The Return to Religious Life

Franz Rosenzweig noted in his private diary the following pregnant thought: “The battle against history in the nineteenth-century sense becomes for us the battle for religion in the twentieth-century sense.” Thus does one of the most important and original thinkers in modern Jewish thought and philosophy ask us to reflect on just what he could have meant by a battle against history? And what a religion in the twentieth-century sense could be?

For Rosenzweig “history” meant most emphatically the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of history meant Friedrich Hegel, about whom he wrote his doctorate. For nearly a century in Germany, Hegel was believed to have taught that history was a rational process culminating in the modern bureaucratic state, complete with a bourgeois civil society, a Protestant civil religion, a capitalist economy, and scientific and technological advances. The vision that placed Hegel and the German states at the center of world history was acclaimed in his native land. But by the end of the nineteenth-century, a deep horror set in, with it a powerful reactionary spirit was unleashed. Could the bourgeois society produced by liberal modernity really be the end of history? Could it fulfill man’s deepest theoretical and religious longings? The reaction to Hegel included a hodge-podge of different movements, from anti-modernism, primitivism, irrationalism, expressionism, to occultist obscurantism.

Beginning from with Christianity before turning to Judaism, Rosenzweig became a leader of the rebellion against Hegel’s sense of history and religion thus understood.

What was Rosenzweig’s battle against Hegel, and how did it relate to religion? To understand this, one must recall that the dominant sense of religion in his day was fundamentally Hegelian. The “liberal theology” of the late 20^th century had been an attempt to forge a compromise between the doctrines of Protestant Christianity and modern thought and morality: exactly what Hegel had intended. For Hegel, Protestantism and the modern state were sewn of the same cloth and would serve the same end: the reconciliation of the individual with the state by means of bureaucracy and education, both moral and civil. Protestantism could serve a fundamentally important task in terms of reconciling men into their role as citizens in the modern state.

Many Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth century opted for this approach, as well. Jews in Germany had founded a new intellectual discipline, the “science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums), which sought reform and apologetics, to help ease the convergence of Emancipated Jewry into Modern German Civil life. While Hegel had argued that only Protestantism was compatible with modern life, the founders of “the Science of Judaism” believed that the moral teachings of Judaism, when freed from the stale holdovers of superstition and myth, would be seen as virtually identical to those of Protestantism. And once both Jews and Christians realized this, modern Jews would be welcomed as fully participating citizens of a modern state–what Protestant prejudice that remained would whither on the vine.

For Rosenzweig, such an approach was both politically untenable and intellectually dishonest. Politically, the First World War seemed to discredit the liberal protestant account of humanistic enlightenment and the solidity of bourgeois culture. Intellectually, Rosenzweig sought to show that Hegel’s philosophy of history, however intellectually spellbinding or perhaps even true, was destructive of life. In the Hegelian system, according to Rosenzweig, man was cut off both from life and alienated from eternity: he was cut off from life because he was denied any access to eternity. And Modern liberal theology, which should have stood for eternity and against history, had done the opposite by further alienating modern man from his God and eternity.

The aim of Rosenzweig’s writing and teaching was to help modern men and women to return to themselves, which be achieved by helping them returning to God, eternity, and through these ideas a holistic experience of the world.

Rosenzweig did not seek to accomplish this through a call to return to faith. He believed that a century of assimilation had yielded Jews so spiritually decayed that an entire spiritual transformation was required. The problem of contemporary Jewish education, Rosenzweig wrote in 1924, was to determine “how ‘Christian’ Jews, national Jews, religious Jews, Jews from self-defense, Jews from sentimentality, loyalty, in short, ‘hyphenated’ Jews such as the nineteenth century has produced, can once again, without danger to themselves or Judaism, become Jews.”

Beyond Philosophy

The best introduction to Rosenzweig’s thought is found in a little book that he wrote — but never published — to introduce his ideas to a wider public, called, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.Rosenzweig’s literary conceit is that the text is a medical report, written to ordinary readers over the heads of “experts,” dealing with a patient who has fallen ill and is dire need of a cure. The disease: philosophy.

