BRAITERMAN_Z - Into Life - Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death

"Into Life"??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of DeathAuthor(s): Zachary BraitermanSource: AJS Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), pp. 203-221Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486906 .Accessed: 14/02/2014 06:36

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"INTO LIFE"??! FRANZ ROSENZWEIG

AND THE FIGURE OF DEATH

by ZACHARY BRAITERMAN

At the end of his short treatise Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, Franz Rosenzweig predicated the restoration of what he called healthy consciousness upon the recognition of death's sovereignty. "[One] must direct [one's] life to no other goal but death," he wrote. "A healthy man has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear." Rosenzweig juxtaposed the Grim Reaper with weary life. The healthy understanding knows that death will dash life to the ground. Yet it takes comfort from knowing that death will accept it with open arms. In the end, eloquent life falls silent as the eternally taciturn one speaks, "Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother."' In his notes to the English translation, Nahum Glatzer remarks with shock, "This concluding chapter--on death-stands in a striking contrast to the final passage of The Star of Redemption." As if to offset our text's more mordant tone, Glatzer then quotes verbatim the seemingly life-affirming paragraphs that conclude Rosenzweig's magnum opus.2 Glatzer is not the only commentator to emphasize the importance of life in Rosenzweig's system. Indeed, Else-Rahel Freund notes that The Star of Redemption begins with the phrase "from death" and concludes with the words "into life." In her

1. Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (New York: Noonday Press, 1953), p. 91.

2. Ibid., pp. 101-102.

AJS Review 23/2 (1998): 203-221 203


204 ZACHARY BRAITERMAN

view, "from death into life" constitutes the entire meaning of Rosenzweig's existential analytic.3

In this paper I will critically reassess the importance of love, life, revelation, speech, and social ethics in Rosenzweig's thought. Alongside these motifs, I will argue that his writings exhibit a prominent morbid strain. Against Glatzer, I will show why death's revelation to life at the end of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy does not contradict Rosenzweig's conclusion in The Star of Redemption. Against Freund, I will argue that the figure of death appears both at the beginning and at the end of Rosenzweig's magnum opus. According to our view, Rosenzweig never turned his eye from the figure of death. Again and again, Rosenzweig draws his readers' attention to death and to the eternal life that waits beyond its gate. In order to make this argument stick, we will have to make sense of the lyric refrains, "love is stronger than death" and "into life." To widen our perspective, we will look at material drawn from Rosenzweig's letters and diaries and from the Yehuda Halevy commentary. By the end of this essay we will have a less than luminous picture of Rosenzweig. Trying to bracket biographical considerations, the side of Rosenzweig we present shows a quietistic religious thinker preoccupied with death and dying as loci of enlightenment.4

I

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Colors, sounds, and things-like Van Gogh's stars-are the focal point and radiance of being."' Leaving Van Gogh's stars and the question of Being aside, our own analysis of Rosenzweig's Star pays close attention to the aesthetic markers of light, silence, and spectacular vision. Rosenzweig consistently combines these

3. Else-Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig' Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of "The Star of Redemption" (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 3-5.

4. See St6phane Moses, "Franz Rosenzweig in Perspective: Reflections on His Last Diaries," in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), pp. 191-193. My analysis coincides with that of Moses in all but one respect. Moses also characterizes Rosenzweig as a quietist for whom love gives only spiritual life and mystical vision. However, he does so on the basis of Rosenzweig's latest, and unpublished, diary entries. Moses concedes that realism and terrestrial life constitute the ultimate word in The Star of Redemption. In contrast, we make no such concession.

5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 15.


FRANZ ROSENZWEIG AND THE FIGURE OF DEATH 205

figures to depict death and eternal life-even when he does not mention our theme explicitly. We have already seen, in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, Rosenzweig associating life with eloquence and death with silence. The same associations occur in The Star of Redemption. Revelation and redemption render terrestrial life vocal through the aural phenomena of dialogue and choral song--speech thinking. In vivid contrast, death and eternal life represent silent figures. As we are about to see, the appearance of silence is a cryptic signal with which to discuss death and eternal life. Light also evokes these mordant themes, an apocalyptic figure representing the visual correlate of spectral silence. We see the combined images of silence and light at work in one such example taken from the chapter on redemption. Describing God's final word, Rosenzweig writes, "God himself must speak the ultimate word which may no longer be a word. For it must be the end and no longer anticipation, while any word would still be anticipation of the next word.... In [God's] They, the We and the Ye sink back into one single blinding light. Each and every name vanishes."6

Love Conquers Death?

