The Path to Utter Freedom

He began to write his masterwork in the German trenches in the Balkans, where he was serving out the last days of World War I. He sent it home in letters to his mother. Mustered out, Franz Rosenzweig finished Der Stern der Erloesung (The Star of Redemption) in February 1919, just six months after he started it; the book was published two years later in Frankfurt. Since then it has become one of the dominant works of Jewish thought in the 20th century, ranking with those of Martin Buber (I and Thou), a friend of Rosenzweig's. Thanks to the labors of such interpreters as Brandeis University's Nahum N. Glatzer, Rosenzweig has been well known in the U.S. for almost two decades. But not until this year, a full half-century after its original publication, has the entire text of The Star of Redemption been available in English. Now, in a courageous translation by William W. Hallo (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $10), U.S. readers will get a chance to sample the very core of Rosenzweig's complex philosophy of Judaism.

It is a heady, often dizzying experience. Students who thought their inability to read German well prevented them from understanding The Star of Redemption in the original may find that they do not understand the work much better in English. Given a point to make, Rosenzweig often runs with it as if he were a kind of Wilhelm Jennings Bryan, piling peroration on peroration in order to close all avenues of intellectual escape. But he can also, by turns, be incisive, poetic, and even now controversial. At its best, the book remains precisely what Rosenzweig intended it to be--the centerpiece of his life and of his lifelong search for God.

Rosenzweig started out as a Jew of his time. He was born in Cassel, Germany, to a comfortable, culturally assimilated family; only a great-uncle was a dedicated, religious Jew. Rosenzweig's real interests as a young man were intellectual: first medicine, then later, at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin, such studies as literature, classical languages, philosophy, history and political theory.

Holiest of Days. Then, while doing postgraduate work in jurisprudence at Leipzig, Rosenzweig met a converted Jew, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who had abandoned his Judaism for Lutheranism. In a climactic all-night conversation in July 1913, Rosenzweig agreed to follow Rosenstock's lead, but vowed to enter the church "as a Jew," like the earliest Christians. While preparing for the leap, Rosenzweig went to services in a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He never publicly revealed what happened to him at the service, but he emerged from it a changed man, no longer willing--or even able --to become a Christian. Later, in The Star of Redemption, he would write about that holiest of Jewish holy days:

"God lifts up his countenance to this united and lonely pleading of men in their shrouds, men beyond the grave, of a community of souls--God who loves man both before and after he has sinned, God whom man, in his need, may challenge, asking why he has forsaken him . . . And so man to whom the divine countenance is lifted bursts out into the exultant profession: The Lord is God': this God of Love, he alone is God! . . . Everything earthly lies so far behind the transport of eternity in this confession that it is difficult to imagine that a way can lead back from here into the circuit of the year."

Mystical Embrace. For Rosenzweig, nothing ever did lead back to the circuit of his old academic life. The long, lonely hours in trenches and on Balkan mountaintops gave him time to think, and out of it emerged The Star of Redemption. In it everything came together: his disillusionment with Hegelian idealism, travels to the brink of Christianity, his profoundly mystical embrace of Judaism.

He begins the book with a meditation on death and ends it with an affirmation of life. It is the terrible prospect of death, says Rosenzweig, that has driven philosophers to so many explanations of "the All," the totality of being and existence. But most philosophies err one way or another, he complains, by trying to explain man and the world as part of God, or God and the world as creations of the mind of man. Rosenzweig insists that "the All" is not one but three essences, primordially and intrinsically separate: God, man and the world.

Those three elements are, in Rosenzweig's complicated and somewhat bizarre scheme, points on an ontological triangle. They are related to each other by a second triangle. One point on this second triangle represents God's creative act calling the world into real existence. The next point is God's revelation of his love to man, with the commandment that man requite that love. Man, in addition to returning God's love, passes that love outward to his fellow man, then to the world around him, thereby redeeming it by turning it to God's greater glory. This redemption forms the final point on the second triangle. Thus the triangle of creation, revelation and redemption, superimposed and inverted over the first, indicates the binding relationship among the three elements of God, man and world. The resulting six-pointed star --the Star of David--is Rosenzweig's star of redemption.

Taken merely as a contrived symbol, the star would be only a bit of mys- tical sleight of hand, but Rosenzweig clearly meant it to be a demonstration of both ontological truth and an ethnic imperative. The Jews, he says, have been elected to grasp intuitively this intimate structure of reality. By their blood inheritance of God's ancient Covenant with Abraham, the Jews have the truth in as rich abundance as man is allowed--if they want it. For Judaism is at the very heart of the star, its burning center. Christianity forms the "rays" of the star, or "the eternal way" toward its heart. Like Rosenzweig, Jews need not convert to Christianity in order to find God; pagans do. Jews are a timeless people, apart from history, overarching eternity as God's Chosen to guard the truth. Christianity, acting in history, is the pagan's path out of time into eternity.

Rosenzweig's vision of Christians and Jews as complementary allies has not won wide favor among either Jews or Christians. Further, note some critics, the vision minimizes contributions of other world religions. But Rosenzweig's insistence that church and synagogue are interdependent has nonetheless encouraged Jewish-Christian dialogue since.

Binding Commandment. Even more important and enduring was the middle- of-the-road view that Rosenzweig took of the Halakhah, the elaborate body of law set down in Jewish tradition. Buber virtually reduced Halakhah to individual inclination, arguing that its prescriptions were useful only to a Jew who found them personally fulfilling. But Rosenzweig saw the law as something stronger, not so much a set of rules as a universally binding commandment to seize every opportunity to perform a good work, or mitzvah. Laws that did not serve such good ends in a particular historical setting simply no longer applied. But as Rosenzweig later admitted, he discovered that more and more of them worked happily even into his own modern milieu.

Ever since his youth, Rosenzweig had believed that the ultimate test of one's philosophy was his life. "Better write than read," he wrote in his diary in 1907, "better write poetry than write; better live than write poetry." His life was as good as his word. The year after The Star of Redemption appeared, he noticed the first signs of a creeping paralysis that immobilized him within two years. Inexplicably, it stopped before reaching his vital organs, but left him with the ability to move only his right thumb slightly. For Rosenzweig, that was enough. With his wife next to him, he would laboriously point out letters of the alphabet to spell words, eventually turning the words into essays, books, even bits of music criticism, which he did as a hobby. Still more incredibly, he found time to collaborate with Martin Buber in translating the Hebrew Bible into German--a translation hailed as the best since Martin Luther's.

No Eulogy. He was anything but melancholy. A visiting poet friend later wrote: "Behind the desk, in the chair, Franz Rosenzweig was throned. The moment our eyes met his, community was established. Everything corporeal became subject to a new order, irradiated by beauty. What reigned here was not pressure and duress, but utter freedom."

Rosenzweig died in 1929, still full of faith. He had asked that no eulogy be given. Buber read the 73rd Psalm, a verse of which Rosenzweig had selected for his headstone:

"Nevertheless I am continually with Thee; Thou holdest my right hand."

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