Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Here goes my @threadapalooza on Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), a heartfelt thinker, passionate seeker, Jewish community leader, avant garde translator & major influence on Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas & Leo Strauss. He died young (from ALS), 4 years before Nazis took power.

His last works were composed using a single finger tapping method, a la Stephen Hawking, which his wife would then transcribe. Like many of his generation, Rosenzweig also struggle with depression. He believed every person should have at least one "dark night of the soul." 2

Rosenzweig is a genius but doesn't get the play he deserves, outside of a small devoted readership of Jewish and Christian readers (and some idiosyncratic academics) for a few reasons. 3

One reason is that his language is more poetic than analytical and doesn't translate. He writes in a romantic style that is rich with literary influence. 4

Another is that he was steeped in Hegelian thought, but then basically perverts it from within, keeping the form, but turning it into something more existentialist. Unless you are a Hegelian, it's hard at first blush to follow or appreciate. 5

FR wants to show that religious texts and ideas have a universal quality, are available to human experience. 6

This creates an ambiguity, tho; because more fundamentalist religious people will say they know things on the basis of revelation; and more secular people will say they don't need FR to patronize them by making religious concepts philosophical. They are just as happy w/o them. 7

FR is in a weird place--he thinks that creation, revelation, and redemption are fundamental concepts without which we can't think or self-understand; yet his definitions of these are more philosophical than they are religious. 8

If you imagine a teenager with a cracked voice that's FR; he's not quite a theologian and not quite a philosopher. This is one reason I love him, but also one reason why he's hard. FR is deliciously ambiguous. To use @dougclinton 's term, FR is master of "Frankensteining." 9

FR began working on the Star of Redemption, his magnum opus, by writing on postcards, while serving Germany in WW1 on the Balkan front. It opens by saying that the condition for existence is the fear of death. He wrote this before Heidegger would say the same thing in 1927. 10

For FR and most existentialists, it is death that makes us concerned for our individuality and the meaning of our lives. Hegel's system treats us as too small in the grand scheme of things. The experience of war give a different hue to the totalizing perspective of "the All." 11

FR is no subjectivist; he's not saying truth isn't objective. He just thinks that methodologically it's pointless and cruel to ignore the self as the starting point for thought. The challenge is to square the circle of the personal and the cosmic. 12

Oddly, and interestingly, FR wants to do the same not just for humans but also for God. He wants to distinguish between God as a pre-worldly reality and God as a Being who reveals Godself to people in history and presents as a personality. 13

If you think God is just a projection, a la Freud, FR isn't for you; FR thinks there is something else on the other side of the relationship. 14

But FR also takes atheism seriously. He thinks Nietzsche is one of the greatest religious thinkers of modernity-that his atheism isn't about denying God, but about saying that the classical conception of God is unfair. "If God exists, how can I bear not to be God?" 15

Leonard Cohen captures this in his line, "If yours is the glory, mine must be the shame." Surely, a good God cannot simply be a dominating one. And yet this is often how religion and religious texts seem to present God. 16

Is there a middle way between total submission to the Other a la certain readings of Rudolph Otto and Kierkegaard and worship of self a la Kant and the adoration of autonomy and choice? 17

Yes, says FR. Relationship. It's mushy, but you could say that religious life and the history of religion are a transformation of God as parent (Creator) to God as lover (Revealer). 18

I've mentioned FR is weird. Allow me to show one example. He thinks that Creation is a synonym for the past. Revelation is a synonym for the present. And Redemption is a synonym for the future. 19

If you read this religiously it means that time itself has a fundamentally theological structure to it. But if you read it secularly, it means that theology is just a poetic expression of what it means to be human, to be governed by temporality (nothing gold can stay). 20

Yes, Creation happened. But the problem is it happened, it's gone; it can't be proven. Yes, Redemption is coming. But the problem is it's always coming, in the future. It can't help us deal with the mess that is now. 21

And what is revelation, revelation is God speaking to me through my life now. Great. Wonderful. But my life remains full of uncertainty and contradiction. 22

Yes, I've gained a religious consciousness from thinking of the past as Created and the future as Redeemed; but at the same time, I've cut religious language down to size. It is no easier to live as me now that I have this language. Revelation is only this: revelation. 23

For FR, following the Hasidic and Kabbalistic interpretation of Revelation, revelation is basically empty, a silent aleph. It is the expression of God, but without any content other than the presence. So revelation doesn't get me knowledge. 24

Knowledge is what follows in the act of interpretation. This is a cool move. It preserves a divine quality to religion (thus distinguishing it from humanism), but then says most of religion save the silent aleph is interpretive, is about language (not the thing itself). 25

Again, this is weird; FR rejects the idea that religion is projection, but also rejects the certainty that comes from an anti-rationalist and anti-academic approach. Ie Rosenzweig isn't willing to go as far as Kierkegaard in taking a leap of faith. And also doesn't need to. 26

