Almost a Lutheran

As Franz Rosenzweig, aged six, was leaving his family's house in Kassel, Germany for his first session at school one day in 1893, his uncle took him by the shoulders and shook him. "My boy," he said, "you are going among people for the first time today; remember as long as you live that you are a Jew."

Rosenzweig never really forgot the admonition, though he came close. Before his death in 1929, he had established himself as one of the most original thinkers of 20th century Judaism. His "third way" of Judaism, equally opposed to rigid orthodoxy and liberalizing modernism, is still the subject of active controversy.

U.S. readers now have a chance to take a look at Rosenzweig's work firsthand. One of his earlier theological works, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (The Noonday Press; $3), has just been published in English. Last year, in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (Schocken-Farrar, Straus & Young; $6), Biographer Nahum N. Glatzer, an old friend of Rosenzweig, turned out a study of his career largely drawn from Rosenzweig's own writings.

The Innermost Heart. In 1912, when Rosenzweig graduated from the University of Berlin, the scholars of European Judaism were more European than they were Jewish. Staunch disciples of the 19th century German philosophers, they had interpreted Judaism for 150 years in philosophic terms that were fundamentally Greek and Christian. As Glatzer recalls: "They identified Judaism with humanism, with a religion of reason, with man's moral autonomy .. . they sought to justify Judaism before the throne of philosophy."

Rosenzweig became a student of the German philosophers himself and of Christianity. At 26, he was close to becoming a Lutheran. But at the point of accepting baptism, he attended Yom Kippur services and realized the ties that bound him to Judaism. Rejecting Christianity, he wrote: "That connection of the innermost heart with God, which the heathen can only reach through Jesus, is something the Jew already possesses."

The Third Way. Rosenzweig's Judaism did not lead him to orthodoxy any more than to philosophic liberalism. The Jew, wrote Rosenzweig, must free himself from "recipes . . . those stupid claims that would impose Juda-'ism' on him as a canon of definite, circumscribed 'Jewish duties' [i.e., orthodoxy as he saw it], or 'Jewish tasks' [Zionism as he saw it], or 'Jewish ideas' [liberalism] . . . There is one recipe alone that can make a person Jewish and hence, because he is a Jew and destined to a Jewish life--a full human being; that recipe is to have no recipe . . . Our fathers had a beautiful word for it that says everything--confidence."

At 35, in the midst of a widening fame, Rosenzweig was stricken with a neuromuscular disease which paralyzed him. For eight years he lived on in his Frankfurt apartment, finally unable to speak or move, except for some power of movement in his right thumb. Even with the aid of his wife and nurses, he could write only by moving his thumb over a plate containing letters of the alphabet.

Despite this, he kept up a brisk intellectual life, and turned out an impressive body of letters and articles ranging from theology to musical criticism. He also worked on a new translation of the Old Testament into German. He received visitors, entertained dinner guests, and displayed a quiet courage. At 43 he died, still a confident man.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.