The Star of Redemption

Foreword

xi Foreword A Life: The richness and even greater promise of a life prematurely cut short is witnessed by an extraordinary book. Franz Rosenzweig was born on December 25, 1886 in Cassel, Germany. His parents were acculturated upper middle class Germans, whose identity as Jews was expressed primarily through their sense of loyalty to the Jewish community. Franz’s university education was multidisciplinary, including the study of medicine, history, philosophy and law. Two events, two encounters of 1913, were pivotal in establishing the direction of his life. The first was a conversation with an elder peer, Eugen Rosenstock, whose passionate and articulate commitment to Christianity convinced Franz that religion, at least Christianity , could provide a meaningful orientation for modern life. The second was a religious metamorphosis during the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. His experience of God’s nearness taught him that there was still fire in the smoldering embers of Judaism, despite his having earlier dismissed that religious heritage as moribund. From that time, Rosenzweig sought to uncover, express, and to institutionally ground an answer to the puzzle of what constituted a life that was both fully Jewish and fully modern. The Star of Redemption, published in 1922, was Rosenzweig’s self-constructed philosophic signpost. It was followed by his efforts to translate some essential sources of the Jewish past, the Bible and the poems of the great medieval poet/philosopher Judah Halevi, and to found a Jewish adult education institute, the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. Franz was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1922, but struggled to go on speaking, writing, and engaging with others until his death, at the age of 42, on December 10, 1929. A Love Poem: The first draft of the Star was composed when Rosenzweig was a German soldier stationed at the Balkan front. In the book, Rosenzweig argues that Jews cannot give themselves fully to war, but this original site of composition plays at least some latent role in the structure of a text that begins—“From Death,” and ends, “Into Life.” Another site in the completion of the text a few months later was the house of a dear friend, Margrit Huessy, who also happened to be the wife of Eugen Rosenstock. In letters to Margrit, Franz acknowledged his closeness to her and the feeling of her presence as he wrote the “heart” of the Star (86)*, the panegyric on Revelation which begins with the quotation from the biblical “Song of Songs,” “Love is as strong as death.” In the Star Rosenzweig explains that it is only love—God’s love for us, the soul’s love of God, and the orienting love of the neighbor, that endows life with a meaning that even death cannot erase. Yet, this meaning belongs to the registry of eternity; in life it appears as effervescent as “a kiss.” * Numbers within brackets refer to pages in Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking: A Few Supplementary Remarks to the Star,” in Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” edited and translated by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli, Syracuse University Press, 1999. All other material in quotation marks is taken from the Star itself. xii A Jewish Philosophy: Rosenzweig rejected the label of a “Jewish book” (68) that some of his contemporaries gave to the Star. For him it was a “system of philosophy” (69). A text that laid out “a logic, an ethic, an aesthetic, and a philosophy of religion” (70) was a philosophic book. Yet, the Star was also Jewish, through and through. It narrated life in terms of fundamental biblical categories, as these are understood from out of the resources of Jewish texts, liturgy, and everyday life. And even in style it intimately addresses its Jewish readers as “us” and “our.” More importantly, the Star defines an expansive understanding of Jewish philosophy through its performance; symbolized by the two overlapping triangles of God, World, Man, and Creation, Revelation, Redemption. As Rosenzweig argued, it is not so-called Jewish topics that make a Jewish text (92), or that are the foci for Jewish philosophy. Jewish philosophy finds its complements in Islamic philosophy and Indian philosophy, in unique philosophic endeavors , drawing on communities’ experiences that may stretch over centuries or millennium, to understand nothing less than the meaning of life and the nature of the universe. The tremendous range and brilliance of individual treatments have brought many critics to mine the Star’s depths, turning it this way and that and finding...