Franz Rosenzweig died twenty-one years ago, but it is only now that American Jews are beginning to learn that this man—considered by many to be the most original Jewish thinker of the 20th century—ever existed. The great bulk of his work still remains untranslated from the original German, though Schocken Books promises a representative selection from his writings for this spring. (Two of his essays, “On Being a Jewish Person” and “The Holy,” appeared in the November 1945 and September 1949 issues of COMMENTARY.) WILL HERBERG presents a sketch of some aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought especially relevant to the situation of Judaism today.
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There is hardly an aspect of Jewish life and thought that Franz Rosenzweig did not touch with his creativity. But there is one achievement of his that seems to me to be of imperishable significance: he was among the first to point the way to that return to faith which is a mark of our time. He it was who—along with his slightly older contemporary, Martin Buber—showed that the ancient faith of prophet and rabbi was not merely compatible with the externals of modern culture—that was easy—but was in fact the answer to the deepest problems of the Jew’s existence in the contemporary world. Because Franz Rosenzweig did not simply inherit his faith as a matter of course, but had to win it for himself, his word possessed, and still possesses, an extraordinary power. In his own person and thought, Rosenzweig showed that the depth, the vitality, the closeness to real existence for which the new generation was longing, could be found in the resources of Jewish religion when that religion was properly understood. Wherever there are Jews who are earnestly striving to understand the meaning and relevance of their faith, there Franz Rosenzweig will have his word to say.
Rosenzweig blazed the trail of a new way in Jewish religious thinking—a “third way” equally distinct from, and opposed to, the traditionalism of conventional Orthodoxy and the rationalistic modernism of “liberal” religion. He laid the basis for a kind of Jewish religious thinking that is traditional yet vital, true to the deepest insights of Biblical and rabbinic teaching yet fully relevant to the demands of contemporary existence. He showed that Jewish religion can be something very different from either a scholastic fundamentalism out of touch with modern life or a rationalistic modernism out of touch with Biblical truth. In his very conception of religion and religious thinking, in his understanding of the eternal problems of Jewish and human existence, he was a pioneer. He re-thought the problems of Jewish religion—or rather, we should say, he re-lived them in his own life—and out of his own life he was able to forge a new way of Jewish religious thinking, a new conception of the ancient faith, that never fails to strike fire in the heart of those who seek God out of the necessities of their existence.
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Franz Rosenzweig was born on December 25, 1886, at Kassel, Germany, into a substantial, in many ways typical, German-Jewish bourgeois family. His great-grandfather in the Rosenzweig line had come from Eastern Europe with a rabbinical ordination but had settled down at Kassel as a manufacturer. His paternal grandfather was a chemist, his maternal grandfather the principal of a Jewish school. His father was a successful industrialist and respected civic leader. The Rosenzweig family was formally affiliated with the Jewish community but its Jewishness was empty of all content. The last link with the past was a great-uncle, Adam Rosenzweig, with whom the boy sometimes went to synagogue.
The young Franz at first studied medicine, but after 1908 he transferred to Freiburg to work in modern history under Meinecke, and somewhat later he went to Berlin. He was a brilliant student and made a deep impression on Meinecke and other scholars under whom he studied. His doctoral dissertation was on Hegel; almost simultaneously he wrote a work on Schelling. In other words, his career followed the course laid out for a gifted young scholar. Nor was it really extraordinary, at least in Rosenzweig’s circle, that he should manifest an interest in theology; he and his friends heatedly debated the great issues of religion and philosophy. But in these discussions Judaism never seriously figured. Rosenzweig seems to have felt that it was quite possible for the religiously concerned young Jew to become a Christian but that it was no longer possible to become a Jew: from the Judaism with which he was familiar, he simply could not see how he could establish his religious existence in Jewish terms. He was thoroughly disgusted with the “religionless” Judaism of the bourgeois world in which he lived. Indeed, in 1909, Rosenzweig even encouraged his cousin Hans Ehrenberg to convert to Christianity.
In 1913 came his own great crisis. His religious concern had been growing intense, and he was in almost continuous discussion, particularly with his Christian friend Eugen Rosenstock (now in this country teaching at Dartmouth). The entire night of July 7, 1913 was devoted to one such interchange. “In that night’s conversation,” Rosenzweig himself relates, “Rosenstock pushed me step by step out of the last relativist positions which I still occupied and forced me to take an unrelativist standpoint. . . . Any form of philosophical relativism [became] impossible for me.” He had now made the standpoint of religious faith his own, but that very fact called his Jewishness into question. There was no role whatever that the Judaism he knew could play in religious existence. And so, in July 1913, he decided to become a Christian.
