig questioned the Platonic dialogue, which he called slumbering dialogue, which was truly nothing other than dialogue which divided roles. Without suddenness with its ever present renewal as faith of the individual, religion could likely become a burden, and its reason for being would likely cease. And without the immediate communication which seizes the soul “like lightening” (Naharayim 230), religion would become a lifeless god in the world of creation, a strange and magical fact which assures its proponents a certain measure of success, without considering the spiritual aspirations and attainments. For, again, their hearts are not open to the great truths, the embodiment of which is the object and purpose of religion. They do not understand that in addition to the revealed aspect of religion, there is also a domain of truth in which “whim” (Star 197) is embodied as lightening in the belief experience. The lightening experience revives the soul, which is what happened to Rosenzweig in the synagogue in Berlin on the eve of Yom Kippur. There, depressed, he found as “fate bursting forth” (Star 193) his eternal longing for the truth, which did not permit him to remain without vital belief. 1 Nahum Glatzer, who was very close to Rosenzweig in his last years, noted that Rosenzweig experienced in that Yom Kippur prayer a conversionary experience; he attained “certainty that man does not reach thorough analysis, he indicates an event intense and immediate” (“Conversion” 72).
Speech as sudden characteristic
Among all the language in the indicative mood there comes suddenly the mood of the imperative: “let there be”! “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) is fate bursting forth. It is the light of the candle of God in the sudden renewal of man’s new soul with the profusion of his love for God and God’s love for man. Speech as manifestation of the content of the meeting is previously expected: In the actual conversation, something happens: I do not know even what I shall say. However, prior thereto man must be, according to Rosenzweig, in the framework of belief thought, that is—biblical and not pagan. He must know what is above and what is below, what is in front and what is behind. But it is impossible to prepare in the manner set forth by Maimonides as the way to prepare for prophecy (The Guide, ed. Ibn Tibon, pt. 2, ch. 36–37). The response to my fellow speaker is an act that I did not expect previously and commences only at the moment he concluded speaking. The suddenness of the conversion demonstrates the independence of the speech of man; human language is influenced by the lack of logic, which is one of the marks of this independence. It is as if language is created alongside man, and he only utilizes it. Language is not dependent on logic.
The content of the meeting is not expected previously
The content of the meeting is not capable of being prepared beforehand by man, since love has no laws. There is no ladder, no preparation of tradition and there is no intellectuality. The meeting as content for love is a sudden occurrence without any preparation. It is “fate bursting forth” as nullification and negation of the moment which immediately precedes this one. The phenomenon of love is “a destiny not ‘destined’ but suddenly there and yet as inescapable in its suddenness as though it were destined from of yore” (Star 193). “Whim” (Star 197) belongs only to the soul of the beloved and not to God because his creating is not supposed to be caprice. Just as the caprice of God becomes ever-present power so, too, does His eternal essence become whim to love that is awakened anew every moment.
The experience of man as lightning will come, and it will not give man the fulmination of experience of experience, for it is forever present, darkened to the past, not expecting a future, for it is only present. Furthermore, the moments of whim which seize the lover and the beloved is like the death of him who seizes. And all who wait for love are promised “that it [love] will never strike man like lightning” (Naharayim 230). Love—spontaneous, bursting forth, is expropriated of all calculation and surprises, “for the thing was done suddenly” (Chron. 29:36). In this suddenness of the moment, the lover and the beloved forget the past and the future, they live the immediate moment: “For love alone is at once such fateful domination over the heart in which it stirs, and yet so newborn, initially so without a past, so wholly sprung from the moment which it fulfills, and only from that moment” (Star 193). The trait of suddenness must occur in the present. The following section concerns the time characteristic of the meeting.