Look at the symptoms: before his illness, the patient went about his business, occasionally wondering about this or that, but eventually putting wonder aside to get on with the commonsensical business of living. One day, though, he was unable to leave his wonder alone and stopped dead in his tracks; the continuous flow of life started to pass him by. Rather than thoughtlessly use simple words like “cheese,” he began to reflect: “What is cheese essentially?” Cheese became an “object” for him and he became the “subject,” and a nest of philosophical problems was opened. Soon the poor man was no longer able to eat cheese, or anything at all. His common sense had been crippled by a stroke and he was paralyzed.

Is there a cure for such an illness? Rosenzweig’s allegory suggests that the therapy for philosophy cannot be more or better philosophy, it must open a way for leaving behind philosophy as traditionally conceived and returning to the flow of life. In Rosenzweig’s tale the cure consists of a trip to the countryside far beyond the sanatorium. In the countryside, the vista is dominated by three separate peaks: God, man, and world. While when a philosopher meets these land masses they instinctively burrow into them in quest of their common properties. Philosophers have declared the hills to be essentially several things: either made entirely of God (pantheism), consisting entirely of man (idealism), or made up entirely of world (materialism). But they have never managed to find a fourth substance. That, Rosenzweig conjectures, is because there is none: there just are three elements out there. In Rosenzweig’s allegory, the patient moves from one peak to the next, and finds himself slowly re-acquainted with each element in its essence; and after several weeks, he is finally able to see God, man, and world for what they are, both self-sufficient and related to each other within the whole of existence. And with that insight he is cured and finds he is able once again to employ ordinary language freed of the compulsive drive to burrow out what lies behind it. Rosenzweig presents us with the beautiful allegory of the man, cured, now on a strict regimen redolent of a religious calendar; his movement becomes natural and he flows through life, learns to live in the moment and face death with tranquility.

Rosenzweig’s Judaism and the Star of Redemption

What does this have to do with Judaism? To answer this question we must turn to his best-known work, The Star of Redemption. The Star, unlike the charming, playful and profound shorter writings is in his words, a “philosophical system” written in the grand style of its nineteenth-century target: Hegel.

The interplay of finitude and transcendence is a great theme of the Star. Rosenzweig speaks of the relations among God, man, and world in terms of “creation,” “revelation,” and “redemption”. While all religions, including pagan ones, see the world and human beings as creatures of the gods, Judaism, according to Rosenzweig, and later Christianity and Islam too, discovered that their world is mute and unfinished and in need of reciprocal human and divine activity. Rosenzweig teaches that the encounter between God and man in the moment of revelation transforms both, as is the world. And he poignantly finds their language is that of love. In a moving and profound exposition of the Song of Songs, Rosenzweig evokes a living and personal God who in His quest to be more fully Himself, comes to a deep concern for his creation, issuing in love. Just as God develops through His revelation, Man finds Himself as the object of His love and is in turn changed. The human transformation allows for a genuine encounter between God and Man through speech. In Rosenzweig’s words, the whole of creation now has an “orientation.”

The love that is the core of “revelation” yearns for perfection; in Rosenzweig’s terms, God, Man and World move towards “redemption”. For Rosenzweig redemption only takes place outside time and has its source in God alone. And yet Man may “anticipate” it in the present, and work to prepare both the world and ourselves in the spirit of patient hope. While Man in search of perfection, lives and loves and worships, God is working through it all to perfect Himself.

It goes without saying that Rosenzweig’s teaching on redemption has never been embraced by most Christian or Jewish theologians. And the reason is not hard to discern: how to think together the reciprocal relation of Man, God and World in the work of redemption? Is redemption the product of God’s love, and so is it enough to leave Him to it in a passive quietist vein? Or, is it the product of Man’s labor as well, in which case are we tempted to think of ourselves as engaged in a progressive self-redeeming historical action?

Rosenzweig was not put off by the heretical implications. He argues ingeniously that the riddle expresses a hidden wisdom. Since what lies behind the two possible interpretations are two complementary and equally true ways of living in the light of revelation and awaiting redemption, that of Judaism and that of Christianity.