Before his conversion could be consummated, however, Rosenzweig went to the Yom Kippur services held in a little Orthodox synagogue in Berlin. There something happened—exactly what has never become known. But when it was over, Rosenzweig was convinced that he could live his religious existence as a Jew and that his place was in the People Israel. It was for him now, as he put it, to “return to where I have been elected from birth.”
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Rosenzweig now set himself to studying Jewish sources and to following the thinking of Hermann Cohen—the great neo-Kantian philosopher who became, in his later years, a Jewish thinker of importance. But before very long, the First World War broke out, and Rosenzweig joined the army. He spent most of the time on the Balkan front, where the fighting was not severe and where he had considerable opportunity to think, study, and write. He published some articles, the most important being Zeit ist’s (“It Is Time”) on the subject of Jewish education. In November 1917, he wrote a long letter to his cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg, in the course of which he dealt with revelation and a whole series of other theological problems; this letter, he afterward said, became the “germ” of his “system.”
But before he was to develop that system he had still another significant experience to undergo. In May 1918, the army transferred him to Warsaw, where for the first time he really came into touch with East European Jewry. He was profoundly and lastingly impressed by what he saw. The image of the “integral” Jewish existence of the Polish Jew remained with him throughout his life as a kind of yardstick against which to measure the “fragmentary” existence of the Jew in the Western world. When he returned to the Balkans in August 1918, he began to write his great philosophico-theological work, Der Stern der Erlösung (“The Star of Redemption”). He wrote feverishly on army post cards and scraps of paper, which he sent to his mother for transcription. Of course, there was later revision, but it still seems almost unbelievable that a work so complex and intricate in its internal organization could have been composed in this manner.
Returning home after the war, Franz married Edith Hahn (June 1920) and settled in Frankfort on the Main, where he took over the direction of the Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus. This was a remarkable institution, which became the source and center of a veritable renaissance in German Jewish religious thought. Drawing to itself some of the most creative intellectual forces of German Jewry, it tried to reestablish the integrity of Jewish “learning” in a vital, non-academic, non-scholastic sense, and, despite its brief career, it left an indelible mark on Jewish thought. In 1922, Rosenzweig also accepted the recently established chair of Jewish theology at the University of Frankfort, after he had declined a very flattering offer of an important university post in history.
That very year, when he was thirty-four, Rosenzweig was stricken by a creeping paralysis from which he was never to recover. Little by little, it affected his whole body, even his organs of speech. And yet, such was the spirit of the man that the next few years were the most productive of his life! “In this period,” writes Nahum N. Glatzer, “he completed his Jehuda Halevi; he wrote the long essays on Jewish law, on Hermann Cohen and on the ‘New Thinking.’ [In this period] Rosenzweig and Buber began to translate the Bible into German. This translation induced the two men to write a number of fundamental articles on Biblical problems. . . . In a number of extensive book reviews, Rosenzweig dealt with current trends from a broad point of view. . . . In his ‘leisure hours,’ Rosenzweig, who had a thorough musical training, reviewed recordings of classical music and wrote a few interesting chapters of musical history.”1
And this, when all he could move was but one finger!
“With the help of nurses”—again I quote Glatzer—“he was placed in an armchair; his chin was supported by a small cushion that kept his head from droping; his right thumb miraculously retained some power of movement, though slow and indistinct. This thumb he moved—his arm supported by a sling—over a plate containing the letters of the alphabet. . . His wife, sitting beside him, combined the letters into a word, the words into a sentence, and the sentences into elaborate articles, epistles, books.”
Aside from Der Stern der Erlösung, virtually everything of major importance that Rosenzweig produced was written under such conditions. And throughout this race with death, Rosenzweig retained his intimate contacts with his friends and his lively interest in the outside world and the various enterprises with which he was connected. He died on December 10, 1929, just as he was approaching his forty-third birthday.
Most of Rosenzweig’s published writings, aside from his early philosophical work, are to be found in three books: Der Stern der Erlösung (three volumes); Kleinere Schriften, a large collection of articles; and Briefe, which contains much of his voluminous correspondence. Next to nothing has been translated into English.