THE TIME CHARACTERISTIC
Time—the mode of action of the meeting
No longer does the logical concept of non-time effectuate the nearness of God to man; rather time, that is, occurrence of speech, assures the realization of the meeting. Thus, one sees in time (as category of occurrence) the true dimension of the law of man’s meeting with God. Time in the meeting is not perceived as a previously given and defined dimension, a sort of form permitting the manifestation of things one after the other, but time itself receives its definition and meaning through meeting experience. The encounter does not only occur in time, but time itself occurs: “For time is made in it entirely real. Not in time occurs everything which takes place, but it, time itself occurs” (Naharayim 228). The meeting is not only of the present, it is present-being, itself; therefore, no experimental event can occur without a connection with time. In every eventful act, the dimension of time of necessity is involved. Every action is executed in some time. Every action happens in a time frame, but we cannot learn from this that the time is action, but rather that the action is the time itself. Creation is an act that occurred in the past, revelation of the meeting occurs in the present, and redemption will take place in the future. Time is not an utterance of thought of language, rather it is involved in it in an active manner: “The new thinking cannot know without a connection to time” (Naharayim 229). The most important representative of existential thought is presently martin Heidegger, whose book Being and Time can be compare in a number of points with Star of Redemption (see “Investigation” 13–52). Rosenzweig emphasizes, vis-?-vis what God did, what He does, What He will do, what occurred, and what will occur to Him and what is occurring to man and what God will do in the future, that all of these are not to be disconnected from the dimension of time (Naharayim 229).
The present is time in the fullness of its real, vital meaning
Present time makes the meeting real, vital and significant; “(of all three tenses, past, present, and future) only the present is time in the fullness of its meaning . . . and just as the images of the idols extend to us until the present as created past, there also exists in the present external images in which lies the redemptive future” (Naharayim 235). Present time, states Rosenzweig, relates to the doctor who treats a patient, revelation of the disease is past and determining his death and future. “If one tries to use non-time consciousness and remove knowledge from the diagnosis, and experience, from the cure—daring and recalcitrance, and from prognosis—doubt and hope, his efforts will be in vain” (Naharayim 229). But in the meeting, “the lightning of experience is forever present” (Naharayim 229). The ever-present aspiration of Rosenzweig for the “present,” for the “now,” is characteristic of all spheres of his philosophy, from his relationship to the Torah and commandments to his metaphysical thoughts. It is the source of his opinion on the matter of “the analysis of language,” for the language of the lover which occurs in the dialogue of the meeting from its nature, is conducive to occurring only in the present”; “. . . ‘God loves’ is present, pure and simple . . . God’s love is ever wholly of the moment . . .” (Star 197). The new thought embodies, in essence, speech, which is occurrence in time, and in the meeting it must be in the present. Rosenzweig gives grammar much importance as manifestation of the operation of temporality on the being of language. Grammar is not something logical, that one can derive a priori, rather it is the time-historic imprint of language of the meeting: “Accordingly a genuine arrangement is necessary (for the expression of language), an arrangement which is not internal but rather adduced for grammar, and in a certain sense for language altogether, from without, that is, from the role of language as against reality” (Star 161). The foundation of the belief philosophy on language, speech and conversation necessitates time and the now since the speech of the meeting occurs in the vital present tense: “Only then—as the expression of a revelation occurring then and thee, and no longer as the testimonial to a revelation that has occurred altogether—will the thing emerge from its substantive past into its vital present” (Star 195). Thus, the contents of the meeting are like a command to love, since the imperative is the domain of the language of the pure present. The love of the imperative knows only the moment and expects nothing from the future, for if it were otherwise, it would become law: “’God loves’ is present, pure and simple.” Rosenzweig suggests, for example, that the lyric, secretive and concealed between lover and the beloved in Songs of Songs is expressed in short sentences like the imperatives . . . “draw me” . . . “rise” . . . “go” . . . “open” . . . and each is in the present. The imperative vitalizes the meeting since it is forever present: “A downpour of imperatives descends on this green pasture of the present and vitalizes it” (Star 233). If were only past, it would not be that which the lover does to love: “pure, unadulterated present” (Star 198). Creation, which symbolized death, is vanquished by the present every moment.
What is the difference between the present and the moment? The present vis-?-vis itself always becomes past, but momentary present, ever-present new moment, is present. This is the forever-ness which was discussed in the section on the dynamic characteristic. The moment is not stuck in one event forever; rather, it is of continuous activity. The occurrence takes place in the moment and not only in the present of the moment which tomorrow becomes past. It is within the power of the moment and not of he present “to transfix God in the Bright, the Manifest, the Unconcealed, in short in the present. And by doing so, he lets God’s concealedness sink into the past once and for all. “Now God is present, present like the moment, like every moment, and therewith he proceeds to be come ‘matter of fact’—something which as creator he had not yet truly been and which even now he only begins to become—like the gods of the heathen behind the ramparts of their mythology (that is, revealed, seen)” (Star 195).