Most interpretations of The Star of Redemption allow the reader to trace a line leading from (1) an analysis of death and the fear of death to (2) an analysis of speech, love, social structure, and terrestrial life. Part I of the Star opens with philosophy's attempt to anesthetize the human person against the fear of death by directing human consciousness toward a comprehensive "All" that would negate the reality of death. However, philosophy fails to cognize reality under the isolated rubrics of God, world, or man. No single idea can subsume the All, now shattered into three coeval fragments. In Part II, Rosenzweig sets himself the task of reconstituting this broken All through the course (Bahn) of creation, revelation, and redemption. Creation leaves us with a world of manifold objects crowned by death. That is, death consummates the object by fixing its identity once and for all under the semantic-temporal sign of the perfect tense. At the same time, death points beyond Creation. Rosenzweig writes, "the created death of the creature portends the revelation of a life which points us beyond the creaturely level."'7

6. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), p. 238.

7. Ibid., p. 155.



By revelation, Rosenzw'eig means nothing more and nothing less than love. In the analysis that follows, the reader discovers that love is as strong as death. The created world presented a world of manifold but dead detail. Revelation now comes to animate the individual figure (in this case the individual beloved soul) through an experience of sheer presence, through the love between an I and a Thou.8 Finally, the love between an isolated I and Thou assumes comprehensive reality through the medium of redemption. This refers to the creation of a worldly community united under the image of the choral song. Redemption unites the manifold detail of epic creation with the lyrical immediacy of love. In what Rosenzweig calls the aesthetic of redemption, we have arrived at an animated, interconnected nexus that now subsumes the All.9

The author of The Star of Redemption powerfully affirms life and love. But what an odd statement we have just cited in the last paragraph: "the created death of the creature portends the revelation of a life which points us beyond the creaturely." In this passage, Rosenzweig does not refer to "death." He refers to "created death." This suggests the existence of two types of death and dying. Indeed, we have a 1922 diary entry in which Rosenzweig suggests that Revelation "overcomes created death and sets up the right of redeeming death. Whoever loves no longer believes in death and only in death."'" Combining our two texts yields the following interpretation. When Rosenzweig states in the Star that "love is as strong as death," we take him to mean that love conquers created death but not redeeming death. Love allows the human person to overcome the created death that threatens the healthy common understanding with paralysis. It thereby frees the beloved soul to greet the fraternal figure of redeeming death, i.e., the death that catapults the soul into eternal life.

In sum, the course charted by Rosenzweig does not proceed from death to love and everyday life. Rather, it jolts back and forth from (1) the created

8. Ibid., p. 193. 9. Ibid., pp. 242-245. 10. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch and sein Werk, Gesammelte Schriften, I Briefe und

Tagebucher, 2 Bande, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinemann, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 778 (emphasis added). See the discussion of this letter in Moses, "Franz Rosenzweig in Perspective," pp. 191-192. See also Werner Marx, "Die Bestimmung des Todes im 'Stern der Erlosung' " in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), ed. Wolfdietrich Schmeid-Kowarzik, Internationaler Kongress (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg, 1988), pp. 612-615.



death of creaturely existence to (2) love and terrestrial life and back again to (3) redeeming death and eternal life. As practically all of Rosenzweig's commentators agree, love (revelation) constitutes the pivotal point in the system. It is caught as a symbol of life in the midst of death. And it mirrors eternal life within the calendrical and ritual structures of terrestrial life. As such, the eternity described throughout much of The Star of Redemption's third part is a static, cyclical repetition in which the flow of time stands still within the linear parameter of historical time." However, the light and love that reveal eternity in this-time mirror a faraway, supernatural source from beyond the other side of life.

Immortality

Freund points to the following passage to buttress her argument that the move from death to everyday life constitutes the meaning of Rosenzweig's thought. Describing the final swell of the communal choral song of redemption, Rosenzweig proclaims, "The We are eternal: Death plunges into the Nought in the face of this triumphal shout of eternity. Life becomes immortal in redemption's eternal hymn of praise."'2 Indeed, death lies vanquished, but not in the sense intended by Freund. Freund's reading suggests that the choral form renders everyday life immortal. Others have pointed to the messianic character of Rosenzweig's thought. However, in our view, everyday life and this-worldly messianism do not exhaust his understanding of redemption. Rosenzweig insists that "the kingdom may build its growth on the growth of life. But in addition it is dependent on something else, something which first assures life of the immortality which life seeks for itself.""'