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For Franz Rosenzweig, religious thinking is not legalistic argumentation or arbitrary speculation, as it has only too often been in Orthodox circles; nor is it sentimentalizing on the beauties of “ethical monotheism,” with the modernists. It is “life thinking,” existential thinking, which seeks not to discover external facts or to establish universal truths but to “make sense” of existence, of one’s own existence. It is therefore not the kind of thinking that one can engage in “objectively,” as in science or philosophy.
“Objective thinking” is objective in two senses: it treats what it thinks about as an object, and it thinks about it as a spectator, in detachment, with the elimination of the so-called “personal equation.” But this is not the kind of thinking that one can do about human existence. For the self—one’s own or another’s—is not object but subject; to “objectify” the self is simply to destroy it. Nor can existence ever be genuinely thought about from the spectator’s detached point of view. The thinking that is adequate to existence is a thinking of involvement and concern in what is thought about; it is thinking in which a man makes his decision, affirms his commitment, and ventures everything on it. This is what Rosenzweig calls the “new thinking” and he gives it the following formulation:
The idea of ‘making’ truth true (Bewährung) is the basic idea of the new theory of knowledge . . . and the static concept of objectivity is replaced by one that is dynamic. . . . From those unimportant truths, truths of the type ‘twice two equals four,’ to which men lightly assent with the expenditure of no more than a trifle of mind-energy—a little less for the ordinary multiplication table, a little more for the theory of relativity—the way leads to those truths for which man is willing to pay something, on to those which he cannot prove true (bewähren) except with the sacrifice of his life, and finally to those the truth of which can be established only by the staking of the lives of all the generations.
This conception of “making true” (Bewähren) by commitment, decision, and venture is at the heart of the “new thinking.” It is what Emil Brunner means when he speaks of the “knowledge of faith” as being “not theoretical knowledge but ‘existential’ knowledge—that is, knowledge of such a kind that it is only fully realized as practical decision and wholly excludes the attitude of a mere spectator.” The teachings of religion, Rosenzweig constantly repeats, cannot be appropriated merely by the intellect; they must be made part of one’s existence to be truly understood.
Is this “new thinking,” then, simply “subjective” in the bad sense, without discipline or control? Rosenzweig denies it. “A philosophy, if it is to be true,” he explains, “must be philosophized from the actual viewpoint of the philosophizing person. . . . There is no other way of being objective than by honestly starting from one’s own subjectivity. The duty of being objective requires that one retain sight of the entire horizon, not that one look out from a standpoint different from that on which one is standing, or even from ‘no standpoint at all.’ One’s own eyes are certainly no more than one’s own eyes; but it would be foolish to think one had to pluck them out in order to see rightly.”
Religious thinking, in this sense, is really inseparable from religious existence out of which it emerges and which it reflects. To Rosenzweig, religion is not philosophy or sentiment or conduct; it is a kind or quality of existence.2 Faith is a divine-human encounter, a meeting, in which man makes his total commitment to God and God offers his grace to man. The life of faith—religious existence—is lived on a plane where God and man are linked by the characteristic bond of personal communion: the word—the word of revelation and prayer. The “new thinking” is thinking that somehow partakes more of the nature of speech, dialogue, than of abstract thought.
“The difference between the old and the new thinking lies in the need of ‘the other,’ and, what is really the same thing, in taking time seriously. To think means to think for no one and to speak to no one, but to speak means to speak to some one and to think for some one; and that some one is always an entirely definite some one, who has not only ears . . . but also a mouth.” The life of faith is thus lived between God and man; it is life “in the second person,” dialogic life, to use Buber’s pregnant phrase. The God of Jewish religion is not a remote lawgiver; nor is he an idea or a synonym for ideals and sentiments. The God of Jewish religion is a God who “speaks and hears,” a God who enters into life at every point and without whom no moment of life can have meaning.
Indeed, man’s very being is “responsible,” and dependent upon God’s word for its origin and maintenance. As Karl Löwith has said: “It is only through God’s calling Adam, ‘Where art thou?’ that the latter’s ‘Here I am’ reveals to man, in the answer, his being as related to God. The ego is at the outset wrapped up in itself and dumb; it waits for its being called—directly by God and indirectly by the neighbor.” Man, in other words, possesses his being as a Thou which arises in response to the I which is God. Human existence is thus intrinsically religious existence.