The present grasps the place of the past in the sense of turning the potential into the kinetic, concealedness to revelation. “As act, creation was founded, and as result it climaxed, in the past. To this tense there here corresponds in dominant fashion the present” (Star 217). It is now understood why love must be linked to the moment—it is man’s momentariness. It is a loved being because of the momentary present. The ever-present nature of continuous momentariness or incessant present provides eternal serene duration to the beloved. “It knows itself loved ‘forever.”’ For it felt loved every moment and only in the ever-presentness of the moment.
THE POLAR CHARACTERISTIC
The time of momentary present which served as the pivot of vital reality of the meeting, which was discussed in the prior section, is based on the axial principle of Rosenzweig, according to which the meeting is an axis between the past creation and the future redemption. From the polarity of the past and present, Rosenzweig can attain the dynamic and real consideration in his discussion of the meeting between God and man.
Polarity—guarantor of man’s experience
. . . only because of the midpoint there rose in the world without boundaries a circumscribed dwelling place, a small plot of land between four stakes of the tent, its fly going and broadening continually. Only in this view are the beginning and end changed from the concept of bounded to that of infinite—from corner-stone to everlasting possession, and let the beginning be “creation” and the end “redemption.” (Naharayim 213)
. . . this is a world lacking specific midpoint, a world of right and left, front and back, such that any thing at any time is likely to be right and left, front and back. The instantaneous goes forward and backwards; this is the world whose lofty spirit teaches man to know his brother in the silences of the thickets and the recesses of the waters. (Naharayim 211)
“Only because of the midpoint,” according to Rosenzweig, can the reality of the meting “know” in its occurrence the significant and absolute reality.
Rosenzweig renews a methodological innovation be setting, as a foundation of the structure of the method, the polarity between the “midpoint” and the “near”, the “revealed” and the “hidden”, past and present, tale and revelation, monologue and dialogue, occurrence and experience, doubt and certainty, suffering and bliss, darkness and light, pagan philosophy and theology.
Only this polarity, bound in the personal ark or religious belief, permits one to prepare an objective system which is consistent with reality: In its groundless presentness, revelation must now permanently touch the ground. This ground lies beyond its presentness, that is, in the past, but revelation itself renders it visible only from within the presentness of experience” (Star 214). This sentence emphasizes the connection between revelation, which is groundless presentness, and reality, which relates to it as fixed from the past—beyond the presentness of the occurring meeting (revelation). In other words, the polarity provides the meeting with something like an act of mercy, an occurrence which can be experienced in direct presentness, which is not of itself the subject of cognition.
The objects in creation of the first pole do not exist on their own, disconnected from the essence of the meeting which occurs in the life of religious man, since creation has a central place in religion; it is the concept which marks revelation of the meeting not as an act occurring in the present but as a meeting which took place in time past: “Rather revelation remembers back to its past, while at the same time remaining wholly of the present; it recognizes its past as part of a world passed by” (Star 215). This first pole, which is the first revelation of God’s meeting with the universe, occurs in the second pole of the meeting as direct, vital manifestation of God as the assemblage of the objectivity of creation. Only from this position is the meeting revealed. Only from the polar variations can we learn of the religious meaning of the creation in the revelation of the meeting. It is the meaning of the concluded pagan world which became the beginning revitalized by the vital God of creation; the silent, obstinate essence itself in the sinking of tragic man is made into a soul which speaks and hears and loves, and is the beloved who is released in the meeting in the present. It is the meaning of the plastic world, of art that became creation which will find its adjustment in the redemption that will always come (D’Varim b’Go 422).
In this sense, the polarity is emphasized in the distant and completed, the accomplished and the absolute being made into the proximate, which attains its existence from ever present occurrence, which renews itself every moment. For the meeting is rooted precisely in the pole which contradicts it, and in that its power and right to exist is experimental, real and ever present. The possible yields its place to the certain; the vague and the segmented yield to the revealed and the complete; the principle becomes a course (A=A or B=B becomes A=B man-God becomes revelation [meeting]) (Naharayim 211).
Idolatry is made a lie when it demands for itself to be “perfection”, complete truth. The meeting “as beginning” ended forever the closed and particular world given to definition as we know it in pagan and logical thought. The polarity provides the meaning of “creatio ex nihilo” whose source is in creation; with the power of the pole of creation that determined the relationship between God and the world, the configured world of the metalogic Weltanschauung would thus have to be really “Nought” (Star 156). Only the idea of polarity tears the world from its elemental closedness and opens new horizons be disclosure of the experiential factuality in the opposite pole.
