## Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig

###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 1
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/1)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Path of Return: A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig**


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 2
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 2](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/2)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It is nearly two years since William Hallo’s translation of the *Star of Redemption* appeared, and Rosenzweig became accessible to us in more than brief glimpses and vicarious memories. Until then we felt we knew the life but not the thought. And this in itself seemed sufficient. For any thinker who took his stand on the irreducibly personal, as Rosenzweig did in opposition to the German idealist tradition, must stand as a living verification or refutation of his words. Or if sincerity can never be a final criterion of the value of any philosopher, at least we knew that Rosenzweig in life stood his own challenge, that philosophy must lead “into life.” And indeed his life seemed almost like a modern equivalent of that lonely bearer of the burden of the personal – Abraham – with its exile (his near conversion to Christianity), its return (his subsequent working back to the sources of Judaism), its great trials (the progressive paralysis of the last eight years of his life) and its fulfilment in the death which is a judgement on life (Rosenzweig’s “point of all points,” Abraham’s “full with his years”). His life was a paradigm in the traditional Jewish sense – it microcosmically recapitulated the history of the race. And now that the thought, too, has been opened to us, and we can see the light of the Star direct and not reflected, it is time to ask, what path has Rosenzweig opened up for us? Is it a path that many can follow, or only the lonely few? Is it a new vision of Judaism or a new path to the old? Will Rosenzweig, like Abraham, become “a father of many”?


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 3
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/3)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Rosenzweig’s was, as we know, the path of return, a “guide of reversioners” in Steven Schwartzchild’s phrase. But it was not *teshuvah* in the traditional sense. For orthodoxy had, on the one hand, seen *teshuvah* as, at least in part, repentance – a relinquishing of one’s past.¹ ch.2. Whereas Rosenzweig, although he knew his past must be transcended, also knew that it must not be severed or denied: “in being Jews, we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism.… This is a new sort of learning. A learning for which – in these days – he is the most apt who brings with him the maximum of what is alien.”², New York: Schocken Books, 1970, 231. And on the other hand, orthodoxy had seen in “return” a stage *in* life rather than a programme *for* life – a first moment only. As a great talmudist once expressed it, “*Teshuvah* is needed when the mechanism of Judaism is out of order. It is not part of the mechanism itself.”³ But Rosenzweig explicitly saw it as process rather than moment, and rejected the traditional view, both in the name of the personal and in the name of Judaism itself: “What advantage has he who has gone the way, over him who right at the outset ventured the leap, which must come in the end in any case? A very small advantage…which we believe justifies the utmost trouble: for only this laborious and aimless detour through knowable Judaism gives us the certainty that the ultimate leap, from that which we know to that which we need to know at any price, the leap to the teachings, leads to *Jewish* teachings.”⁴

footnotes:
¹ M.T. Teshuvah
² “On Jewish Learning,” in Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought
³ This was expressed to me by the late Dayan Yechezkel Abramsky.
⁴ Glatzer, 241.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 4
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 4](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/4)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These two facts about Rosenzweig’s thought are of central interest when we come to “place” him in the conventional schema of religious commitment. For we find at once that we cannot do so – and it is not simply that he cuts across the traditional distinctions between Orthodox and Progressive, but that his thought lies along a completely different axis. Distinctions imply the existence of fixed points of opposition; whereas Rosenzweig is concerned to outline the form of a process or a series of transitions, and to share with us some of the perceptions that one who travels along his path will have. This leaves him with only one fixed point of reference – the self – which is not conceived of as the bearer of convictions but as the subject of experiences, and whose crucial predicates are those not of orthodoxy and obedience but of openness and courage. And this is what leads us to look for a correspondence between the thought and the life, and to read his philosophy as a kind of paradigmatic autobiography.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 5
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 5](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/5)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Another consequence is that we will find no simple answer to the question: What was Rosenzweig’s attitude to his native German culture? The Orthodox responses ranged from cultural separatism to the Hirschian co-existence of compartmentalised Jewishness and Germanness. And in general, the Reform reaction was to accept Kantian ethical universalism as the high point of the human spirit and sift Judaism for whatever was compatible with it, or at most to deny the existence of a cultural gap at all, *in ultima*, as Hermann Cohen did in his patriotic tract of 1915, *The Spirit of Germany and the Spirit of Judaism*. But for Rosenzweig there was no answer short of continual internal dialogue. And for this reason, perhaps the key terms in understanding him are “conversation” and “translation.” The German Jew, whose German structures of thought occupy the surface of his mind, and whose atavistic Jewish responses are buried in the deepest recesses of his being, must strive to reach the latter through the channels opened up by the former. And in this process both will be transformed in what he, in another context, calls “A Holy Wedding.” This is why he uses the metaphor of “conversation” to describe the working of his philosophy: “In the new thinking, the method of speech replaces the method of thinking maintained in all earlier philosophies. Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless.… Speech is bound to time and nourished by time, and it neither can nor wants to abandon this element. It does not know in advance just where it will end. It takes its cues from others. In fact, it lives by virtue of another’s life.…”⁵