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The God of our faith reveals himself through his words and his deeds. “He has made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the children of Israel” (Ps. 103:7).
The problem of revelation—and of the Bible as revelation—is one of the crucial problems of Jewish and Christian faith. To oldline Orthodoxy—what we in this country call fundamentalism—every word of the Bible, especially of the so-called “Five Books of Moses,” is literally the word of God, dictated by him and therefore incapable of error. Many Orthodox Jews would even extend this doctrine of inspiration and infallibility to the rabbinic writings, particularly to those dealing with halachah (Law). To the modernist, on the other hand, revelation is usually nothing but a figure of speech. The scriptural writers, he concedes, were “inspired,” but this means little more than saying that a Shakespeare or a Plato or a Buddha was inspired; the “inspiration” of the prophet is identified with the imagination of the poet and the illumination of the mystic or philosopher. As to the Biblical writings themselves, they are, to the modernist, interesting compilations of myth, legend, and folklore, in which are embedded a number of high ethical teachings. After all, has not criticism shown that even the Pentateuch is a patchwork of documents from different times, sources, and historical settings—in other words, a compilation made by man rather than a single whole dictated by God?
Rosenzweig agrees that Scripture is a compilation made by men, but he nevertheless insists that it contains the revelation of God. God reveals himself through his encounter with man, and the Bible is pre-eminently the record of the divine encounter with Israel, in which God makes known his will and displays his judgments and mercies. Of course, the books of the Bible were put together and edited by men in the course of centuries and therefore contain God’s word only as it has passed through the medium of the human heart and mind: does not the Talmud itself say that “the Torah speaks in the language of men”? But it contains God’s word nevertheless. It contains it, yet is not identical with it. The whole tradition of scriptural interpretation reflects the effort to discover the message of revelation in the record of scripture. This is a work that is never complete and that each of us, in his own religious existence, though taking cognizance of the tradition that has come down to us, must in the end do for himself.
The celebrated translation of the Bible into German made by Buber and Rosenzweig was based on Rosenzweig’s profound conception of Scripture as revelation. Granting that the various books of the Bible are compilations from various times and sources, Rosenzweig points out that the meaning of Scripture is to be discovered in how these parts are put together, just as in a mosaic the meaning of the picture emerges from the way the separate tiles are arranged and not merely from what the tiles in themselves “say.” It is the whole that counts—and Scripture is a whole, a Gestalt, a unique and organic entity. Rosenzweig regards the Redactor—the name for the compilers and editors of the Biblical books—as the key figure in the development of the Bible:
Our difference with Orthodoxy [he writes to Dr. Jacob Rosenheim, the Orthodox leader] consists in this, that from our belief in the holiness and uniqueness of the Torah and its character as revelation, we cannot draw any conclusions as to its literary origins or the philological value of the received text. Should Wellhausen prove right in all his theories . . . our faith would not be affected in the least. . . . We too translate the Torah as a single book. For us too it is the work of one spirit. . . . We call him by the symbol which critical science . . . uses to designate its assumed redactor: R. But this symbol R, we expand . . . into Rabbenu. For he is our teacher; his theology is our teaching.
In the same spirit, Rosenzweig understands the relation between Scripture (written Torah) and tradition (oral Torah). To the Orthodox, he writes, “the oral Torah is a stream parallel to the written Torah and sprung from the same source. For us, it is the completion of the unity of the Book-as-written through the unity of the Book-as-read. Both unities are equally wonderful. The historical view discovers multiplicity in the Book-as-written as well as in the Book-as-read; multiplicity of centuries, multiplicity of writers and readers. The eye that sees the book not from the outside but in its inner coherence sees it not merely as written but as read. In the former, it sees the unity of teaching; in the latter, it finds the unity of learning, one’s own learning together with the learning of centuries.”
Clearly, this approach to Scripture presupposes the election of Israel. The compilation of the Bible is part of the literary history of the Jews, just as the compilation of the Homeric poems is part of the literary history of the Greeks. It is only because of Israel’s unique position that its literary history is more than a mere record of human creativity and becomes the working out of the divine intent in communication with men. Scripture is indeed a human document, and therefore by no means infallible in its parts; but God fulfills his purposes through the doings of men, and so this human document can become the vehicle of divine revelation.