It is now very clear why Rosenzweig commenced his book with the sentence about death (Star 45), more precisely, about the fear of death, and concluded his work with the slogan “into life” (Star 437). The first pole, death, demonstrates perfectly to man his individual reality and existence. In death or the fear of death man in creation is solitary, silenced, withdrawn, and lacks the love of God. he is like a dead person whose mouth is closed like a god who either feels or reacts. It is a framework lacking the unexpected. Thus, death is placed first, for it is not “Nought”, but is something: “. . . and truthfully death is not what it seems, not Nought, but a something from which there is no equal . . .” (Star 46).1 It is, again, to demonstrate the source of the reality that only from it life germinates and not from philosophical and logical speculations of which he wrote disparagingly in the first chapter of his book. this “something” is existentialism as Heidegger defined it: a “race” (“vorlaufen”) whose goal is death.
Every man, when created, is essentially sentenced to death, because this is the singular reality of absolute truth of his life. Rosenzweig did not matter-of-factly place his entire philosophical method between the two extremities of death and life. According to Rosenzweig, this polar tension only grounds and assures the ultimate path “into life”: “This is a world lacking a specific midpoint, a world of right and left, front and back such that any thing at any time is likely to be right and left, front and back. The instantaneous goes forward and backwards; this is the world whose lofty spirit teaches man to know his brother in the silences of the thickets and the recesses of the waters,” “Only in this view are the beginning and the end changed from the concept of bounded to that of infinite—from corner-stone to everlasting possession, and let the beginning be ‘creation’ and the end ‘redemption’” (Naharayim 211, 213). Therefore, Rosenzweig calls the short epilogue of his book “Gate” (Star 432), though the discussion about the problem of death is in the beginning of the book.
Rosenzweig thinks that all reality of life is nourished by the feeling of the reality of death: the soul dies first and is resurrected in the eternal arms of God, its lover: “Man dies his way into the lover and is resurrected in him” (Star 197). The meeting gains its power from the fear of death, and furthermore, the vitality of the meeting results from this consciousness. This explains the renewed birth, which is a prior condition of the soul dying with the fear of death and being resurrected like a new birth in the arms of the beloved. Love, in fact, draws its strength from the strength of death since “love is strong as death” (Star 190).
Polarity as a product of the unification of the fixed and absolute point of meetings
“[The meeting] is, then a midpoint, a fixed and standing point. Why? Because it happens to be the solid, silent fixed point, without touch, to the obstinate ‘I,” with vitality, like ‘such am I and not another’, that is, o my freedom that is entirely my complete, obdurate, impermeable freedom’ (Naharayim213). “Because all reality . . . is called to freedom . . .” (Naharayim 220). “This is the point of momentary time which has no beginning and no afterwards but rather its world middle. Both because of its afterwards, the world is ‘infinite’” (Naharayim 213), “because of the everlasting power of God” (Star 193), “infinite in space because of the beginning and infinite in time for the afterwards” (Naharayim 213).
Crescas, in Ohr HaShem2, uses an axial description in a manner similar to that of Rosenzweieg: “(The axis is similar to) roots on which to rest the Torah and the poles on which it will sit” (7). The axis, according to Rosenzweig, is similar to a fixed geometrical point pursuant to which is determined the place of every point in the plane, and it’s description of the four wedges of the tent is comparable to the point of the meeting of two separate tangential circles, in direct relationship, which passes via two contact points, and is called the axis of that pole (Naharayim 213).
