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The Orientation of Past Time © Part 2

The Source of the Orientation

Franz Rosenweig believes revelation is an individual, not group phenomenon. It is not experienced through the physical senses; it is through orientation and cognizance of every created matter and being in existence from the Creator. Once an individual is willing to give deference to his irrational nature, he can experience God at a high level, unfettered by restraints of rationale.His faith supports and reinforces the meeting. Its foundation is in the knowing objectivity of the past, and it is manifested as experiential, subjective "orientation" of the present. This link, between the factual past and the believing present, is created through the certainty that the God man loves in truly god, and this certainty's source is in the soul: "For it is the soul and not the intellect that feels God."

 The origin of the feeling of certainty and realistic security is in the soul of man. The orientation of that of time past is rooted in the belief that its source is in the soul or heart of man. The experience that is in the soul of man is the focus and springboard to knowing God, acknowledging God and gaining nearness to God. But Rosenzweig says knowing God, and his intention is the bond with God, which is not an association with the infinite essence of God but rather an association with the image of God. "… also the higher world only knows what experience encounters" (Naliarayim 240).

Rosenzweig did not choose the path of moral understanding nor the path of conventional revelation in order to explain the meeting of man with his God. He chose a third path, that of belief orientation, whose entire source is in the soul of man. Rosenzweig tells us that each miracle of the meeting occurs from "a particular occurrence" (Star 133), from "personal credibility" (Star 134) by "the capacity for observation" (Star 134). Rosenzweig seeks to point to an internal source in the depths of man's heart which reveals to him the contents and framework of the meeting, which placed rationalism in the shade.

The soul which admits its being in love thereby attests most assuredly the 'being'of the lover.  Every acknowledgment of belief has but this one content: him whom I have recognized as the lover in experiencing my being loved - he 'is.' The God of my love is truly God… one's own experience of love must be more that an individual experience, that he whom the soul experiences in its love really lives, that he is not merely illusion and self-delusion of the beloved soul…The soul can roam the world with eyes open and without dreaming ...Now it knows: it need but stretch out its right hand in order to feel God's right hand coming to meet it. " (Star 213, 215)

We learned in Genesis that "God created man in His own image," and at the time of his creation, God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Gen 2:7) And each morning we say, "My Lord, the soul you gave me is pure You created it and you protect it within me."[1] Surely the soul is the focus of belief orientation. However, this focus does not seek to nullify understanding. Rosenzweig raises in the meeting two separate paths. One road philosophical theology chose for itself, in which the intellect is the nourishing factor. The philosophy of religion walked the second padi, revelation serving as its basis. These two paths, according to Rosenzweig, complement each other, one nourishing the other, and neither can exist independently. Bergson, for example, states that in addition to the intellect, an additional attribute is needed to understand reality.  He calls this additional characteristic "intuition" (Introduction, 59). And what is the intuition of Bergson if not an echo of 'the concealed eye' of

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (article 4), the prophetic sense, which he sees as the singular means to permit man to know his Creator.  Rosenzwcig joins intellectual history with the believing soul for a new orientation of the meeting.10 He does not want to point out the limitations of the intellect while emphasizing belief but seeks only to reveal this intellectual cargo in the vessel of the believing soul. He wants to live the past in the present and not to add another new dimension. The matter is similar to a burning ember and a fire. The ember is the fixed objective fact of the past and the blaze is the renewed vitality of the soul in the form of belief orientation. Without fire, there is no ember, and without the ember there is no fire. The belief orientation is in effect the informative response to the unconscious portion of the soul, the irrational part.11 This portion can nourish and satisfy only by irrational creations. And here man must leap the domains of the concrete past of rational experience and pass the intellectual border and uncover the way across this border. The ability to do tins is given him by the irrational part of the soul, religious belief.  At this bolder, the intellect concludes its task and, according to Rosenzweig, yields its place to religious faith - to orientation of that of time past. The border is the end of knowledge and the beginning of religion.  Man, whether rationalist or irrationalist, is a firm believer, but there are differences in the utterance of belief. Rosenzweig does not deny that the believer is also a rationalist in regard to historical appraisals in the world - he even accepts scientific and technical achievements and does not thrust them aside so long as they do not oppose his religious belief. But he does not stop with them, his soul needs more, it needs an irrational means to nourish its unconscious part. He finds these irrational means in revelation via his religious belief in his soul and in all that which derives from it, by obeying the Torah and its commandments and through prayer.