With this otherworldly supplement in mind, Rosenzweig's conclusion to the redemption chapter does not surprise us. Immediately after the passage quoted by Freund, Rosenzweig points to the rabbinic sage Rav's depiction of the pious in the world-to-come. Rosenzweig comments, "For only thus did the Rabbis dare to describe the eternal bliss of the world to come, which differs from that ever renewed peace which the solitary soul found in divine love: the pious sit, with crowns on their heads, and behold the radiance of the

11. Stephane Mosbs, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 170-172, 223.

12. Rosenzweig, Star ofRedemption, p. 253. 13. Ibid., p. 225 (emphasis added).



manifest deity."'4 So ends the chapter on redemption. This image of eternal life in the world-to-come combines the trope of light with the promise of spectacular vision. Clearly, the veiled allusion to the luminous appearance of a deity become manifest (offenbargewordene Gottheit) does not belong to this-world. To borrow the language of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, this passage suggests that life and love propel the beloved soul toward the goal of death and the radiant vision described by the rabbis. As we are now about to see, the holiday structure sketched in the third part of the Star constitutes the mirror with which the beloved soul prepares itself. Rosenzweig's recourse to silence and light in Part III of the Star will recall the description of eloquent life falling silent before death in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. It will also recall the allusion to the light perceived by the righteous in the world-to-come.

Back into Life? (The Silent Ritual Cycle)

At the end of the redemption chapter (i.e., the end of the second part of the Star), the beloved soul has leaped from the gradual growth of the terrestrial Kingdom to a radiant vision of eternal life. Rosenzweig must now direct the beloved soul back into life. In the introduction to the third part of the Star, he warns his readers against fanatics who jump ahead to the final end-goal. By leaping ahead toward the goal, the beloved soul threatens to lose itself in the void. To counter this danger, Rosenzweig has the Kingdom grow in earthly, social time. Love must proceed gradually, loving only the most proximate person (der Nichste) and then the next one without concerning itself for the next-after (der Uberndchste).'5 In a 1920 letter to Rudolf Hallo, Rosenzweig reiterates this point with the very same language drawn from his magnum opus. He tells Hallo that we should only look at the next-moment (der Ndchste) and forget the fact that we can die at the next-after-moment (der Uberndchste). Death stands before the human person, forcing him or her into life (ins Leben).'6 Turning our attention back to the Star we see how the ritual cycles of Judaism and Christianity and the historical trajectory of Christianity contribute to the gradual growth of the Kingdom from one moment to the

14. Ibid., p. 253. 15. Ibid., pp. 270-271. 16. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk, I, p. 662.



next. As Robert Gibbs notes, the third part of the Star represents a turning back to terrestrial life and social structures."

However, the intertwined trace of death and eternal life haunts the ritual cycle under the tropes of silence, light, and spectacular visions of a face. In the introduction to Part III, Rosenzweig asserts that the silent common gesture (not the common word) constitutes the main component of liturgy. Ritual signifiers are visual, not audible. According to Rosenzweig, "They are the light, by which we see light. They are the silent anticipation of a world gleaming in the silence of the future."'8 Elsewhere in the introduction to Part III, Rosenzweig calls liturgy the reflector that focuses the light of eternity into the small cycle of the year. It prepares the soul for the ultimate silence of perfect union.19 This light is said to shine like a face, "like an eye which is eloquent without the lips having to move. Unlike the muteness of the protocosmos, which had no words yet, here we have a silence which no longer has any need of the word. It is the silence of consummate understanding. One glance says everything here."20

An eerie silence runs throughout Rosenzweig's description of the hol- idays. The Sabbath sermon is supposed to beget unanimous silence from its listeners.21 A few pages later, Rosenzweig contrasts the Sabbath with the work week's chatter and noise.22 The biblical pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot are supposedly marked by the common festival meal-an eating that prepares the soul for the ultimate experience of common silence.23 However, the festivals prove unable to quiet the human soul. For this effect, Rosenzweig turns to wordless gesture (symbolized by Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur). Having once met at the festival table, people greet each other silently. Echoing what the literary critic Russell Berman calls "fascist modernism," Rosenzweig has utopia represented by the army, the

17. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Cf. Moses, System and Revelation, and "Franz Rosenzweig in Perspective"; Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 70-71.

18. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, p. 295. 19. Ibid., pp. 308-309. 20. Ibid., p. 295. 21. Ibid., p. 310. 22. Ibid., p. 314. 23. Ibid., pp. 315-316.



common spirit, the knowledge of belonging to the whole, the flag---situations in which everyone knows everyone and greets each other wordlessly.24

So far, Rosenzweig has only left veiled allusions to light, perfect union, and ultimate silence. The discussion of death becomes explicit as the silent ritual cycle turns to the spiritual apex of Yom Kippur. On this day, the beloved soul wears a white shroud. In Rosenzweig's interpretation, the shroud traditionally worn by Jewish men on Passover and at their weddings challenges death. On these occasions, the shroud signifies eating, drinking, and joy. But on Yom Kippur, the shroud represents the attire of death. With the beloved soul standing alone before God on the Day of Judgment, the holiday cycle has reached its crescendo. At the border of life and death, this masculinized Jewish soul perceives God's face. In Rosenzweig's description, "On the Days of Awe ... he confronts the eyes of his judge in utter loneliness, as if he were dead in the midst of life ... beyond the grave in the very fullness of living.... God lifts up his countenance to this united and lonely pleading of men in their shrouds. . . . And so man to whom the divine countenance is lifted bursts out into the exultant profession: the 'Lord is God': this God of love, he alone is God!""25 Yom Kippur represents the jubilant soul's last confident cry. The final word, we know from the chapter on redemption, belongs to God's silent majesty.