In the geometric description, as it were, of the framework of polarity, Rosenzweig notes the polar structure of the life of faith which is summarized in the absolute, unified experimental encounter of man with his God3: “For idolatry is nothing other than coagulation of veritable revelation of the moment of the true-God in existing God-likeness, which stands due to this existence in the face of the will of revelation . . .” (Naharayim 40). The first pole contains in closed form the content of the pole which differs from it. The polar duality becomes unified in the pivot of the religious encounter, as was well formulated in Psalms (8:6): “what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” and its addition “for thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and Thou crownest him with glory and honor.” In this connection, Jeremiah’s call is very clear: “Am I not a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off?” (Jer. 23:23). Also, very clear is the connection of the song of the seraphim in Isaiah (6:3): “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the fullness of the whole earth declareth his glory,” in which we hear explicitly of the (holy) transcendence of the creator as well as his immanence (the Master who fills the whole earth).18
In “midpoint,” which on one hand is the past and on the other hand the future, is fixed the principle of unification of the “I,” the Tetragrammaton, that occurs in the meaning of Man and God:
Am Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name, what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said, moreover, unto Moses, Thus shalt say unto the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. (Exod. 3:13–15)
The pole of the future which is the coming generations and the pole of the past which is the generations of long ago are bound tightly by the unity of the “I” in the present (the meeting of the “I” of man with God). The individual in the present exists thanks to the polar action of memorization and anticipation which “cause to be” the generations which were and will be within him. The grandfathers and the grandchildren together sustain life for self-faithfulness and consciousness of the ‘I” in the meeting. This is the foreverness that burst into time. This is the blood tie (Blutsgemeinschaft) which passes from father to son. See Star, page 323: “It must produce itself in its own time and reproduce itself forever. It must make its life everlasting in the succession of generations, each producing the generation to come, and bearing witness to those gone by (the German word Zeugen relates to bear a child and bear witness). . . . It must be a blood-community, because only blood gives present warrant to the hope for a future. Anticipation of the future is possible for the Jewish People as a result of procreation.) Glatzer expressed this well: “Judaism is the non-historic segment cast into history” (HisLife 114). Or, phrased differently, “Israel is the symbol of eternity in history” (Jewish Philosophy 2:240).
The pivot of this meeting is not only the unity of time in the eternity of the individual but of the Judaism of the individual and of Israel generally. This is the axial trinity of Yahweh (the Tetragrammaton) “He was, He is, He will be.” It is self-faithfulness that was guided in the path of the past, the present and the future. There is always need of “transmitting the past under the rod of criticism of the present—for the sake of the future (Naharayim 80).
From within the pivot “love your God” man acts in the world and adjusts the kingdom of God by “love your neighbor” in that it brings the entire creation closer to redemption via the absolute of the pivot of the encounter. This polarity is woven in the threads of lineage; in it are not only the woven in the circle of the individual but of all the nation to come. The polarity indicates two meanings of the “I.” One says that the “I” is located in the polar opposite of the “he,” and the second says that “I” and “he” are one “I.” The first definition is the reality of pagan creation and the second is the manifestation of creation for revelation; it is the system of solidarity between the two poles according to Rosenzweig, which Rosenzweig explains by means of mathematical analogies, in this event the analogies being B=A and all B=A emerges in B=B. An understanding of Rosenzweig’s mathematical analogies can be attained from the contents of his letter to Rudolf Ehrenburg of November 18, 1917. In that letter, while explaining the dialectic of Hegel, Rosenzwieg sets forth the formula of existence.19
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE MEETING
The polarity also summarizes the consequences of the meeting.
The meeting carries man from the pessimistic pole to the pole of optimism. The dialogue provides man with purpose. Rosenzweig considers the life of man depressing until man meets God. he is not satisfied with his existence in his generation, among his people; he wants to continue to exist as an individual and distinctive as a personality. He sees the abyss and wants to hang a bridge leading out, and he wants to overcome his cessation. He wants to cause his dimness to shine, to turn his coming to going, to produce fro the absolute Nought the Aught and the eternal “yes”—he communicates with the absolute Nought. This is the integral consequence of the essence of the polarity between pessimism and optimism.
The consequence of association
Nothing is so heavy a burden on man as living in creation, mute, enclosed, and alone. It is like living in “total rest”, not being activated, without association, without distraction and task, and without bursting forth of the miracle. For then he feels his nothingness, his forsakenness, his cessation, the dust and ashes of his being, his end as a dying man, the helplessness, his emptiness and fear of the unknown. There rises immediately from the foundation of this soul his gloom, sorrow and loneliness, the feeling of the absence of love, doubt and shame.
Such is life in creation, life separated from all, with no relationship between man and God. This separation is the reason for the feeling of gloom and absence of satisfaction of the soul. Separation exists within the “I” following the lack of coordination between the conscious soul (the intellect) and the unconscious soul (belief); there is an absence of connection between the “I” and God, between the “I” and the world.
