The Halakah, Sacred Events, and Time Consciousness in Rosenzweig and Soloveitchik

This essay compares the perspectives of Franz Rosenzweig and Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the sacred events generated by the halakah on the Yamim Nora’im (high holidays). It treats the halakah as a medium that begets “events” in the structure of human experience, rather than as the product of legal reasoning or historical circumstances. Both Rosenzweig and Soloveitchik bear witness to an experience of circular time—wherein the community senses a simultaneity of present, past, and future—and anticipates the return of the events they have experienced even as they pass away. Soloveitchik’s phenomenology of sacred time, however, allows not only for a sense of simultaneity by way of circularity—as with Rosenzweig. For him, simultaneity can also be attained through an experience of reversibility, as with the penitent who actually changes her past in the present, and her present in light of hew newly envisioned future.