In his daily morning prayer, the religious Jew prays: "...give our hearts the knowledge to understand and to discern to hear, study and teach… " And he repeats it in the eighteen Benedictions: "Thou graciously endowest mankind with knowledge, and teachest reason unto mortal man. O may we be graciously endowed from thee, with knowledge, understanding, and discernment." It is thus clear that the religious believer wants his creator to understand the foundations of religious belief, he wants to believe with intelligence and understanding and not only obey mechanically the commandments of God. The assumption of believing man is as expressed in Psalms  --  "an ignorant man does not know, and a fool will not understand this" (92:7). Here is joined, then, understanding and belief of creation that Rosenzweig emphasizes in the looking-glass of the meeting. Rosenzweig does not leave man totally outside the domain of the world of understanding. He emphasizes further "that belief is anchored in history" (Star 134, Naharayim 207).  Rosenzweig broadens the experiential, historical horizons of the past beyond the rational domain and unites the two worlds together: "But the past only becomes visible to revelation when and as revelation shines into it with the light of the present" (Star 217).

The Reminder of Blaise Pascal: The Relationship between Consciousness and the Soul

Blaise Pascal, born in 1623 in Clermont, France, was a stimulating philosopher and mathematician. Students of Pascal in our times are divided in two streams - one religious and the other atheistic. The former deals with theological questions, such as the redemption of man, man's relationship with God, etc.  Members of this stream are the theologians Berdiaev (Russian), Buber (Jewish), Marcel (French), Franz Kafka and Rosenzweig. Pascal was numbered among the leading scientists of his time He died at the age of 39 on August 19, 1662. The sources he left us are the sketches he wrote or dictated in his last years.  These notes were published after his death under the title Pensées, and these are the principal basis for his being venerated.  Baruch Kurzweil wrote: "Pascal was the first existentialist" (92).

Blaise Pascal, one of the pioneering existentialist thinkers in Christian history, can help us understand the difference between the intellect and soul, or heart, of man. His influence was great, and Rosenzweig was among those influenced by his writings (L'Nochach HnMevucha 135).

A few days after Pascal's death, one of his servants saw something stuck into a bulge of Pascal's clothes. It was a small piece of parchment on which was written a text by Pascal as a reminder of the significant event in his life.  That text reveals to us the turning point in his life, and it begins as follows:

   In the Year of salvation 1654                                                                                                                                          

   On Monday, November 23, on the                                                                                                                                  Day of Clemence the Holy,                                                                                                                                                         About 10:30 in the evening until                                                                                                                                         About one-half hour after midnight                                                                                                                                   Fire!                                                                                                                                                                                           "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob"                                                                       Not of the philosophers and learned men.                                                                                                                      Certainty, certainty, feeling.  Happiness, peace.                                                                                                                  The God of salvation Christ                                                                                                                                                   Your God, your God. Ruth. (Toldot HaPhilosophia 192)

 

 He forgot the world and everything in it except for God.