Contented man is one who is not stricken by these two, whose personality is not divided within itself and does not shudder from the fear of the unexpected, The soul is tied to God and is not separated in the knowing experimental sense “. . . I know myself loved. And this acknowledgment is already the highest bliss for it, for it encompasses the certainty the God loves it” (Star 212). A man like this feels, in his joining with God, like a citizen of the world and son of God, benefiting undisturbedly from the abundance of love that God showers upon him, constructing his path to the world. He is no longer inundated with thoughts about death and whether God loves him because he does not feel himself disengaged from the absolute, eternal and loving reality and even will not feel, because of this, disconnected from those who follow him: “Now and forever more it will remain in God’s proximity” (Star 215).
This profound, intensive and instinctive association with the divine “I” provides the loftiest of pleasures—the feeling of being loved. The lifeless image now becomes itself filled with the life which it hitherto only aroused in the spectator, and thus it come alive. Now it can open its mouth and speak.
The consequence of love
At the meeting, man hears the command: “love me,” and since “it can open its mouth and speak,” it answers, saying, “I am a sinner”; it overcomes the doubt of God’s love. It dares to proceed from its confession of the past to a general confession of the present. It is certain of the response, and in the light of the presence of its love, it purifies itself. It is certain of his love. Its acknowledgement is not acknowledgement of the absence of love and is not even a general acknowledgement, rather it is a notification that it is loved. This acknowledgement is the confession of love, which is the highest bliss for it, for it encompasses the certainty that God loves it: “nothing short of acknowledgement carries the soul off into bliss of being loved” (Star 211). Following the presence of this love, it can attest to God with absolute certainty.
It comes to the confession of belief that comprehends experiential consciousness that “God is”—the God of its love is truly God and not fantasy. The soul, which went astray in the world with eyes open and forever dreamless, is now, and in the future will be, engulfed in God’s proximity. Now it knows; it need but stretch out engulfed in God’s proximity. Now it knows; it need but stretch out its right hand in order to feel God’s right hand coming to meet it.
The soul found claim and peace in his eyes (Star 234). “God gives himself to the soul” (Star 202). The peace of God is given to the soul. “She is his and thus she knows of him: he is mine” (Star 234). The soul is at peace in the love of God, like a child in the arms of its mother.
In summary, the beloved feels itself borne and secure in the love of the lover. It knows itself loved at every moment only because it knows itself loved “forever.” Being loved is the very air in which it lives. The vital moment to Rosenzweig in respect of God is found in the Torah in Exod. 34:6 and Num. 14:18, in which God is described as “most merciful.” The world was created, according to Jewish conception, as a result of the kindness of God: “A world of mercy he will build.”5 The Creator’s mercy fills the world, in the words of the poet of Psalm 33; and God “maintains life with mercy” as stated in the 18 benedictions, recited by Jews three times a day. The divine creation must do well, otherwise everything will end in destruction. Without obeying God, the loving soul, the effort of human creation is likely to end in failure. Rosenzweig already learned this lesson from Genesis because of the disobedience to God (the soul); it is said there that Adam was driven from the Garden of Eden to work in the sweat of his brow until he will subdue good, possessed land. Disobedience and sin, which separated man and God. Thus, Rosenzweig eradicates the sin from the soul of man and his surroundings, that is, mankind. The knowledge that is eternal and existing proves to be a vital, creative force by tearing the lover’s own love away from that moment and “eternalizing” it once and for al. Love warms the stone-cold past from its rigor mortis. The living soul, loved by God, triumphs over death. For love is strong as death. The bridegroom standing below the “huppa” (the wedding canopy), wears his shroud in order to proclaim war with death and that he is as daring as it. On the holidays of revelation, the Jew wears his shroud and is accompanied by the wine of the meal, the joy of children and songs—here, too, he turns his nose up at death. Death is a basic force in the world, but man can overcome it. Such is the consequence of the meeting and even the summary, the essence, of its tale. Love can bring blessed acknowledgement with the power of the soul. Rebelliousness becomes faith, in which man responds to the love of God, and he maintains, with all his strength, his love for God.
The certainty of God’s love brings the soul to prayer. Prayer is a result of the consciousness that God loves the soul. Prayer is an overflow of the most perfect trust of the soul. Prayer is the highest bliss that man can attain. The soul merits prayer with the certainty of the kindness of God’s love to it. With the feeling of security and prayer comes the completely pacified belief. The soul now praises God’s name forever, attests to him and praises his glorious name, his unbounded greatness:
Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion subsisteth throughout all generations. . . . The Lord is near to those who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He will also hear their cry and save them. The Lord preserveth all those who love Him; but He will destroy all the wicked.6
The soul knows how to pray: “Blessed be God who does not remove my prayer and his mercy from me” (Star 216). Prayer is not limited by any means to the relationship of bliss between man and his God, but also manifests the bond between man and the world, that is, all mankind. From prayer we move to the universal consequence, which follows in the next section.