Rosenzweig devotes part three of The Star of Redemption, to a modified Hegelian sociological comparison of the Jewish and Christian ways of life. For Rosenzweig, following Hegel, Christianity is defined by its belief in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and living with the expectation of his return.  Hence, Christianity is historical to the core: there is the age before Christ, and the eternal age of redemption that will follow his return, and the “eternal way” in which Christians must live. As a result the Christian is a pilgrim and lives life as if on a journey. The Christian is always en route, from pagan birth to baptism, overcoming temptation, spreading the gospel. Because he is an eternal pilgrim, the Christian is always alienated, divided between Siegfried and Christ, and so never fully at home in the world. And yet – as Shakespeare, Hegel and Nietzsche had seen – this tension in the Christian soul was productive, driving history from antiquity, to the medieval world, to Luther and modern Protestantism, to the modern age of secularization, which is simply the triumph of Christianity as it prepares the redemption of the world through historical labor.

The Jewish way of life is altogether different. The Jews live in a timeless, face-to-face relationship with God. Because of this immediacy, there is no need for a mediator, so God gave them no historical task, since they were simply busy already doing what God had destined them to do. Instead of working toward redemption historically, Jewish life, as reflected in its religious calendar, symbolically anticipates redemption. “The Jewish people,” Rosenzweig wrote, “has already reached the goal toward which the [other] nations are still moving,” which means that for them history itself has no meaning. “Only the eternal people, which is not encompassed by world history, can—at every moment—bind creation as a whole to redemption while redemption is still to come.”

The Jews way of life is to live apart, divided from the other nations by divine law and the Hebrew language, and blood. According to Rosenzweig, “All eternity not based on blood must be based on the will and on hope. Only a community based on common blood feels the warrant of eternity warm in its veins even now…. The natural propagation of the body guarantees it eternity.” Whereas the pagans rooted themselves in land, and the Christians in history, the Jews are rooted in themselves as a “blood community” with an eternal relationship with God. Whereas Christians bear witness to their faith by proselytizing to all mankind whom they consider brothers, the Jews attest by renewing the covenant between generations past and future, by means of reproduction.

According to Rosenzweig, Judaism boasts an infinitely rich set of rituals permitting the Jewish people to experience symbolically creation, revelation, and redemption. He sees a kind of divine drama in the structure of the Sabbath day, in the family festivals from Pesach to Sukkot, and in the communal holidays from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. The entire cycle of human existence is found reproduced here in every year of Jewish life.

The common sense of Judaism, its living link between God, man, and world that traditional philosophy is constitutively blind to, is found, in Rosenzweig’s view in the Jewish religious calendar. There he finds the rituals that symbolically enact the divine drama of creation, revelation and redemption. The life cycle is dramatically lived out each day, and each week with its Sabbath, and each year with the cycle of communal festival days. But as the bearers of a timeless way of life, according to Rosenzweig, the Jews must live without politics.

He writes that, “The state symbolizes the attempt to give nations eternity within the confines of time,” in this way the state is a rival of the eternal people that has already attained eternity. So Rosenzweig’s Jews cannot take politics, and with it war, seriously. Rosenzweig was not a Zionist.

It remains that case for Rosenzweig that the whole truth about God, man, and world is the possession of neither way of life, not that of the Jew nor that of the Christian.

The Jewish audience of Rosenzweig’s work were self-consciously “hyphenated Jews” of the German nineteenth- century, which is to say Jews for whom Goethe, Schiller and Lessing meant more than Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Emancipation and the entrance into the modern State which Christian by definition, meant, that the Jews had abandoned their way of life, the Jewish life. Rosenzweig sought to wean them both from the entrancement of history and prepare them for a life apart, which would still be a hyphenated-life. For Rosenzweig hoped simply to enable German Jews of his generation to experience a more authentic double-life, one that would be religiously grounded, not internalizing the myriad secularized Christian ideas of Judaism. In other words, what he sought was a genuine Galut existence, or life in exile. His way was not that of simple return to the Jewish life of the Fathers, the submission to divinely revealed law, nor is it the Zionist confrontation with the hard realities of power politics. However brilliant his exposition, and manner of posing the problem posed by Hegel for modern religion, it remains to be seen whether Rosenzweig’s “way” could become the basis for communal religious action, or, indeed, the authentic “experience” of the world he sought.