FRANZ ROSENZWEIG THE STAR OF REDEMPTION (excepts) Notre Dame Press, translated by William W.

Hallo

The One People: Jewish Essence

THE JEWISH GOD (308-309) To his people, God the Lord is simultaneously the God of retribution and the God of love. In the same breath, they call on him as "our God" and as "King of the universe, or to indicate the same contrast in a more intimate sphere as "our Father" and our King." He wants to be served with "trembling" and yet rejoices when his children over come their fear at his wondrous signs. Whenever the scriptures mention his majesty the next verses are sure to speak of his meekness. He demands the visible signs of offering and prayer brought to his name, and of "the affliction of our soul" in his sight. And almost in the same breath he scorns both and wants to be honored only with the secret fervor of the heart, in the love of one's neighbor, and in anonymous works of justice which no one may recognize as having been done for the sake of his name. He has elected his people, but elected it to visit upon them all their iniquities. He wants every knee to bend to him and yet he is enthroned above Israel's songs of praise. Israel intercedes with him in behalf of the sinning peoples of the world and he afflicts Israel with disease so that those other peoples may be healed. Both stand before God: Israel, his servant, and the kings of the peoples; and the strands of suffering and guilt, of love and judgment, of sin and atonement, are so inextricably twined that human hands cannot untangle them. THE JEWISH MAN (309) And man, who is created in the image of God, Jewish man as he faces his God, is a veritable repository of contradictions. As the beloved of God, as Israel, he knows that God has elected him

and may well forget that he is not alone with God, that God knows others whom he himself mayor may not know, that to Egypt and Assyria too, God says: "my people. He knows he is loved so why concern himself with the world! In his blissful togetherness alone with God, he may consider himself man, and man alone, and look up in surprise when the world tries to remind him that not every man harbors the same certainty of being God's child as he himself. Yet no one knows better than he that being dear to God is only a beginning, and that man remains unredeemed so long as nothing but this beginning has been realized. Over against Israel, eternally loved by God and faithful and perfect in eternity, stands he who is eternally to come, he who waits, and wanders, and grows eternally the Messiah. Over against the man of earliest beginnings, against Adam the son of man, stands the man of endings, the son of David the king. Over against him who was created from the stuff of earth and the breath of the mouth of God, is the descendant from the stem of anointed kings; over against the patriarch, the latest offspring; over against the first, who draws about him the mantle of divine love, the last, from whom salvation issues forth to the ends of the earth; over against the first miracles, the last, which so it is said will be greater than the first. THE JEWISH WORLD (309-310) Finally, the Jewish world: it has been dematerialized and permeated with spirit through the power of blessings which are said over everything and branch everywhere. But this world, also, is twofold and teeming with contradictions in every single thing. Everything that happens in it is ambivalent since it is related both to this and the coming world. The fact that the two worlds, this world and the coming, stand side by side, is allimportant. Even the object that receives a soul by a benediction spoken over it has a twofold function: in "this" world it serves everyday purposes, almost as though it had never been blessed, but at the same time it has been rendered one of the stones of which the "coming" world will be built. Benediction splits this world in order to make it whole and one again for what is to

come, but for the present all that is visible is the split. As the contrast between holy and profane, Sabbath and workaday, "Torah and the way of earth," spiritual life and the earning of a livelihood, this split goes through all of life. As it divides the life of Israel into holy and profane, so it divides the whole earth into Israel and the peoples. But the division is not simple in the sense that the holy shuts out the profane. The contrast penetrates to the innermost core, and just as the benediction touches everything that is profane and makes it holy, so, quite suddenly, the devout and the wise among all the peoples will participate in the eternal life of the coming world, which but a short time ago seemed reserved for Israel alone. Those who were blessed will themselves become a blessing.

The Holy People: The Jewish Year

THE SABBATH (310-311) Only established, only founded. But as such a foundation, the reading of the Torah becomes the liturgical focus of the holiday on which the spiritual year is founded, of the Sabbath. In the circle of weekly portions which, in the course of one year, cover all of the Torah, the spiritual year is paced out, and the paces of this course are the Sabbaths. By and large, every Sabbath is just like any other, but the difference in the portions from the Scriptures distinguishes each from each, and this difference shows that they are not final in themselves but only parts of a higher order, of the year. For only in the year do the differentiating elements of the individual parts again fuse into a whole. The Sabbath lends reality to the year. This reality must be re-created week by week. One might say that the spiritual year mows only what is dealt with in the portion, but it becomes a year because every week is nothing but a fleeting moment. It is only in the sequence of Sabbaths that year rounds to a garland. The very regularity in the sequence of Sabbaths, the very fact that, aside from the variation in the Scripture portions, one Sabbath is just like the other, makes them the cornerstones