The consequence of universality
A consequence of the meting is to bring man closer to the universalism of the whole world. Love of God in the meeting is learned afterwards as love of one’s fellow man and all mankind. The man-world relationship is the path of redemption which ultimately vanquishes death. For only redemption is the final victory over it, “before these cries of triumph death is driven to nothing” (Dat H’Tvuna 280; see Star 197). One prophet who contributed much to the sublime of redemption of the world on Israel was Jeremiah. Rosenzweig’s religious, philosophical idea is like the principle of the prophets. Jeremiah believed in bringing all peoples to serve the true God, the one and unique God, as a result of a personal, internal reformation from the consciousness of the nothingness of their idols. The next chapter will discuss the universal consequence—redemption, and will complete the circle which commenced with God and returns to him. The world and man unify into one with God and with eternity.
Summery
The thought of death, the absolute certainty that binds us all, propels man’s search for absolute reality. The logic that Life comes from Life is proof of God’s existence and reciprocal love with God is man’s natural and eternal relationship with God.
Tactility of exclamatory present-tense language provides the combustion of spontaneous feeling to fortify the natural eternal bond of the lover and beloved. This moment is enshrined forever as a “realization” and does not decay as that particular “present” is condemned to. In fact, being written down, the timeless quality of these words leap into the heart at any future reading. This becomes a timeless “now” moment devoted to the relationship of the lover and the beloved and is transcendentally and eternally vital.
As we have seen, one can only truly comprehend and feel love if one is rooted to the immediacy of the moment. The moment forges a realization. Consequently, we understand how the semantics of prayer and scripture are to initiate bliss and enhance the mood of love of God.
1Compare Heidegger, Being and Time, 314, sec 49. “Das M?gliche Ganzein des Daseins und das Sein sum Tode,” and, in particular: “Vorlaufen die M?glichkeit des Todes” (“with the possibility of racing towards death”), key elements of Heidegger’s thought.
2 Chasdai crescas (1340–1410) Ohr HaShem: Introduction. See, also, Klazkin thesaurus Philosophicus I: 158–166.
3 See Star 148, 166, 186, 192, 200, 211, 214, 216, 219, and see 233: “Drawn to its matter of creation into revelation and revelation rises to its matter above creation.”
4 Compare, Crescas, Ohr HaShem, art. 1, ch. 2, which explains this verse in Isaiah as follows: “Because his being is holy and distinct . . . his splendor fills the earth.”
5 The explanation given by the Rabbinical Sages to Ps. 89;2. See Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 58B.
6 From the “Ashrai” prayer, the recitation Verse Siddur 252 and Ps. 145.
LIST OF SOURCE MATERIAL ABBREVIATIONS
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Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962.
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Being
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Scholem, Gershom. D'Varim b'Go [There is a Reason]. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1976. 407-425.
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D'Varim b'Go
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Cohen, Hermann. Dat H'Tvuna M'Mkorot H'Yehadut [Religion of the Intellect from Jewish Sources]. Trans. Zvi Veslavsky. Ed. Samuel Hugo Bergman and Natan Rotenstreich. Jerusalem: Bialik Inst., 1971.
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Dat H'Tvuna
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Glatzer, Nahum N. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Jewish Publ. Soc. of Amer., 1953.
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His Life
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Rotenstreich, Natan. HaMachshavah haYehudit b'et haHadash [Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times]. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1966.
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Jewish Philosophy
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Rosenzweig, Franz. Naharayim [Selected Writings of Franz Rosenzweig]. Trans. Yehoshua Amir. Jerusalem: Bialik Inst., 1977.
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Naharayim
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Ohr HaShem
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Crescas, Chasdai. Ohr HaShem [Light of God]. Ferrara, Italy: n.p., 1956-57.
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Star
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Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. 2d ed. Trans. William W. Hallo. New York: U of Notre Dame P, 1985.
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The Guide
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Moshe ben Maimon. Morei Nevuchim [The Guide to the Perplexed]. Ed. Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Tibon. Jerusalem: S. Monzon, 1938.
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