footnotes:
⁵ “The New Thinking,” in Glatzer, 199.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 6
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/6)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
And this is also why the work of translation is so important for Rosenzweig. It is not just the intrinsic significance of his work on the poems of Judah Halevi and, with Buber, on the Bible; but the centrality for his thought of his methodological self-consciousness about the problems of translating Hebrew thought into German. For no other Jewish philosopher, with the possible exception of Buber himself, could we place the work of translation so near to the heart of his concern. And this is, even in the narrowest understanding of translation, a problem not of language alone but of the patterns of life in which these languages are set. When we read Rosenzweig’s comments on translation as an interpretive key to his whole thinking, we see in sudden relief exactly where his concerns lay: “Whoever has something to say must say it in a new way. He will create his language, and when he has said his say, the face of the language will have changed. The translator makes himself a mouthpiece for the alien voice and transmits it across the chasm of space or time. If this alien voice has something to communicate, the language will be different from what it was before.”⁶ And since we must understand Rosenzweig as both translator and the audience of his own translations (which were part of the personal heuristics of his return to Judaism) we can read the following as a personal statement of the prior condition for making the cultural transition: “the time…for such a Holy Wedding (of two languages) is not ripe until a receptive people reaches out toward the wing-beat of an alien masterpiece with its own yearning and its own utterance, and when its receptiveness…has become an integral part of the people’s historical development.”⁷ His whole writing on the nature of translation reads like a commentary to that phrase about the path of return: “in being Jews, we must not give up anything…but lead everything back to Judaism.”

footnotes:
⁶ Glatzer, 253.
⁷ Ibid., 257.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 7
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 7](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/7)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
If we were to characterise Rosenzweig in a single phrase, it would not be “the *Ba’al Teshuvah*” (he who has returned) but “the Translator,” with all the wealth of meaning that he himself gave to the word. And it is precisely here that his originality lies. For Rosenzweig was acutely conscious of the theological problems of the meaning of exile for Judaism. A Jewish theology must come to terms with its historical situation, since it is above all a religion which reads Divine significance into the vicissitudes of its people in time and space. One solution – and that taken by the traditional prayer book in the *Musaph* service for the festivals – is that exile is an act of retribution, calling for a response of atonement (“because of our sins we were exiled from our land”). Another and more positive reading, emphasised most overtly in the mystical ­tradition, is that exile is a way of sanctifying not only the local dimensions of the Holy Land, but the whole secular world. The picture here is one of “releasing the buried sparks of holiness” that lie scattered in the realm of the secular, or in another image, that of “shaking the spice-box so that its sweet smell spreads to all the corners of the room.” But both solutions involve a denial of the independent value of the exile environment. The first sees it as a temptation to be overcome; the second, as the mere physical location of sanctificatory acts which are essentially untouched by their context. They both inherit the linguistic directive of a Hebrew in which “holy” (*kadosh*) also means “separate.”


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 8
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 8](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/8)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But Rosenzweig, that exiled Jew, affirmed every dimension of his situation. He saw, in exile, revelation. For revelation has a history and is not confined to, even if it was prefigured in, Sinai. And to say that its history (from the “face-to-face” encounter of Moses, to the voices and visions of the prophets, to the law-maker of the Tannaim and Amoraim, to the remote and only ecstatically accessible “infinite nothing” of the mystics) is intelligible only in the light of the social conditions of its recipients, is not necessarily to take up the detached perspective of a Max Weber. It might also be the starting point of a theology of Jewish history. And accordingly one might then reason that the positive function of a situation of exile is to open up a whole series of channels of revelation which derive from the new eyes that an alien culture bestows. And what is exciting about this new interpretation of exile is not only that it is the most affirmative (and this of itself would be a religious advance, to be able to discern the positive intention in the seeming withdrawal of Divine involvement in history) but that it explicates the *necessity* of the “I-here-now” which must underlie any religious response to the individual moment in its full uniqueness.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 9
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 9](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/9)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This explains why Rosenzweig the translator is also the philosopher of exile. Only the translator, with his full grasp of the potentialities of the two cultures, the one timeless, the other mediating it in time, can bring about the “Holy Wedding.” Only now it is not (as in the traditional image) the reunion between God and His people, but the wedding of the exiled Jew (in full affirmation of his exile) and his Jewishness. And this is the key to the series of brilliantly original observations which fill the *Star of Redemption*. Rosenzweig writes with the perceptiveness of the outsider, seeing new patterns precisely because, understanding other cultures as well as he understands Judaism, he can set them against it and see the divergences – things which would not be consciously articulated by the Jew who had always lived inside the walls of Torah, not so much because they eluded his attention but because his hierarchy of significances was unresponsive to time.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 10
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 10](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/10)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
To say this, however, is not enough. For it might sound as if Rosenzweig had triumphantly solved the paradox of exile. This is not so, and his position is a precarious one, at least from a traditional perspective. To understand this we might begin with his metaphor of “conversation.” One thing is particularly striking about the accession to the threshold of prophecy (for Maimonides,⁸ ch. 7, *Guide for the Perplexed* II: 35–48, III: 51. the legitimate aim of every Jewish life), and that is that it is accompanied by a sudden realisation of the inadequacy of human speech to the Divine Word – Moses’ “I am not a man of words,” Isaiah’s “I am a man of impure lips,” Jeremiah’s “I cannot speak, for I am a child.” Their message is ultimately not theirs, they become transparent, their self becomes a medium and not an independent reality. And for this reason, any philosophy which sees a real distinction between the subjective and the objective can only be a *preface* to Judaism and cannot speak with an authentically Jewish voice. Rosenzweig saw this and made his subjectivism a starting point only: “to achieve being objective, the thinker must proceed boldly from his own subjective situation.”⁹, 597; Glatzer, 179. But if so then the whole of the *Star of Redemption* is a starting point, leading “into life” but transcended in life, in the same way as Wittgenstein described his *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*, “he (the reader) must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it. He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”¹⁰ 6.54.