We must consider the entire situation in which the religious event occurred to Pascal. He was one of the most famous and successful physicists and mathematicians of his time, who followed in the path of research of Galileo and Descartes.  What is the meaning of Pascal's turning against the God of the philosophers and to the God of the Bible?  The God of the Fathers is the living God; he is neither a philosophical principle nor an idea.  He is neither "the first cause" nor "absolute value" nor "moral requisite" nor "the highest essence." The God of the Fathers is our father in heaven, and we are his children, and we may look upon ourselves as his children.  He is the God who speaks to us; he is not the content or conclusion of some philosophical theory.  Rather, he is the God revealed to man, the eternal "you," and the relationship between man and God is that of "I" and "You," and thus man can also speak to God in the meeting, to pray to him as an outcome of the certainty of the meeting and even shout at him as an expression of the manifestation of the total acknowledgment.

We arc commanded "you will love the Almighty, your God." But man cannot love an abstract philosophical principle. At the major turning point in his life, Pascal found the way from the God of the philosophers to the God of the Fathers.

The function of a philosopher like Pascal is not to show the way from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the "pure" God of the philosophers; rather, His task is to show man the way from the God of the intellect to the God of the soul and the heart.  Pascal wrote: "The heart has its reasons which the mind knows not of." He also wrote: "the heart, and not the intellect, feels God. This, then, is the essence of belief. God is that which the heart, and not the intellect, feels" (HaSechcl UaRoeh 124). The two paths complement each other: "The intellect and the heart are like gates, through which truths enter our soul, but only few of them enter via the intellect, while they burst into it in large numbers via the daring desires of the will without thought lending its advice" (HaScchcl HaRoeh 49-50).

HakTav HaKabbala reinforces the conception of Rosenzweig:

For knowledge itself is not sufficient at all times, since the knowledge and intellect of man changes according to the circumstances, and in bad times his thought is not clear and he can easily come to doubt these verities, and belief alone is not superior, for in sectarian matters belief alone can not help. Belief assists knowledge, and knowledge supports belief, and each one needs the other. He will not flee from inquiring into the verity of his faith, and surely also, what is lacking in his knowledge and learning will suspend that which is lacking in his knowledge, and strengthen his belief.

Regarding these two requisite conditions, knowledge and faith, the rabbinical sages called them "truth and faith" in the blessing following the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, truth being the knowledge of the verity of the historical traditional texts to researchers of the heart, and faith the knowledge of the verity in the present by the acceptance of our fathers which is in our hands. Rosenzweig states:

Only in this backward glance does the past prove to be the base and prediction of the present experience, domiciled in the I… That which sounded in advance out of that all-embracing, lonely, monologic 'let us' of God's at the creation of man reaches its fulfillment in the I and Thou of the imperative of revelation. (Star 217)

This "let us make" of Rosenzweig is wholly human and its entire source is in the heart and soul of religious man.

Summery

Franz Rosenweig believes revelation is an individual, not group phenomenon. It is not experienced through the physical senses; it is through orientation and cognizance of every created matter and being in existence from the Creator. Once an individual is willing to give deference to his irrational nature, he can experience God at a high level, unfettered by restraints of rationale.His faith supports and reinforces the meeting. Its foundation is in the knowing objectivity of the past, and it is manifested as experiential, subjective "orientation" of the present. This link, between the factual past and the believing present, is created through the certainty that the God man loves in truly god, and this certainty's source is in the soul: "For it is the soul and not the intellect that feels God."

LIEST OF SOURCE MAERIAL ABBREVIATIONS

Glatzer, Nahum N. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Jewish Publ. Soc. of Amer., 1953.

His Life

Pascal, Blaise. HaSechel HaRoeh [The Discerning Mind]. Trans. Yacov Kopelvitz. Jerusalem: Magnes P, 1972.

 

HaSechel HaRoeh

Bergson, Henri Louis. An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Liberal Arts P, 1950.

Introduction

Kurzweil, Baruch. L'Nochach haMevucha haRuchanit shel Dorenu [Facing the Spiritual Perplexity of our Time]. Ed. Moshe Shwarcz. Ramat-Gan, Isr: B. Kurzweil's Memorial Foundation, 1976.

 

L'Nochach Ha'Mevucha

Naharayim

Rosenzweig, Franz. Naharayim [Selected Writings of Franz Rosenzweig]. Trans. Yehoshua Amir. Jerusalem: Bialik Inst., 1977.

