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BOOK TWO: The Rays or the Eternal Way
- University of Wisconsin Press
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357 BOOK TWO THE RAYS OR THE ETERNAL WAY N O human power can grasp the thoughts of the Creator ; for his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. It is with these words about God’s ways at the conclusion of the great record of the entire content of oral and written Torah, which Maimonides gives to us as “repetition of the Law,” that the following sentences begin about the way of the true Messiah and that great deception of worshipping another beside God, which, according to the prophecy of the Book of Daniel befell the world through “renegade sons of Your people who presume to fulfill the visions—and shall fall.” Our great teacher then continues as follows: All this only cleared the way for the royal Messiah who will establish the world upon the service of God, as it is written: then I shall give to the peoples pure lips, so that they all together invoke God and serve him united. If however in the meantime the whole world has become full of the messianic idea and the words of Torah and the Commandments ; if that idea and these words have spread to distant islands and among many peoples of uncircumcised heart and uncircumcised flesh; they are all now concerned with the words of Torah and with questions of their legality, some claim that those our Commandments are certainly true but no longer legally in force, and others claim that secrets are hidden in them and nothing can be understood in the plain literal sense, and that at one time the Messiah came and made manifest that which is secret. But only when the true Messiah comes and he succeeds and he will be on high and exalted, then they will all return and acknowledge what a delusion it was. FROM the fiery heart of the Star there shoot out the rays. They seek their way through the long night of the times. It must be an eternal way, not a temporal one, even if it leads equally through time. It must not deny time; after all, it is supposed to lead through it. And yet time may not get power over it. And on the other hand it may not, like the eternal people that continues to beget in itself, create its own time and thereby make itself free from time. So there is only one thing left: it must become master THE ETERNITY OF REALIZATION THE WAY THROUGH TIME: CHRISTIAN HISTORY PART THREE: BOOK TWO 358 over time. But how could that happen? How could a way that traverses time, instead of being divided off by time, itself divide off time? In the very question lies the answer. Yet the rhythm of time determines all that happens in it only because time is older and younger than all that happens. If a happening confronted it that had its beginning and its end outside of time, then the pulse beat of this happening could regulate the striking of the hours of by the world clock. Such a happening would have to come from beyond time and flow into a beyond of time. In any present it would of course be in time; but because it knows that it is independent of time in its past and in its future, it therefore feels strongly against it. Its present stands between past and future; yet the moment does not stand but flies away at the speed of an arrow and as a result is never “between” its past and its future, but before it could be between anything, it has already flown away. The way of the world knows a between only in the past; only the past point of time is time-point, crammed time, haltingplace . Living time knows of nothing of points; each point, when the moment begins to fly across it at the speed of an arrow, has already flown straight across. But in the past there is that fixed juxtaposition of hours; here there are packed times, halting-points in time, and they can be recognized by the fact that time precedes them, time follows them; they are between time and time. Only as such a between however does time acquire weight such that it can no longer fly away at the speed of an arrow. The packed time no longer passes before I became aware of it, and changes before I notice it. But it means something. “Something...