Dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down in to silence. But we will bless LORD from this time forth and for evermore. Haleluia
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Ps. 1215:17
After man gives his love to God, he can give love to his fellow-men. Rosenzweig describes this in the third tract. This love given to others redeems the world, and that become the purpose of man.
Eternal man – the universal religious experience
Man's purpose is to perpetuate his acquired love, since its externalization no longer grows in the "I" and "Thou," but longs to be founded in the presence of all the world. Love forever exists between two people; it knows only of the "I" and "Thou," and not of the street, nor is it displayed to "the eyes of everything that lives" (Star 234). According to the Sanctification of God's name portion of the Sabbath additional service: "[He will save us and redeem us a second time] and in His mercy let us hear a second time, in the presence of all the living" (Rinat Yisrael 268). The sobs of the beloved penetrate beyond love, to a future beyond its present revelation. It is insufficient, maintains Rosenzweig, "that the beloved lover calls his bride by the name of sister in the flickering twilight of illusion. The name ought to be the truth. It should be heard in the bright light of 'the street,' not whispered into the beloved's ear in the dusk of the intimate duo-solitude, but in the eyes of the multitude..." (Star 234). Past love, then, does not provide God's truth in the eyes of the multitude; that love is not eternal.
Man's purpose is manifested in the questioning cry: "O that you were like a brother to me! (Star 234) , and not in the pronouncement "she is his… he is mine" (Star 234), nor even in the call, "My God, my God" (Star 215), in the individual's prayer. In the bothersome question, "O that you were like a brother to me," the soul seeks its purpose in the world. The soul fears that the response will not come from the lover the soul trusts. The soul expresses its yearning for an eternal love that can never spring from the everlasting presentness of sensation in the meeting between man and God.
The soul desires its object, pleading "with the lover to sunder the heavens of his everlasting presentness which defies her yearning for love eternal, and to descend to her, so that she might set herself like an eternal seal upon his ever-beating heart and like a tightly fitting ring about his never-resting arm" (Star 234). Rosenzweig hints at matrimony not being love. "Matrimony is the external fulfillment which love reaches out after from her internal blissfulness in a stupor of unquenchable longing – Oh that you were my brother..." (Star 234). Notwithstanding the cry "O that you were like a brother to me," there is no answer from the lover's mouth.
In the love of the I and Thou, the dark portents of the impersonal communal life of the natural kinship community had been beautifully fulfilled; but here the soul aspires beyond love to the realm of brotherliness, the bond of the supernatural community, wholly personal in its experience yet wholly worldly in its existence. This realm can no longer be founded for her by the love of the lover from which she had previously always awaited the cue for her answer. If this longing is to be fulfilled, then the beloved soul must cross the magic circle of belovedness, forget the lover, and itself open its mouth, not for answer but for her own word. For in the world, being loved does not count, "and the beloved must know itself, as it were, thrown out on its own resources" (Star 235).
The concept of eternity, man's object and purpose, is of special importance in the philosophy of Rosenzweig. Can it be that "eternity is actually there, within the grasp of every individual and holding every individual close in its strong grasp…"? (Star 346). Can some thing which has an end, like man in respect of his being man, grasp that which has no end? Can the realm of time comprehend the concept of eternity, can the relative discern the absolute? The part does not understand the whole. Where the intellect does not govern, faith seizes its place, since what we do not understand, we must of necessity believe: "..[for] there is something in the rational that is irrational, something which is not encompassed in the concept of truth… something of the rational which is beyond the rational (beyond in the logical sense)…" (Naharayim 208).
Indeed, religious faith comes to perfect the intellect. The rational explanation destroys the strength of belief. Rosenzweig's religious belief in eternity does not require the explanation of the essence of eternity; on the contrary, the rational explanation has a negative influence, as was shown above in Chapter Three (pp. 163-198). All the other reasons which are proffered to explain eternity, in particular reasons based on the intellect (the rational), are nullified by the irrational reason relied upon by Rosenzweig.1
© כל הזכויות שמורות למחבר: ד"ר צדוק קרויז Dr. Zadok Krouz