From the spectacular vision of Yom Kippur, we return to the yearly cycle and the mundane insecurity that the holiday of Sukkot liturgically evokes. Of course we know that the rabbis in the Talmud make this biblical harvest festival commemorate the Israelites' wandering in the desert. Rosenzweig takes up this theme to argue that Sukkot reinstates the reality of time in order to neutralize Yom Kippur's foretaste of eternity.26 For all that Rosenzweig loves life, there is something anticlimactic in his description of Sukkot. Everyday life does not represent the highpoint of Rosenzweig's calendar or the apex of his system. To use a term drawn from classical music, we should rather say that Sukkot follows Yom Kippur as the diminuendo follows the crescendo! From the apex of Yom Kippur at the border of death, the ritual cycle has forced the beloved soul back into life, back into the decrescendo of daily terrestrial existence.

24. Ibid., pp. 321-322. 25. Ibid., p. 327. 26. Ibid., p. 328.



Vision of the Face at the Gate of Death

Stephane Moses and Richard Cohen remind us that Rosenzweig writes one last crescendo into the score of The Star ofRedemption. At the end of the text and the course that it plots, the reader confronts a surprising sight.27 The beloved soul had briefly perceived God's countenance at the apex of Yom Kippur. Now, at the end of the Star the soul encounters a detailed vision of the divine face. In this last vision, the soul sees the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth of God. According to Rosenzweig, the life of this face is gathered in the mouth. He writes, "The mouth is consummator and fulfiller of all expression of which the countenance is capable, both in speech as, at last, in the silence behind which speech retreats: in the kiss." Having described God's face, Rosenzweig concludes, "But for Moses, who in his lifetime was privileged only to see the land of his desire, not to enter it, God sealed this completed life with a kiss of his mouth."28 The face, of course, represents the configuration of absolute truth. God, world, person, creation, revelation, and redemption form into the unitary pattern that speculative cognition had failed to grasp. Not the lyric refrain "into life," but this vision of the face constitutes the apex of the Star

In our view, this climactic vision occurs at the gates of death. First, we note that the coupling of death and God's face had marked the text's previous highpoints. We saw allusive references to the divine presence and the divine countenance at the conclusion of the redemption chapter, where Rosenzweig described the reward of the righteous in the world-to-come. A divine countenance appeared again at the apex of Yom Kippur. Our second reason for associating the appearance of the face with death is textual. Rosenzweig concludes his depiction of the face with a reference to God kissing Moses on the mouth.29 At the end of the midrashic text Deuteronomy Rabbah, the rabbis picture Moses resisting the Angel of Death. Since Moses refuses to yield to death, God must come and personally draw out Moses' last breath. By citing Deuteronomy Rabbah, Rosenzweig subtly links the spectacular vision of absolute truth with death's advent. We find a further warrant for associating this appearance with death in our third aesthetic marker: light. We have already seen Rosenzweig associate light with the

27. See Moses, System and Revelation, pp. 284-286; Cohen, Elevations, pp. 241-267. 28. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, p. 423. 29. Ibid.



reward of the righteous in the world-to-come. Once again, now at the very end of the Star, we return to this figure. Rosenzweig describes the gate leading out of the mysterious, miraculous light-filled sanctuary in which no man can remain alive.30

Into Life?

From this climactic vision at the border of life and death, Rosenzweig leads the soul back into life. Miraculously, the vision vouchsafed here is none other than the one perceived in the midst of life: to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. On a more personal note, Rosenzweig explains to Buber in a 1925 letter that "into life" came to mean married life with Edith Hahn and work at the Free Jewish Lehrhaus.31 This touching letter (along with the last words of The Star of Redemption) accords perfectly with the views of Freund and Glatzer. "Into life" means everyday life.