Leo Strauss says that Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed appears to be a philosopher but is in fact a theology; Rosenzweig in the star appears to be a theologian but is in fact a philosopher. 27

I discovered Franz Rosenzweig in high school and was deeply inspired by his personal story. FR is what's known as a Baal teshuva, literally, a master of repentance, someone who re-discovers Judaism later in life. 28

FR says he wanted to convert to Christianity due to the influence of a cousin who had converted from Judaism, but then he wanted to become a Christian as Paul had, that is, as a Jew, not a pagan. 29

He then goes to synagogue on Yom Kippur and writes afterwards that conversion to Christianity is no longer necessary. Alluring and opaque. FR has an interesting view on Christianity, seeing it positively as Judaism's sister religion. Both religions have a positive role.30

Judaism is for Jews; Christianity is for pagans. Everyone deserves to have a relationship with God. Ok, it's a bit condescending, and also it doesn't hold non-Christian religions in high esteem, but FR was an early proponent of interfaith theology before it was cool. 31

FR basically holds that Jews are chosen to be Jews, but that this doesn't preclude other peoples from being chosen for other missions; this, he gets from Lessing's Nathan the Wise, a staple parable defending a pluralistic conception of religion...32

Another odd feature of FR's pluralistic and positive attitude to Christianity is that he associates the Church with nationalism and Judaism with wandering. FR is a diasporic (non-Zionist thinker); so was his teacher and mentor Hermann Cohen. 33

He believes, along with George Steiner, that the Jewish people must teach the world how to "be good guests." Or at least, that Jewishness does not require expansion or empire or sovereignty the way that missionizing religions do. One wonders what he would have though in 1948. 34

I recall Elias Canetti describing similar dynamics in Crowds and Power. Some groups seek to expand forever while others seek to contain their boundaries...both are valid. Though obviously, when you have two groups that seek hegemony, that leads to war. 35

Ok so FR is a universalist and a particularist, and a philo-Christian at a time when Jewish-Christian relations were still raw, and would become rawer still. 36

Said differently, FR is at once anti-assimilationist; Jews should not reduce their Judaism to Germanness, but he's positive about German culture, and sees in Jewish thought parallel insights that one can find in German thought. A strange project to do on the eve of WW2...37

FR is purported to have had different sets of "bentchers" in his home (pamphlets of the Grace after meals prayer). One had Hebrew letters on one side and transliteration on the other side (German letters expressing Hebrew sounds); the other was just a bilinear translation. 38

Why? One set, the Hebrew set, was for Jews, even uneducated ones who couldn't read or understand Hebrew. He felt it was more important for them to experience the language, the strangeness, and have it affect them. Reason is overrated when it comes to ritual. 39

Yet FR had an open home and wanted his non-Jewish friends to be able to follow along and to share in the meaning of Jewish prayer. German is the language of Luther. It is an inescapably Christian language, no matter what you believe. One should not pray as a Jew in German. 40

The same would go for English and, we might also argue, modern Hebrew. Gershom Scholem, also influenced by FR, believed that modern Hebrew would spell catastrophe for Israel, as it would smuggle a sacred residue into everyday use, confusing both. 41

FR was consistent in his appreciation for the strange, his belief that authenticity was to be found in the emotive and not simply in the comprehensible (a romantic notion). When he translated the Torah into German w/ Buber, he sought to capture the sound of Hebrew. 42

Rosenzweig used new words and strange grammar to create an experience of the primitive and to connect readers to the breath, rather than make reading easy. 43

Everett Fox's English translation follows the Rosenzweig-Buber model of translation; it's not as useful as JPS, but it has more feeling; the alienation of the ancient gives it an aura. 44

Peter Gordon writes that Rosenzweig was influenced by modernist aesthetics; that his project is not unlike Stravinsky's Rite of Spring...there's a sense that we have to pay ironic homage to the ancient past to save ourselves fro mass culture and technological speed. 42

But it's a bit reductive to say FR is just a romantic or just a modernist. FR is, in my view, a genuine seeker who wants to be religious without giving up his intellectual influence. He seeks common cause with philosophy while recognizing the gap betw. philosophy and faith. 43

His appreciation for all that stands in the way of faith makes him a compelling teacher--he started a Lehrhaus or institute for adult Jewish education to try to make Jewish life and thought compelling to assimilated Jews. While it's time was brief, it is a model today. 44

A model for sophisticated encounter that seeks to let Judaism be Other, but also doesn't require people to check their convictions at the door. It seeks neither synthesis nor persuasion or conversion, but encounter. 45

Before writing my dissertation on Heidegger, I initially thought I'd write a comparison of FR and Heidegger. My argument was/is that while both accept the fundamental reality of death, FR emphasizes love as equally important. 46