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It is in terms of the basic affirmation of the election of Israel that Rosenzweig understands the Torah as Law (halachah). Again, he finds inadequate both the Orthodox and the modernist conceptions. To the conventional Orthodox Jew, the Law is something external, a list of 613 particular commandments, every one of them given by God on Sinai and thereafter carefully arranged, interpreted, and codified: these he is to perform. To the modernist, they are simply remnants of ancient folkways, of little religious significance today, at best merely of sociological, aesthetic, or sentimental value. Rosenzweig, in a brilliant essay, Die Bauleute, and a letter, Göttlich und Menschlich (end of November 1924), outlines his own position.
Halachic observance is the “acting-out” of the Jew’s affirmation of the chosenness of Israel and its “separation” as a “priest-people.” “You shall be holy unto me, for I have separated you from among the nations that you should be mine” (Lev. 20:26): in this proclamation lies the meaning of Israel’s existence and the ultimate grounding of the halachic code of ritual observance. The Jew who, himself and in his own religious existence, receives the Torah, receives it not only as a teaching about the election of Israel but also as a code—a “holiness-code”—in terms of which he is to enact this teaching into the pattern of his life. Rosenzweig commends “the Pharisees of the Talmud and the saints of the Church” for knowing that “man’s understanding extends only as far as his doing.” Religious observance is, in effect, the doing of one’s religious convictions; the two cannot be separated.
Jewish observance is halachah, for the Jew lives “under the Law,” and the special discipline to which the halachah subjects him is the commandment of God involved in the election of Israel. But to say this is a far cry from asserting, as the fundamentalists do, that the particular, detailed observances that confront the Jew at any time are the eternal prescription of God, communicated to Moses on Mount Sinai. The commandments (mitzvot) are not fixed and eternal; they have arisen, have changed, and many of them have lost their effectiveness with the passage of time. As with Scripture, so with halachah, it is fruitless, even meaningless, to attempt a single and definitive differentiation between the “human” and the “divine.” Yet one cannot accept the “general principle” of election as important and divine but relegate the particular commandments to the rank of the merely peripheral, the “merely human.” The “general principle” cannot be understood—means nothing existentially—unless particular commandments are observed. “The general theological connection [between chosenness and Law] comes to life for us only when and where we actually fulfill it as individual commandment.”
Die Bauleute was addressed as a letter to Martin Buber, who took a rather negative attitude to halachah as Law, and who objected to its “ritualistic” emphasis. But the halachah in Rosenzweig’s presentation is very far indeed from legalistic ritualism. Buber himself, moreover, speaks somewhere of the “mysteries whose meaning no one learns who does not himself join in the dance.” The halachic pattern in Rosenzweig’s view may be said to be the “dance” in which the Jew learns the mystery of the election of Israel.
It is a “dance,” moreover, in which the individual Jew finds himself as a Jew. Religious observance must be personally appropriated; it must be not just halachah, but halachah-for-me. The entire body of halachic tradition, ever changing yet ever the same, confronts the individual Jew as Gesetz (“law” in the external sense). To be operative, it must be turned into Gebot (“commandment” in the inner sense). “Gesetz must become Gebot, which, the very moment it is heard, turns into deed. It must recover its contemporaneity [Heutigkeit].” This, however, is not to be achieved through “obedience to the paragraphs of a code.” “In the end, it is not a matter of will but of ability to do [Können]. Here the decisive thing is the selection which our ability-to-do makes from among what is to be done [das Tubare]. This selection, because it does not depend upon the will but upon the ability-to-do, must necessarily remain an individual matter.” Only personal ability to fulfill the precept can decide. “The doing comes forth only . . . at the point where at the voice of the Gebot, the spark leaps instantaneously across from ‘I must’ to ‘I can.’” No man can decide for another what he can or cannot appropriate; each must decide for himself—in responsible recognition of the claim that the tradition of the Law has upon him, but for himself nevertheless. “What anyone is able to do, he alone knows; the voice of his own being, to which he is to listen, can be heard only with his own ears. . . . Nor does anyone know that the other’s not-being-able may not in the end mean more for the building up of the teaching and the Law than our own being able. . . .” Rosenzweig, who started with nothing, became more and more traditional in his observance as time went on, but his philosophy of halachah never changed. Personal appropriation in religious existence remained his touchstone.