However, just because these are the last words of the Star does not mean that "life" represents the highest good in Rosenzweig's system. We do not forget Rosenzweig directing life to no other goal than death at the end of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. Combining our two texts, we take "into life" to mean into life directed toward death. It means coming to good terms with death and overcoming the fear of it that would otherwise paralyze the healthy understanding. In our view, "into life" represents a diminuendo! In the same way that the gray realia symbolized by Sukkot follow the spiritual apex of Yom Kippur, "into life" follows the climactic vision of God's face like a decrescendo. According to our reading, death, light, silence, and a spectacular vision of the truth represent the highpoint and highest good in Rosenzweig's thought. Indeed, in a 1923 letter, an ailing Rosenzweig reassures his mother that he could never commit suicide. A brutal pull toward life and an unbounded ability to enjoy preclude that option. However, he goes on to say that his life for him is but the second-highest good. That it is not for him the highest good he really feels only in the tranquility with which he looks forward to its end.32

30. Ibid., p. 424. 31. Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk, I, p. 1062. 32. Ibid., pp. 921-922.



The letter just cited is admittedly late. One could reasonably dismiss its overall significance by arguing that it reflects the sentiments of a mortally sick man. We could then cite letters that predate Rosenzweig's illness that support Glatzer's and Freund's readings. We have already cited a 1920 letter in which Rosenzweig instructs Rudolf Hallo not to worry that we might die at the next-after-moment. However, the Letters and Diaries show Rosenzweig's morbidity predating his disease. In a 1920 letter, his cousin Walter Raeburn confides that he has always recoiled from Rosenzweig in horror. Raeburn recounts having laughed at his morbid speculations in the face of happy life.33 Note Rosenzweig's response. With perhaps a trace of irony, he denies being melancholy and alien from life. Rosenzweig then counters that Raeburn has no right to privilege life over morbid speculation. Raeburn's own hatred for speculation was itself too speculative. Rosenzweig therefore counsels Raeburn to fear neither Rosenzweig himself nor his own talents, going on to suggest that our talents are not our fault.34 As we are now about to see, Rosenzweig's letters offer further proof of his speculative talents. More than once, we will find Rosenzweig describing death in terms of his own dark joy, in terms of tranquility and beauty. These letters, diary entries, and personal accounts bolster our own suspicion that Rosenzweig's theories about life, love, and eternal life might themselves be morbid speculations.

Precocious Reflections

The first references to death in the Letters and Diaries take the form of playful jokes. In one 1907 diary entry, Rosenzweig considers the philosophical possibility of denying death. Responding to a hypothetically posed question, "What do you think about death?", Rosenzweig curtly notes, "That it is a bad symptom to think anything about it." He goes on to remark how strange it is that he has absolutely no relation to the topic. Clearly joking, the young Rosenzweig proceeds to offer a pseudo-Kantian argument to support the notion of immortality. Qua physiological phenomenon, the human person does not die, because he or she is already dead. Qua noumenon, the human person does not die, because he or she has never lived in time.35 I do not want

33. Ibid., p. 684. 34. Ibid., pp. 685-686. 35. Ibid., p. 74.



to dwell on a diary entry written by a precocious wit. At the same time, we note the irony that these reflections follow the disavowal of any relation to the subject of death. Best not to think about death, but Rosenzweig does so nonetheless.

The laughing spirit with which the young Rosenzweig considers our topic is not isolated to this one diary entry. We find a perfect example in Hermann Badt's 1908 account of Rosenzweig's morning ablutions. Coming to visit late in the morning, Badt finds Rosenzweig still in bed. Badt then proceeds to tease Rosenzweig about the length of time he takes preparing himself. Badt records Rosenzweig's response: a half-serious, half-jesting lecture about the moment of daily awakening from nocturnal death being the greatest and most holy part of the day. In Rosenzweig's eyes, one could never dwell too long on this daily renewal. He describes as truly happy he who not only consciously experiences this daily reawakening but remains conscious even at the moment of death, stepping from this world to the beyond.36

Perhaps we begin to understand why Raeburn recoiled from Rosenzweig. At the same time, Badt's more sympathetic account provides a fascinating window onto Rosenzweig's spiritual biography. This early link between ritual and death anticipates the more mature reflections found in The Star of Redemption. In the Star ritual life reflects the light of eternal life into the narrow prism of temporal life. It helps the soul direct its journey toward the goal of death. In Badt's account, ritual practice heightens the soul's consciousness of life's daily renewal. It prepares the soul for the ultimate step. In this early source, ritual and death coalesce in the light-hearted jokes of an indolent student.