footnotes:
⁸ See Maimonides, M.T. Yesodei ha-Torah
⁹ Briefe
¹⁰ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 11
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/11)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
As an illustration of the distance between starting point and destination, we might, with the added poignancy that Rosenzweig’s personal fate lends it, take his analysis of death. This must be the starting point for subjectivism, for only in the fear of death does the individual realise his ontological loneliness: “All knowledge of the whole has its source in death, in the fear of death.” “Only the singular can die, and everything mortal is solitary.”¹¹, translated by William Hallo, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, 3–4. But death in Judaism has no ultimate reality, for Judaism knows no ultimate loneliness. Death is, as Rosenzweig notes, the gate through which the “I” cannot pass.¹² But because the Jewish soul is more than the “I,” because in its alignment with the Divine will it encompasses the Whole, death is not its boundary. Much of the meaning of this is open to Rosenzweig, who sees for example the connection between marriage and death as twin symbols of union of the mortal and the Divine. But in his comments on the Day of Atonement¹³ – the day he held back from Christianity and began his lonely path back to Judaism – he still sees the “solitary individual” confronted by the fact of death. Whereas, traditionally, it is the day par excellence when the community stands together in absolute collectivity (“*Our* father, *our* king,” “For the sins *we* have committed”); and the shroud (*kittel*) that the worshipper wears is not a symbol of death but of the angelic orders, of eternity, of self-effacement.

footnotes:
¹¹ Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption
¹² Ibid., 273.
¹³ Ibid., 326–327.


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 12
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 12](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/12)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This is why Rosenzweig will stand as the Translator and not as the *Ba’al Teshuvah.* For as he himself wrote, “to translate is to serve two masters,”¹⁴ and while one’s perceptions of Judaism are still mediated by the forms of a previous non-Jewish vision, they are not yet visions from *within*. This does not mean that they must be “renounced,” but they must be transformed by taking their place in a different context. And ultimately the “speech” will be stilled to the silence that knows that it has arrived at its place of destination, and needs and can have no other voice than the infinite resonances of the Divine word. Had he reached that far, we would not remember him as Franz Rosenzweig (that bearer of “the first name and surname – the *personal* in the strictest sense of the word”¹⁵, 7. as he said of Kierkegaard), but as some set of initials – as Rashi, Rambam, Ravad – in the striking effacement of identity by which tradition hides its individual talents in permutations of the holy letters: another column of commentary clustering round the text of Jewish history.

footnotes:
¹⁴ Glatzer, 254.
¹⁵ The Star of Redemption


###### Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 13
[Tradition in an Untraditional Age, THINKERS, Chapter 13; The Path of Return; A Preface to the Reading of Rosenzweig 13](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Tradition%20in%20an%20Untraditional%20Age/s/THINKERS,_Chapter%2013%3B%20The%20Path%20of%20Return%3B%20A%20Preface%20to%20the%20Reading%20of%20Rosenzweig/r/13)

**Tradition in an Untraditional Age, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Rosenzweig is indispensable to us. We needed to be shown the religious meaning of exile in a way that did not blind us to the call of the moment and of the place. He has given new meaning to the old maxim that everyone who sees something new in Judaism is as if he were standing in the immediacy of Sinai; and he has opened this possibility not only for himself but for each of us. But if his words show us the path and lead us to the gate, they do not take us through to the other side. And yet in his last utterance, that great affirmation of death (“now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep”) he himself transcended his thought, and finally passed “into life.”