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One of Rosenzweig’s most profound and significant insights is his conception of the nature of Christianity and its relation to Judaism. In thinking through the problem, he finds himself once more in conflict with both Orthodoxy and modernism. Conventional Orthodoxy is without any real sense of the organic relation between the two faiths. By and large, it sees no religious or theological problem at all; its attitude to Christianity (to the goyim) is largely determined by the bitter experience of Jews in so-called Christian lands. On the other hand, most modernists take the position that all religions are essentially the same, being different cultural expressions of one and the same “religious spirit.” All possess the same basic truth, and all are in part, though not perhaps to the same degree, corrupted by ignorance and superstition. For the modernists, too, there is no special problem.
But for Franz Rosenzweig, who takes seriously the claim of Judaism to supernatural truth and yet cannot ignore Christianity’s kinship to it, there is a problem. And this problem he treats with a depth and originality that will make all future thinking on the subject dependent on his work.
In dealing with the problem of Christianity, Rosenzweig explicitly associates himself with the insights suggested in the teachings of the great Jewish philosophers of what he calls “the classical period of the construction of dogma systems in Judaism.” What he finds in the older Jewish thinkers, he deepens and develops in his own characteristic manner. Judaism and Christianity are to him essentially of one piece, one religious reality: Judaism facing inward to the Jews, Christianity outward to the Gentiles. The two faiths are organically linked as complementary aspects of God’s revealed truth. Yet they are not the same; they are distinct and different in their being and in their function. Judaism is the “eternal fire,” Christianity the “eternal rays”; Judaism is the “eternal life,” Christianity is the “eternal way.” While Israel stays with God, Christianity goes out to conquer the unredeemed world for Him. And Christianity would not endure as a force for redemption did not Israel remain in its midst, in its very being serving as a witness to the Eternal.
Borrowing the imagery of Judah Halevi, Rosenzweig speaks of the historical revelation of Israel as a seed, which, falling on the ground of paganism, produces a tree—Christianity—in the fruit of which it reappears in another form. Christianity is, in fact, “Judaism for the Gentiles,” through which the peoples of the world are brought to the God of Israel. Yet as close as are the two, so are they different, and the difference is not to be overcome by “liberalism” or good will, since it is rooted in the different functions and vocations set for them by divine providence. Only when the goal is reached and the world redeemed, only at the “end,” will the final reconciliation and fusion take place; then all will indeed be one in the recognition of the unity of the Divine Name. Until, then, “only with God . . . is the truth one. Earthly truth remains split into two.” It is for each—the Jew and the Christian—to remain loyal to his vocation and his vision of the truth, which is the truth-for-him and as such valid before God. For “truth is a noun only to God; to men, it is really best known as an adverb, ‘truly’ [wahrlich], as the measure of of inner faithfulness” (Agus).
It follows from this general conception that Christian existence contains within itself the tension between paganism and revelation. The Christian is always in danger of lapsing into paganism, in rebellion against his fate and vocation as Christian. It is in this phenomenon, in the Christian’s own incompleteness, in his own “not-yet,” that Rosenzweig finds the hidden source of anti-Semitism. “The fact of anti-Semitism, age-old and ever-present though totally groundless,” he concludes in a letter to his mother, “can be understood only by the different functions which God has assigned to the two communities—Israel to represent in time the eternal kingdom of God, Christianity to bring itself and the world toward that goal.” Whenever the pagan in the Christian rises in revolt against the yoke of the Cross, he vents his fury on the Jew whom he hates not as Christ-killer but as Christ-bringer. The notorious proto-Nazi anti-Semite, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, saw this very well. “The Jew,” he was wont to wail, “has spoiled everything with his Law and his Cross.”
Rosenzweig’s teaching on Christianity is the first, and remains the only serious, attempt to develop a Jewish theological framework in which the two religions will be seen in their relation to God’s providential plan for the salvation of mankind. Rosenzweig does not deny that in some sense God is to be discerned in all religions, but he insists that only Judaism and its counterpart Christianity are in full truth revealed religions. Only they are divinely ordained as God’s appointed way for the realization of his kingdom among men. Together, they constitute the “Ueberwelt,” in which eternity enters into time and God into the world.