of the year. The year as a spiritual year is created only through them. They precede everything that may still come, and imperturbably go side by side With all else, following their even course amid the splendors of feast days. Through all the surge of joy and sorrow, of anguish and bliss that the feasts bring with them, the even flow of the Sabbaths goes on, the even flow which makes possible those whirlpools of the soul. In the Sabbath the year is created, and thus' the main significance of the Sabbath lies in the symbolic meaning of its liturgy: it is a holiday that commemorates creation. THE FEAST OF CREATION (311) For God created heaven and. earth in six days, and on the seventh he rested. And so the seventh day became the "day of rest," the "sabbath," to celebrate the "memorial of the work of creation," or, more accurately, the completion of that workHand the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the host of them." The Sabbath reflects the creation of the world in the year. Just as the world is always there, and wholly there before anything at all happens in it, so the order of the Sabbaths precedes all the festivals which commemorate events, and completes its course in the year, undisturbed by other feasts. And just as creation is not contained in the fact that the world was created once, but requires for its fulfilment renewal at every dawn, so the Sabbath, as the festival of creation, must not be one that is celebrated only once a year, but one that is renewed throughout the year, week after week the same, and yet week after week different, because of the difference in the weekly portions. And just as creation is wholly complete, for revelation adds to it nothing that was not already latent in it as pressage, so the festival of creation must also contain the entire content of the festivals of revelation; in its own inner course, from evening to evening it must be all presage. FRIDAY EVENING (311-312)

On the Sabbath in contrast to weekdays the great prayer of benedictions, repeated thrice daily, is enriched by inserts of poetry which convert the simple repetition into an organized and rounded whole. The addition to the prayer on the eve of the Sabbath refers to the institution of the Sabbath in the creation of the world. Here the words that conclude the Story of creation occur: ". . . and the heaven and the earth were finished." On returning from the service in the House of Prayer, this is repeated in the home, by the holy light of the candles, before the blessing over bread and wine of the divine gifts of the earth the divine nature of what is earthly is attested in the glow of the Sabbath lights and the entire day thus consecrated as a festival commemorating creation. For bread and wine are the most perfect works of man, works that cannot be surpassed. They cannot, however, be compared to his other works in which his inventive mind artfully combines the gifts of nature, and in the act of combining goads itself on to greater and greater artfulness. Bread and wine are nothing but the ennobled gifts of earth; one is the basis of all the strength of life, the other of all its joy. Both were perfected in the youth of the world and of the people thereon, and neither can ever grow old. Every mouthful or bread and every sip of wine tastes just as wonderful as the first we ever savored, and certainly no less wonderful than in time immemorial they tasted to those who for the first time harvested the grain, for bread and gathered the fruits of the vine. SABBATH MORNING (312) While the eve of the Sabbath is primarily a festival in honor of creation, the morning celebrates revelation. Here the poetic insert in the great prayer of benediction proclaims the joy of Moses at God's gift of the Sabbath. And the joy of the great receiver of revelation, to whom God "spoke face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend," and to whom he gave greater recognition than to any later prophet of Israel, is followed, in. the order of the day, with the reading of the weekly portion to the congregation by its representatives. On the eve of the Sabbath, expression is given to the knowledge that the earth is a

creation; in the morning, we find utterance of the people's awareness of being elect through the gift of the Torah which signifies that eternal life has been planted in their midst. The man called forth to the Torah from the congregation approaches the book of revelation in the knowledge of being elect. When he leaves the book and again merges with the congregation, he does so in the knowledge of eternal life. But within the Sabbath, too, this knowledge of eternal life carries him over the threshold separating both revelation and creation from redemption. The Afternoon Prayer becomes the prayer of redemption. SABBATH AFTERNOON (312-313) In the insert in this prayer, Israel is more than the chosen people, it is the "one and only" people, the people of the One and Only God. Here all the fervor which the praying Jew breathes into the holy word "One," the fervor which compels the coming of the Kingdom, is at its greatest intensity. Twice daily, in the morning and in the evening profession, after the community of Israel has been created through the injunction to "hear," and the immediate presence of God has been acknowledged by the invocation of God as "our God," God's unity" is proclaimed as his eternal name beyond all name, beyond all presence. And we know that this proclamation is more than a fleeting word; we know that within it the eternal union of God with his people and of his people with mankind occurs through every individual "taking upon himself the yoke of the kingdom of God. All this vibrates in the Afternoon Prayer of the Sabbath, in the hymn on the one people of the One and Only God. And the songs of the "third meal," at which old men and children gather around the long table in the light of the waning day, reel with the transport of certainty that the Messiah will come and will come soon. THE FEASTS OF REVELATION (316-317)

The three pilgrimage festivals, that of the deliverance from Egypt, that of the revelation of the Ten Commandments, and the Feast of Booths in the wilderness, feasts on which everyone in the land once journeyed to the common sanctuary, give an image of the people as the carrier of revelation. Creation and redemption, too, are revealed in revelation, creation because it was done for the sake of redemption and thus, in a narrower sense, is actually the creation of revelation; redemption because revelation bids us wait for it. And so, in the course of the destiny of the people chosen for revelation, the periods of the feasts in which this people grows aware of its vocation to be the recipient of revelation are grouped around the day and the moment on which revelation is actually received. This vocation is shown in three stages: the people are created into a people; this people is endowed with the words of revelation; and, with the Torah it has received, this people wanders through the wilderness of the world. The eight-day periods of the Passover and of the Feast of Booths are grouped around the two-day Feast of Weeks. In these three festivals, the steps of eternal history pace the ground of the year with its cycle of Sabbaths, a ground which is, as it were, eternal in nature. For these feasts only seem to be feasts of commemoration. In reality, the historical element in them is living and present, and what is said to every participant at the first festival holds for them all: that he must celebrate the feast as though he himself had been delivered from Egypt. The beginning, the middle, and the end of this national history, the founding, the zenith, and the eternity of the people, are reborn with every new generation.