February 16th 1919: a still young man, 32, recently released from the army concludes his book with the lines 'Into Life'. Into Life: the composition of The Star of Redemption, he will say later that year, was only an 'episode' in his life; it is 'only a book', after all; he did not 'attach any undue importance to it'. 'The book is no goal, not even a provisional one'. If Luther had died on the 30th October 1517, his Epistle to the Romans would have been a scholarly work; but on the 31st, he nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, witnessing in life what existed only in theory. How could the validity of The Star of Redemption be shown but in the day-to-day life of its author?
Even so, Rosenzweig writes to Oppenheim:
I must be grateful to fate. It isn't given to many to see their boldest childhood dream realised at 32: to have a book, a real timeless work (or what we mortals call timeless), finished, behind me. The rest of my life is now really a kind of magnificent gift ...
A gift! But to whom? To Rosenzweig, certainly, but also to those around him to whom he can speak, and to whom he could listen. The tasks of the everyday should be accepted with reverence. The Star of Redemption is finished, and so is Rosenzweig's career as a writer; as he writes in another letter:
You know how important speaking has become to me, since, through the writing of The Star of Redemption I cut myself off from further literary work; speaking was only the productiveness still open to me.
Rosenzweig wants now to confront human beings, to speak, to listen. Married in March 1920, he is appointed head of the Free House of Jewish Studies in August of the same year. By the time Hegel and the State is published in 1920, several years after it was written, Rosenzweig had abandoned scholarship except in the service of adult education, whose focus at the Free House is the small discussion group.
The Star of Redemption is published in 1921. In the same year, Rosenzweig writes Understanding the Sick and the Healthy at a publisher's request, but withholds it from publication. It summarises and simplifies many of the ideas of his magnum opus, being based on the lectures he gave at the Free House. In its pages, you will find what he thinks of as specifically Jewish thinking, which emphasises the concrete, the spoken word and dialogue, and the experience of the time of dialogue, with its give and take, its rhythm ...
In truth, of course, this is the topic that invalidates his treatises. What matters is to speak, to act through speech, not to write. Isn't this what Rosenzweig learnt all those years ago in conversation with his friend Rosenstock, a Jewish convert to Christianity?
On the night of July 7th 1913, he writes, 'I was immediately disarmed by Rosenstock's simple confession of faith'. Asked what he would do when all answers failed - when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him - Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray. Kneel and try to pray: these simple words come from a scholar, a thinker, not a romantic.
For Rosenstock, what mattered was that truth revealed in the relationship with God and one's fellow human beings. The Biblical 'word', the logos, is different from the monologue of philosophy. Dialogue - the give and take of words - is everything.
In a letter to Nahum Glatzer, whose prefaces and essays I borrow from here, the ailing Rosenzweig, a few months from death, wrote that The Star of Redemption 'grew out of an ardent longing' - a longing to stand before God and to live in his faith. Does one stand before God in dialogue? In the exchange of speech?
This is why the 'parerga and paralipomena' Rosenzweig produces are, to him, of no great importance. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy will not be published: the patient attacked by paralysis its author describes has been attacked by philosophy. He's laid out, sick ... but Rosenzweig is alive and in living dialogue with his pupils at the Free House. Wasn't Kafka supposed to have been taught by him?
But in 1922, there appear those first symptoms of progressive paralysis which will lead to Rosenzweig's early death at 43, in 1929. By December 1922, he can no longer write; by Spring 1923, he loses his ability to speak. Mercifully, the paralysis stops short of his vital organs; though he cannot move, he lives and is even able to communicate, to 'dictate' using eye movements and a letter board.
The speaker is unable to speak. Yet he writes - a volumous correspondence, translations and essays; he translates a large part of the Bible with Buber. He listens; he receives visitors. His paralysis is the opposite of the paralysis of philosophy. He's been released into life - freed - his book behind him. His book has been burnt up by life.
From September 1925, this from a poem he sent to Buber in celebration of the completion of their translation of Genesis:
I have learned/ That every beginning is an end./ Quit of the task of writing, I wrote, 'Into Life' -/ After scarcely two years/ The hand ready for work grew lame,/ The tongue ready for speech stood still,/ So only writing was left me.
Only writing. But he wrote with Buber; they collaborated - and they did so in translating the first book, the 'Word of the beginning', the poem continues. A writing in dialogue? A writing-speech? Reading, or trying to read The Star of Redemption, I want always to read the shorter texts Glatzer collects in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, or at least to read The Star in their direction.
Because it is only there, read in the context of his letters (substitutes for what he could have said, if he'd but had a voice) that the book becomes important in its unimportance, seeming to negate itself, to catch fire, its pages burning as you read them. Only then that the book's 'Into Life' falls into the heart of the book, life setting it on fire and sacrificing it to itself.