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Everything in Rosenzweig’s thinking about Jewish existence stems from and returns to the election of Israel. For the very cornerstone of Rosenzweig’s Jewish faith is a passionate belief in the uniqueness of Israel and of its divine vocation in the world.
Rosenzweig never tires of reiterating that Israel is not “like unto the nations,” neither in its origin nor in its nature and destiny. “The saga of the eternal people, different from those of the other peoples of the world, does not begin with autochthony. . . . Israel’s ancestor is a wanderer, with the divine command to leave his native land and go to a country that God will show him. Thus begins the story as told in the sacred books. Only by exile does this people become a people.” Nor does it possess a fatherland in the usual sense. Rosenzweig was no Zionist, at least not in the familiar nationalistic acceptation of the term—though he had a strong love for Zion. “A fatherland of which a people becomes part by ploughing itself, as it were, into it . . . such a fatherland the eternal people does not possess. The land [Zion] belongs to it only as the land of its yearning—as the Holy Land.” Until the “end,” when the “yearning” and the “promise” will be fulfilled, Israel’s destiny remains inescapably dual, centered alike upon Zion and the Exile.
To Rosenzweig, Israel is a people defined by the covenant of election, a people eternal and “forever inexplicable, a disturbance to state and to world history. The power of world history breaks down before [it].”
The “peoples of the world” are always straining, through their historical enterprises and institutions, to bring time to a stop and secure for themselves a measure of eternity. But for God’s people eternity is ever present. Israel lives in eternity because it “represents in time the eternal kingdom of God.” It lives as a “holy people” and by its very being bears witness to the Holy One. It lives and waits—for the great “day of the Lord” when redemption will come, for Israel, for mankind, and for all being. Israel, the elect people, finds its vocation as the Suffering Servant of the Lord. Rosenzweig’s vision is essentially the Prophetic conception which Salo Baron describes as “the idea of a Jewish people beyond state and territory, a divine instrument in man’s overcoming of ‘nature’ through a supernatural process in the course of ‘history.’”
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In this brief sketch, it has been possible to touch upon only certain aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought. Not even an allusion has been made to the imposing quasi-metaphysical structure that constitutes the architectural framework of his Stern der Erlösung. But I think I have included those aspects that are especially important for an understanding of the quality of his Judaism. What is so amazing in Rosenzweig’s thinking is his ability to transform ancient doctrines and theological formulas into a living power. He has at his command all the knowledge and learning of his time, but he must go beyond. No real understanding of the deepest problems of life is possible, he is convinced, except in terms of man’s relation to God. To Rosenzweig, such words as God, revelation, divine providence, election, vocation, the Kingdom of Heaven, stand for immediate and vital realities without which it is impossible to think seriously about existence. That is why he is always saying that “theological problems require to be translated into human and human problems pushed on into theological.”
For the Jews of today, Rosenzweig has a word of special relevance. For he shows us how we can affirm the authentic religion of Israel without falling into obscurantism, how we can lead a life true to Torah without falling into legalism and superstition, how we can dedicate ourselves to the vocation of Israel without falling into racial or nationalistic chauvinism. What Rosenzweig fought against with every fiber of his being was the routinization, the secularization, the sentimentalization of Judaism. On this ground he opposed fundamentalism; on this ground he opposed modernism; on this ground he opposed nationalistic Zionism. And he was able to develop a Judaism free from these distortions. This is his legacy to us of this generation and to the Jews of the generations to come.
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1 Nahum N. Glatzer, “Franz Rosenzweig,” Yivo Annual: I(l945). Glatzer was a friend and coworker of Rosenzweig's and followed Martin Buber in Rosenzweig's chair at Frankfort. The only important studies of Rosenzweig in English with which I am acquainted are Glatzer's memoir, Jacob Agus's chapter on Rosenzweig in his Modern Philosophies of Judaism, and Karl Löwith's “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1942.
2 Rosenzweig even disliked using the term “religion” for Judaism and Christianity, for he felt that it implied the separation of a particular field called “religion” from total reality. “The special position of Judaism and Christianity consists precisely in the fact that even though they become religion, they still retain within them the power to free themselves from their religiousness and to find their way back to the free field of reality. . . . They were originally something quite ‘unreligious’—the one a fact [the fact of the People Israel], the other an event [the ‘Christ-event’].”
