The Star of Redemption

BOOK ONE: The Fire or Eternal Life

317 BOOK ONE THE FIRE OR ETERNAL LIFE P RAISED be he who has planted eternal life in our midst. The fire burns in the heart of the Star. It is only out of the fire of the center that the rays shine forth and flow outwards irresistibly. The heart of the fire must burn without ever stopping. Its flame must eternally nourish itself. It does not want nourishment from anywhere else. Time must roll past it without power. The fire must beget its own time. It must beget itself eternally. It must make its life eternal in the succession of generations, each of which begets the following one, as it itself again will bear witness to the preceding one. The bearing witness takes place in the begetting. In this connection with the double meaning and single effect of begetting and bearing witness,1 eternal life becomes real. Past and future, otherwise strangers to each other, the one drawing back when the other’s turn comes— here they grow into one: the begetting of the future is a direct bearing witness to the past. The son is begotten so that he might bear witness to the past father of his begetter. The grandson renews the grandfather’s name. The patriarchs call the last offspring by his name, which is also theirs. Above the darkness of the future there burns the starry heaven of the promise: so shall be your seed. THERE is only one community in which such a relationship of eternal life reaches from the grandfather to the grandson , only one that cannot express the “We” of its unity without hearing as well within its core “are eternal” as its complement. It must be a community of the same blood, for only the blood gives to hope for the future a guarantee in the present. Every other one, every community can be propagated differently than by blood if it wants to establish its We for eternity, and it can do so only by safeguarding a place for itself in the future; all bloodless eternity is founded on the will and on hope. The community of the same blood alone feels even today the guarantee of its eternity running warmly through its veins. For it alone time is THE PROMISE OF ETERNITY THE ETERNAL PEOPLE: JEWISH DESTINY BLOOD AND SPIRIT 1 Bearing witness, Bezeugen; begetting, Erzeugen. not an enemy to be restrained, over which perhaps, perhaps even not—but it hopes that—it will be triumphant, but child and grandchild . That which for other communities is future and therefore in any case that which is still on the other side the present—is for it alone already present; for it alone, that which is future is nothing foreign, but something that is its own, something that it carries in its womb, and it can give birth to it every day. Whereas every other community that lays claim to eternity must make arrangements in order to pass the torch of the present on to the future, only the community of the same blood does not have need of making such arrangements for the tradition; it does not need to trouble its mind; in the natural propagation of the body it has the guarantee of its eternity. That which is held by a people in general to be the union of families of the same blood in the face of all communities of the spirit is held by our people in a quite particular way. Among the peoples of the earth, is, the Jewish people is, as on every Sabbath , that high point of its life, it calls itself: the one people. The peoples of the world cannot be satisfied with a community made up of the same blood; they put forth their roots into the night of the earth, itself dead yet life-bestowing, and appropriate from its permanence a guarantee of their own permanence. Their will to eternity clings to the soil and to the soil’s dominion, the territory . The blood of their sons flows round the earth of the homeland ; for they do not have confidence in the living community of blood, which would not be anchored in the solid ground of the earth. We alone have put our trust in the blood and parted with the land; in this way we saved the precious life fluid that offered us a guarantee of our own eternity and alone among all peoples of the earth we have awakened out...