The emphasis on love in FR thus allows him to be more religious, where Heidegger ends up feeling more like the plodding hero in a Bergman film. 47

Perhaps I'll return to this; but I felt I could not write on FR in a dissertation because he is even more difficult than Heidegger. By difficult I mean too weird. Heidegger's language in Being and Time takes time to absorb, but is coherent. FR, I worried, was less coherent. 48

I believe FR believed "love is strong as death," but I'm not sure I knew or he knew how he got there. Sometimes, it feels like he posits things as a matter of self-evidence without demonstrating the veracity. 49

This is a general problem with phenomenology--if you don't agree with the account of experience, what then? Phenomenology is an interpretation of life, not, as Husserl thought, "a rigorous science." 50

I found FR's phenomenology aspirationally compelling, but less true to life and less structurally clear than Heidegger's. 51

In defense of FR, I believe some of this is intentional. FR isn't messy or whimsical just for the sake of it; he's intentionally "speculative." This is b/c FR believes, following Hegel, that things will be clear only from the standpoint of Redemption, ie., in the future. 52

Philosophy must be messy, because the world is. We can't expect the clarity that can come only when the world is clear. Gillian Rose calls this idea "the broken middle." We don't live at the end of history, but in the broken middle. 53

Looks like the thread broke (cue the religious metaphors), so click here to continue:

https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1420847964856139779

Hegel thought he lived at the end of history; FR thinks we can only get a glimpse of the end of history in our encounter with one another, in the light of the divine face, shining through the human face. Strange! 54

I found a similar idea not just in Levinas but in Rav Hutner (aka the Pachad Yitzhaq) h/t R. Aryeh Bernstein. In the prayer "Sim Shalom," it says that God should bless us all as one in "the light of your face" (b'or panecha). 55

Rav Hutner sees in the human face the shining of both human individuality and human unity. You might say, for Rosenzweig, the face is the promise of the reconciliation of the systematic and the personal. 56

This Rosenzweig's contribution to the debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard on which I wrote here. For FR, Hegel is right, but not yet. Kierkegaard is right, but only for now, not in the future. B/c the Messiah has yet to come, faith remains a leap:

https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1415726188614635521

57

As with Derrida, there's an ambiguity about Redemption. Is Redemption actually going to happen one day, or is Redemption just another word for hope, such that it is always deferred? The world to come is forever "to come." 58

When a sage sees Elijah at the gates of Rome and says when are you coming, Elijah says "hayom" (today). But the sage complains, you never came. Elijah responds, "today," but only if you ask for me. Perhaps by definition we can't ask hard enough. 59

Thus the redeemed world is both coming today, and always beyond reach. 60

Such a pessimistic or realist view would seem to undercut the Talmudic statement that we are obliged to "anticipate" the Messiah. But even the notion of anticipation might be re-interpreted through a Rosenzweigian or Heideggerian lens. 61

Did you feel the glimmer of the future in the brokenness of the present? 62

Did you intimate the divine in the face of the person before you? 63

Did you feel the eternal even as you found yourself in the unprecedented tempest of your historical moment? 64

Rosenzweig, like Levinas, sided w/ Heidegger against Cassirer in the Davos debate. He thought he had more in common with the existentialists than the Kantians, more in common with those who emphasized that reason is always "embedded". 65

Michael Sandel calls this idea in his critique of John Rawls the notion that there is no "unencumbered self". We can't abstract away history or identity, because if we did we'd be so thin there'd be no basis on which to choose anything. 66

In criticizing Rawls, @MacaesBruno makes a similar argument. Civic life is shared between people who care, not between people who, for the sake co-existence, have agreed to pretend not to care. 67

You find this critique in Gadamer, too. While Habermas is busy talking about ideal speech conditions, those who follow Gadamer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and others, know that such conditions are both impossible and unimaginable without a basis in some tradition or culture. 68

I saw this play out between Bratton and Agamben: versobooks.com/blogs/5125-aga…
Bratton saying the left should be "pro-science" harkens to Rawls & Cassirer. One response is that there's no such thing as Science. "Science" is an interpretive tradition as much as anything else. 69

Admitting science is interpretive isn't the same as rejecting scientific evidence as a mirage caused by the devil, but FR is definitely on the side that is unphased by so-called objective findings (for better and for worse). 70

All of this to say Heidegger is part of a movement that he calls "The new thinking" which makes for strange bedfellows; today, we might say the new thinking is a herald of identity politics, focused, as it is on 'lived experience' (Dilthey) over and above objective fact. 71

But while FR speaks of the language of collective destiny, he parts ways from identity politics in that identity is primarily personal, not social. Identity is what I compose in the face of death. 72

In this I see more commonality with Cold War liberal humanism than w/ today's campus politics. FR is mainly interested in the soul's journey through this world, not in things like structural violence or systemic oppression. 73