Quietism

Rosenzweig maintained an active interest in death as he matured. In a 1917 letter to his cousin Hans Ehrenberg, he notes that even animists and pagans believe in the soul's immortality. In his eyes, corporeal resurrection constitutes the religious conceptualization of death par excellence. Rosenzweig continues to talk about Christian, Jewish, and Germanic eschatology throughout the remainder of the letter.37 Scholarly preoccupations do not, however, exhaust Rosenzweig's mature interest in death. In a 1917 letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg,

36. Ibid., p. 85. 37. Ibid., p. 358.



Rosenzweig (now a soldier on the Balkan front) informs his cousin that he has no presentiments regarding his personal destiny and maintains a blind certainty regarding the importance of his future activities. Either he will die in battle, in which case God does not need him. This will spare him work and worry. Or, he will survive, which would mean that God needs him to resume his duties.38 Years later, the mortally stricken Rosenzweig rebukes Hans for pitying him. Dying people are not sentimental, and he would not exchange places with anyone.39

That Rosenzweig accepts the possibility that he might not survive the war or that he later comes to accept his disease does not make him a quietist. Both letters lack the expression of joy that we find in the following letter, dated May 27, 1922. In this letter, Rosenzweig responds to his cousin and confidante Gertrud Oppenheim's regret at not being able to be with him during these troubled times. Rosenzweig tries to console Oppenheim. He reassures her that one can only accompany a dying person so far, just as one can accompany a passenger only as far as the railway station. Then the whistle blows and the train disappears. Those left behind feel only sorrow. However, the person actually taking leave forms a different impression. In addition to the shared sorrow, he feels a "dark joy" awaiting that which is to come.40

Glatzer renders "dark joy" (dunkle Freude) as "obscure anticipation"--a translation that does no justice to the eeriness of Rosenzweig's metaphor.41 In our view, this peculiar translation recapitulates Glatzer's unwillingness to grasp the mordant conclusion of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. The joy with which Rosenzweig anticipates the soul's departure betrays a deep quietistic strain. Earlier in this essay, we saw the diminuendo of "into life" following the ecstatic vision of the face in The Star of Redemption. This letter only confirms our reading. Rosenzweig does not face the inevitability of dying with sober poise. Rather he contemplates his own demise with the highly charged fervor of a deeply affected religious soul.

38. Ibid., p. 376. 39. Ibid., pp. 847-848. 40. Ibid., p. 788. 41. Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books,

1953), p. 115.



The Beauty of Death

Perhaps Rosenzweig accepts death and moves toward it with a dark joy because he finds it beautiful. We have already seen the aesthetic charge with which Rosenzweig describes death in The Star of Redemption. Death means silence, light, and spectacular vision--not moldering bodies. A 1911 source finds Rosenzweig adopting a similarly contemplative pose toward old age. Working on his dissertation in Berlin, he writes to his maternal grandfather Amschel Alsberg on his seventy-fifth birthday. With tremendous fondness, he calls his grandfather a living document of the nineteenth century and the age of Bismarck. Rosenzweig then playfully rebukes his grandfather, who (like "all old people") would rather complain about old age rather than speak well of it. Rosenzweig offers a different stance. He claims actually to look forward to old age as an opportunity to experience a new relationship to things. To Rosenzweig, old age means a consummate and detached attitude according to which one can claim that "all this really doesn't concern me." On this basis, Rosenzweig won't sympathize with elderly people who complain about old age.42

We have already seen the passion, the dark joy, with which Rosenzweig anticipates the end of life. In this letter we see old age (the proximity of death) forming part of a contemplative and aesthetic distance from terrestrial life. It is as if Rosenzweig might one day enjoy the act of dying even more than life itself. We find Rosenzweig reflecting upon a similar liminality that he had experienced during the war. Although Rosenzweig came to tire of the war, one cannot escape the impression that he spent much of his military service rather pleasantly. The letters from the front show him reading, preparing articles, lecturing the officer corps. They show a wartime tourist charmed by the Jewish communities of Uskub in Macedonia and of Warsaw. Rosenzweig alludes to similar pleasures in a 1922 letter to Oppenheim. The mortally stricken Rosenzweig describes his daily routine, filled with lectures and reading. He admits that this sounds comical. During the war, he had sometimes felt the same way, but not frequently. Now he perceives this to be simply true. According to the mortally ill sage, dying is more beautiful than living.43

42. Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk, I, pp. 121-122. 43. Ibid., pp. 785-786.



Death and Life

We conclude our analysis of the Letters and Diaries with a letter that shows Rosenzweig loving life and death. Before we begin to look at this letter, we want to note that it predates the disease that was to make the encounter with death and dying immediately pressing. In this 1918 letter, Rosenzweig attempts to console his mother on the death of her husband, his father. He reminds her how during the war she wrote him how her life would cease if something were to happen to him. In contrast, Rosenzweig can think of no present or future loss that could alienate him from life. While every loss makes us more familiar with our own death, no loss can bring us closer to it. No loss can expel us from the "house of life." In the face of death, Rosenzweig stubbornly upholds his I and the unfathomable and surprising tasks that each day newly brings. Every loss, by familiarizing one with death, makes one more prepared for life. An interesting letter, it evokes Rosenzweig's love of life and extraordinary sense of self. However, Rosenzweig continues, "The less I fear death, indeed the more I love it, the more freely I can live. Happiness and life are two different things, and it's no wonder that men finally came to ascribe bliss to the dead alone. In any event, it is not the portion of the living."44 In our view, this strange condolence letter shows Rosenzweig loving death like the brother identified at the end of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. Written in 1918, this letter predates the biographical accident of his disease-just as Walter Raeburn had suggested.

