Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) was one of the leaders of the “Jewish Renaissance” (Martin Buber was another) that brightened at least one area of German Jewish life under the Weimar Republic. Influenced by Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig was in turn one of the sources for modern religious Existentialism. He stood for a return to a Jewish orthodoxy, though his conception of it was a subject for criticism by the fundamentalists.
As against Buber, Rosenzweig emphasized the importance of Halachah (law); as against the established Orthodoxy, he stressed that the distinctions set up by Jewish law are not once and for all fixed, regardless of the religious situation; as against his teacher, Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig rejected the neo-Kantian attempt to found Judaism on pure reason. A typical illustration of Rosenzweig’s religiosity is the little commentary we publish below on a poem of Jehuda Halevi, “Holy.” It appeared, together with a German translation of the poem by Rosenzweig, in the German Jewish magazine Der Morgen, in April 1925.
As with Kierkegaard, what Rosenzweig writes here is not homiletics or theology proper; it is a kind of record of religious perception, a steady and cool perception which is as far from mysticism as it is from rational philosophy. Rosenzweig tells us what it is that one sees when one sees with faith—not so much what the faith is.
Worthy of notice is the quality of his style. The literary, the aesthetic was an important aspect of the German Jewish Renaissance, and it is doubtful whether there was ever a group of men who wrote German prose with such consistent distinction and such reverence for the language itself as did Rosenzweig, Buber, and their Jewish friends.—Ed.
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The word “holy” in Hebrew has the original meaning of being set apart. God’s working is the soft, almost inaudible beginning—but then everything seems to endure just as it was; Creation seems so primeval that it could almost be “eternal,” and the voice of conscience so unconditioned that it might almost be called “autonomous.” And so it is that true-believing Kantians could arrive at the notion that it would really make no difference if God’s authorship of the heavens and of conscience were conceded to the “religious position.” But this “position” cannot be so easily gained. God is not merely he who was. He is not merely the foundation bearing the world and men. That indeed is an empty belief, a mere “concession” which lacks the experience of the living present and does not grow out of it. Without a God who powerfully encroaches on our everyday life, the Soft and the Inaudible—which sustains the world and our heart which he created—becomes a fairy tale or, worse, a dogma. It is the holy who defines himself and everywhere determines distinction, election, holiness, the unheard-of. Without the obvious miracles of today, the hidden miracles of those days would be invisible—invisible, at least, as miracles. It is only the revelation of the unique that teaches us to honor the Creator in the realm of the natural; it is only the shudders of holiness that sanctify the everyday of the profane.
It is essential to miracle that it be embraced by the living present of holiness and so by sanctification. The question as to why no more miracles occur “today” as they “used to” occur, is a simple stupidity. Miracles have never “occurred.” The past is a murderous atmosphere for miracles. The Bible itself subsequently explains the miracle of the Red Sea “naturally.” Every miracle can be explained after the event. Not because the miracle was no miracle, but because explanation is explanation. The miracle is always in the present and possibly in the future. The miracle can be solicited and experienced, and as long as the presence of the experience continues, one can give thanks; when the presence is effaced, the miracle can only be explained. Every miracle is possible, even the most comic one, even a swimming axe; once it has occurred, men will not be embarrassed for an explanation. The only condition for its occurrence is that it can be solicited. With genuine, will-less prayer, to be sure, not with the intentioned prayer of the magical techniques of a medicine man; only in the latter is there something like a difference in the times when one can pray for something and when one cannot. But when genuine prayer is possible, the impossible becomes possible; where it is not possible, the possible becomes impossible. So it can be possible that the dead arise and impossible that the sick recover. There is nothing impossible in itself, only much that we hold to be so and that we are therefore unable to pray for; and a great deal that we hold to be very possible and which, for whatever reason, we lack the strength to pray for.
There is nothing at all miraculous about a miracle except that it—happens. Hundreds of times, perhaps, has the east wind laid bare the ford in the Red Sea, and it will do so hundreds of times more. But that it happens in the moment of a people’s extremest need, that is the miracle. What was but prayed-for future becomes the arriving present. This enrichment of a moment of the present with the past, its past, gives it the strength to endure as a present, not past, moment, and lifts it up from the flow of moments, of which it is yet one. So the miracle becomes the germ of holiness, and holiness endures as long as it is united to its origin, as long as it is miraculous. The distinctions that men seek to make provoke to laughter the Creator who created only one creation and lets it time and again be flooded by outbursting primeval chaos. But the distinctions that God himself makes spread over the whole of creation and reveal in their growing unity and universality the silent secret of the Creation.
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