When asked if he was keeping this or that commandment, Rosenzweig would say, "not yet." I love the alluring answer. He's saying he's an aspirational Jew. But on a deeper level, he's saying that insofar as the middle is broken, one can only affirm Judaism as possibility. 74

This resonates with a statement Rav Kook also made: he would say "there is no such thing as holy and not holy, only holy and not yet holy." FR normalized the notion that one could be on the path to religion without embarrassment. 75

He made a virtue of the search where others make a virtue of either the completion of it (orthodoxy) or the rejection of it (secularism). 76

Rosenzweig was capable of many cheeky lines. Like his notion that we read the letter "R" in Biblical criticism not as a stand-in for redactor, but rather "rabbeinu" (our teacher). 77

Rosenzweig's clever, unorthodox orthodox view is, in a way, now influential amongst those rare scholars who are both Biblical critics and observant Jews. 78

I think FR offers a great path into the divinity of Torah to moderns by allowing one to affirm the humanness of the text without negating its divinity. 79

The scholar Avivah Zornberg follows this path in her reading of Deuteronomy, arguing that it describes Moses the man above all. To be a prophet is not to be inhuman. 80

You can get a soft polite version of this in Kant, in the idea that though we are apparently just physical things we are also noumenal, free. But the better comparison is to Nietzsche and Heidegger for whom our greatness is not our spirituality, but precisely our finitude. 81

Transcendence is not the opposite of immanence, but what opens out from it. 82

Or if you want another image, take Cynthia Ozick's reading of the shofar. The sound comes out the narrow end, not the wide one. We must write what we know and become who we are because if we try to be everything we end up in a no-man's land of abstraction. 83

So too, theology is best understood not as God's word to us, but as our word about or in response to God. 84

As mentioned, though, this is still a far cry from Mordechai Kaplan, for whom there can be no dialogue because God is just a synonym for the values of the collective. Hard pass. 85

Kaplan compared putting on tefillin to pledging allegiance to the flag. The reduction of religion to nationalist self-worship is in my view a sad thing. Rosenzweig avoids this, if just barely, because he maintains the reality of God, the silent aleph on the other side. 86

My most provocative claim is this: if you don't like Heidegger or Nietzsche, can you like Rosenzweig? What does Rosenzweig get right that they don't? Because a lot of the romantic tendencies found there you'll find in him, if with more God talk. Can the God-talk obviate much? 87

Jewish readers love to celebrate Rosenzweig, but the last thing FR wrote was a short piece basically saying Hermann Cohen had renounced his purist rationalism and come closer to Heidegger's position. 88

One way that people try to solve the conundrum that a hero of modern Jewish thought found commonality with a thinker who would go on to express sympathy to Hitler is by focusing on FR's emphasis on "speech-thinking"...89

Speech-thinking (Denk-sprache) is the idea that thought is 1) dialogical and 2) spoken. We can't think by ourselves, but need to think by speaking with others. This sentiment is well captured in a recent piece by @AgnesCallard bostonreview.net/philosophy-rel…
90

As far as Heidegger goes, this is a straw-man. Heidegger was renowned for his Socratic method. Arendt describes Heidegger's teaching as more dazzling than his writing. And in his later work, Heidegger makes similar arguments as Rosenzweig about language as a shared "path." 91

It might be better to say, as Eliot Wolfson and Marlene Zarader do, that Heidegger's uncanny affinity with the best of Jewish and mystical thought should serve to caution us against a certain triumphalist reading of our tradition. 92

For Wolfson and Michael Fagenblat, Heidegger is like Balaam, the anti-Moses; but the Torah and Talmud still affirm Balaam's power, his intimate proximity w/ Jewish tradition. 93

Rosenzweig was trying to do for Jews and Judaism what Heidegger was doing for Germans and Germany. And that is both fascinating and worthy of pause. Promoting a cultural renaissance that would neither be retvrn nor revolt, neither adaption nor antiquarianism. 94

FR's project was interrupted by the Holocaust, yet his writings on Jewish education are prescient. He understood the need to balance accessibility and enchantment; he understood that an intelligible Judaism would lose the things that make it special and necessary. 95

Rosenzweig was a philosopher who granted the importance of the non-philosophical, what in Hebrew is called "chok" (the unjustifiable, revealed law). 96

But he wasn't content to let religion just be mysterious, and to surrender reason to piety. 97

I see him as a model for many across the spectrum trying to live a conscientious life that is intellectually honest, but also intellectually honest enough to admit when intellectual honesty is not enough. 98

In the end, like with most greats, it's not Rosenzweig's propositions that most impact, but the problems he found and the way he described them. He knew the limits of systematic thought and the limits of unbridled individualism. 99

He knew that systematic thought would be possible only in the end, from the point of view of Archimedes. In the present, we must content ourselves to the life-giving light of the face. 100/100