Psikta Rabbati

P'sikta Rabbati. New York: Mandelbaum P. 1954.

Post Scriptum

Kierkegaard, Stren. Post-Scriptum [Final Scientifique aux Miettes Philosophiques]. Trans. Paul Petit. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.

Sechzig Hymnen

Rosenzweig, Franz. Sechzig Hymnen und Gedichte Des Jehuda Halevi [Sixty Hymns and Poems of Jehuda Halevi].  Deutsch, mit einem Nachwort und mit Anmerkungen [German, with an Epilogue and with Remarks], Konstanz: Oscar Wohrle Verlag, 1924.

Star

Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. 2d ed. Trans. William W. Hallo. New York: U of Notre Dame P, 1985.

The Guide

Moshe ben Maimon. Morei Nevuchim [The Guide to the Perplexed]. Ed. Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Tibon. Jerusalem: S. Monzon, 1938.

Zohar

Zohar, 2d ed. Jerusalem: Mossad H'Rav Kook, 1956.

     

[1] See below in this chapter; "The Remainder of Blaise Pascal: The Relationship between Consciousness and the Soul."

2 Schelling, Philosophy of the Revelation, Pt. B, ol. 14, 121; Bergman, Toldot HaPhilosophia, vol. 3.

3 "It is entire from the beginning: man became man when he first spoke" (Star 147).

4 See Yalkut Shimoni to Isaiah, chapter 43, verse 12

5 See also Chapter 3, Section II. Article 2, in which Ms. Freund discusses Die Wilklichkeiten SchÖpfung.  Offenbarung and Erl Ösung, 96.  See also Chapter 3. Article 3 which discusses "Das System and Seine Relativierung durch die Offenbarung," 145.

6 Menachem Ha'Meiri (1249?-1310?), in his introduction to Berachot.

7 Jerusalem Talmud, Traetate Sanhedrin. 18A

8Compare the words of Rabbi Eliyahu ben-Moshe d'Vidash (deceased 1518) in "The Beginning of Wisdom," in the chapter entitled "Negotiating with Belief": "The one who is faithful is as one who obeyed all the 613 commandments as is learned in tractate Makot… Habakkuk came and taught about truth… as it is said, they just shall live by his faith" (Babylonian Talmud, Makot 24A); see also Schechter, 283 ff. and other references made by Moore. 2:84

9 Compare Shomer Imunim [Keeping Faithful] by Rabbi Yosef Ireges (1655-1730), p. 39: "the most splendid form."

10 From the daily morning prayers, the blessings of the soul. Prayer Book Rinat Yisrael. 16.

11 See above Chapter Two: "The Irrational as a Source of Self-Persuasion and Influence".

12 See above Chapter Two: "The Irrational as a Source of Self-Persuasion and Influence".

 

 

 

About the Author

Dr. Zadok Krouz, was born in Jerusalem. In his youth, he studied in various `yeshivoth` in Israel. He enlisted in the army, where he served in a combat engineering unit. His academic career began at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, where he obtained a master`s degree, `cum laude` . He also studied Philosophy in association with Columbia University of New-York, where he obtained a doctorate. He studied psychology and the philosophy of education at Tel-Aviv University, where he also completed a teachers` training program and Gestalt training program. He is certified by the Certification Committee for Teachers to teach Talmud. He organized a workshop in Philosophy and Jewish Heritage in the United States. Dr. Krouz served as a lecturer at New York`s Yeshiva University and at the Teachers` Training College . He has published books, various articles, a collection of writings on language and literature, religious existential meditation, philosophical doctrine of the human spirit and produced a number of self-hypnosis audio cassettes for improving the quality of life. His studies, work and rich experience as a healer have helped him to create a new and unique type of therapy, applying philosophical theories to hypnotherapy, humanistic therapy and logotherapy.

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