III

It will not surprise us to find similar reflections in the Yehuda Halevy translation and commentary. Written after Understanding the Sick and the Healthy and before the Bible translation, Rosenzweig's Halevy commentary represents one of the great literary products of twentieth-century Jewish thought. Rather than present a scattered miscellany, he organized the Halevy poems and his own "notes" around a masterfully arranged theological analysis.45 We find in Rosenzweig's commentaries the same philosophical

44. Translated by Nahum Glatzer in Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought, p. 67 (emphasis added).

45. For a similar opinion, see Barbara Ellen Galli, "Placing the Halevi Book, Rosen- zweig, and the Star," in Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and



acuity and heady lyricism that attract readers to the Star: the attention to language, the dialogic play of revelation, passionate descriptions of the love binding God and human souls, the turn toward community. At the same time, the Halevy commentary reveals the same morbid strain: the preoccupation with death and dying, the notion that the soul is bound to death within life, and the picture of the soul's joyful movement toward that death.

"God"

Rosenzweig organizes the poems and commentaries into four separate chapters. In the first chapter (entitled "God"), he has the poet take up the themes of revelation, the knowledge of God, and religious praise. Qualifying the choral shout described in the Star, Rosenzweig recognizes the moral danger posed by praising God. He knows that too many hallelujahs threaten to drown out the realities of evil and individual suffering. No one who wants to forget these has the right to praise God.46 Suffering, however, performs a cathartic function. God must shake the world until it collapses into a confusion of body and soul. In place of a proud spiritual order the soul finds religious confidence amidst a chaos of humiliation.47 Rosenzweig ends the chapter reflecting on the certainty of divine help. He describes the restrained joy that we are not gone, but live. Rosenzweig leaves his readers with two kinds of certainty. The first reflects the easy certainty belonging to one to whom help has been given. The deeper certainty belongs to those who have reached such deep despair that the memory of past help has choked. When help has become unbelievable, it can only come from the farthest source.48

So ends the chapter on God. The revelation of divine presence, the certainty in divine help paradoxically rests on the experience of suffering, dread, and despair. Rosenzweig's faith (in the cathartic power of suffering to transform human consciousness and reveal the presence of God) does not represent a unique trust in modem Jewish thought. The same rhetoric marks the work of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel. They too predicate

Translators, ed. Barbara Ellen Galli (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), p. 289.

46. Ibid., pp. 202-204. 47. Ibid., p. 208. 48. Ibid., pp. 211-212.



divine encounter on the shock evoked by horror.49 What sets Rosenzweig apart from his fellow "existentialists" is the excessive morbidity that characterizes his thinking. Buber and Heschel never seem to share the same preoccupation with death and the world-to-come that we find in the next chapter of the Halevy commentary.

"Soul"

In our text's second chapter (entitled "Soul"), Rosenzweig charts the soul's movement from despair to triumph. As promised, he does not buy this confidence by turning his readers' attention away from death. Once again, we find life and death intimately entangled. Rosenzweig insists that Judaism couples a sensual, this-worldly understanding of good with otherworldly anticipations. He goes on to describe the poet apprehending life in the midst of death and longing for worldly, sensual reward. According to Rosenzweig, Halevy understood the full equivalence of sensual and spiritual reward, of worldly and otherworldly salvation. This blending of both worlds, however, finds its boundary at the point of death. While eternity may here and there break into every earthly moment, Rosenzweig insists that only the clasp of eternity allows the soul to grasp life as a real, present, perfected whole."5

Rosenzweig ends the chapter on the soul with the same confidence that we saw in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. Death does not frighten the soul which awaits its call home. Rosenzweig describes a floating away of immediate musical power as the poet introduces the motif of death into a poem dedicated to life. The calm certainty of life in death allows the refrain of life to rise more and more exuberantly. And finally, the call "into life" with which the soul greets earthly life allows it to enter the "community of souls." The poet has turned from the today and here to the there and always."5 In the next poem, Rosenzweig describes the poet glancing out of temporal life into the life of eternity on the day of death as the soul surveys both worlds.52 Finally, in the chapter's concluding note, Rosenzweig summarizes all the

49. See Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post- Holocaust Jewish Thought, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 3.

50. Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi, pp. 219-223. 51. Ibid., pp. 231-233. 52. Ibid., p. 233.



songs of the soul: the longing for a vision of God, the certainty of death, the heavenly origin of the soul and its desire to go home.53

"Zion"

The last poems of the Yehuda Halevy book (in the chapter entitled "Zion") recapitulate the poet's leaving Spain, his sorrow, anticipation, and ultimate confidence. Rosenzweig takes this to mean the poet's overcoming lamentation and longing. Again, we find the familiar pattern of doleful yearning breaking into delight. In the God chapter, Rosenzweig had argued that only those who dare not forget suffering and death are allowed to praise. Now, Rosenzweig evokes this very forgetting in terms of bright, manly consciousness and clear, inspired vision. The greatness that will crown Zion at the end of days overwhelms the memory of the people's suffering. And so the poet forgets his lament in order to rejoice. This joy points beyond messianic trust. Rosenzweig concludes, imagining the poet carrying this jubilant song to his very death.54 This is the final, crowning image of the 1927 Yehuda Halevy commentary. Like Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, this text also ends on a note of "dark joy."

IV

The foregoing discussion has left us with what is perhaps an unfamiliar picture of Rosenzweig. We do not call Rosenzweig a quietist because he accepts the finality of death. One can soberly share this view without being "morbid." Rosenzweig's quietism shows itself in the intensity with which he directs his readers' consciousness toward death, in the jubilant confidence with which he describes its spiritual significance, and in the beautiful figure he makes of it. I do not want to ignore the readings of Rosenzweig presented by recent scholars like Gibbs, Cohen, and Galli. Rosenzweig's dramatization of life and love, his speech thinking, and social ethics remain lasting legacies. However, Rosenzweig's writings reveal a radiant view of death that strikes a discordant note in a post-Holocaust world. Unlike Deuteronomy Rabbah's Moses, Rosenzweig does not turn away from the Angel of Death in disgust or

53. Ibid., pp. 234-235. 54. Ibid., pp. 285-6.



beat it back with a stick. In our view, Glatzer was right to have been shocked by the conclusion of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. Rosenzweig seems to love death a little too much.

I would not want to conclude this essay without mentioning the refrain with which Rosenzweig ends the Star Clearly, Rosenzweig moves the beloved soul from the gates of death back "into life." But does Rosenzweig turn its back on death? Does he turn our attention away from it? We have already answered this question, but without the following comparison. Readers of Walter Benjamin will all recognize Paul Klee's angel flying into historical time with its face pointed toward the ruined past. Klee's sad angel flies backwards toward the terminus of history. Rosenzweig suggests the reverse movement. The beloved soul has jumped ahead and reached the endpoint of human life and thought. It does not want to die. It wants to live. With nowhere left to go but through the luminous gate, it steps back into life. But the beloved soul does not (as it were) turn away from death and fly face forward back into life. Instead, the soul backs back into life, its face pointed with a dark joy toward spectacular light.

Syracuse University Syracuse, N.Y.


Article Contentsp. 203p. 204p. 205p. 206p. 207p. 208p. 209p. 210p. 211p. 212p. 213p. 214p. 215p. 216p. 217p. 218p. 219p. 220p. 221

Issue Table of ContentsAJS Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), pp. i-iv+163-362+1-27Front Matter [pp. i-356]Must the Patriarch Know 'Uqtzin? The Nasi as Scholar in Babylonian Aggada [pp. 163-189]The First Jews from Aleppo in Manchester: New Documentary Evidence [pp. 191-202]"Into Life"??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death [pp. 203-221]Review EssaysReview: untitled [pp. 223-234]Review: untitled [pp. 235-244]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 245-247]Review: untitled [pp. 247-250]Review: untitled [pp. 250-253]Review: untitled [pp. 253-255]Review: untitled [pp. 256-258]Review: untitled [pp. 258-263]Review: untitled [pp. 264-266]Review: untitled [pp. 266-270]Review: untitled [pp. 270-273]Review: untitled [pp. 273-275]Review: untitled [pp. 275-277]Review: untitled [pp. 277-279]Review: untitled [pp. 279-281]Review: untitled [pp. 282-284]Review: untitled [pp. 284-286]Review: untitled [pp. 286-289]Review: untitled [pp. 289-292]Review: untitled [pp. 292-300]Review: untitled [pp. 300-307]Review: untitled [pp. 307-315]Review: untitled [pp. 315-318]Review: untitled [pp. 318-321]Review: untitled [pp. 321-324]Review: untitled [pp. 324-330]Review: untitled [pp. 330-332]Review: untitled [pp. 332-335]Review: untitled [pp. 335-337]Review: untitled [pp. 337-340]Review: untitled [pp. 340-343]Review: untitled [pp. 343-346]

Collected Studies [pp. 347-355]Books Received [pp. 357-362] : , [pp. 1-27]

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