Thoughts to Ponder on the Days of Awe

I am featuring the remarkable Franz Rosenzweig in this session of Coffee with the Sages.

Rosenzweig was not only one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the early 20^thcentury; he was also – extraordinarily – one who was especially interested in, and enamored of, Christianity.

In anticipation of the beginning of the High Holidays in a few days, I have extracted 18 gems from the Star of Redemption that reveal Rosenzweig’s brilliant thinking on these special days.

For Jews, these thoughts will be recognizable but also fresh, surprising, and inspiring. For Christians, they will shed light on differences between the two faiths, but, even more, unexpected and significant areas of similarity.

Make the coffee strong, put away distractions, focus, and enjoy!

 

1. ”What distinguishes the Days of Awe from all other festivals is that here and only here does the Jew kneel…He kneels only in beholding the immediate nearness of God, hence on an occasion which transcends the earthly needs of today.”

 

2. In the concluding moments of the everyday service, we are “bound up with the prayer of a future time, “when every knee shall bow before God…when the world will be perfected under the kingdom of the Almighty, and all the children of flesh will call upon his name…and accept the yoke of his kingdom.”

Yet, knowing we’re not yet that ‘single band to do God’s will with a whole heart,’ we anticipate “the moment of eternal redemption by seizing on it now, in the present.”

“What the congregation merely expresses in words in the course of the year, it here expresses in action: it prostrates itself before the King of Kings.”

 

3. ”Thus, the Days of Awe, New Year’s Day and the Day of Atonement, place the eternity of redemption into time.”

 

4. ”The horn blown on New Year’s Day at the peak of the festival stamps the day as ‘the day of judgment.’ The judgment usually thought of as at the end of time is here placed in the immediate present.”

“The year becomes representative of eternity… In the annual return of this judgment, eternity is stripped of every vestige of remoteness; it is actually there, within the grasp of every individual and holding every individual close in its strong grasp.”

 

5. ”There is no more waiting, no more hiding behind history…On these days, the individual in all his naked individuality stands immediately before God. Only his human sin is named in the moving recital of sins ‘which we have sinned,’ a recital which is far more than a recital. It shines into the most hidden corners of being…”

 

6. ”Just as the year, on these days, represents eternity, so Israel represents mankind. Israel is aware of praying ‘with the sinners.’ And…this means praying in the capacity of all of mankind, ‘with’ everyone. For everyone is a sinner.”

 

7. ”Though the soul is pure when God gives it to man, it is immediately snatched into the struggle between the two urges of this heart divided against itself. And though he may concentrate his will over and over, though he may renew his purpose and vow and begin the work of unifying and purifying his divided heart over and over, still at the boundary of two years which signifies eternity, all purposes become vain, and all consecration desecration; every vow toward God breaks down, and what God’s children undertook with assurance, is forgiven them now that they are no longer sure.”

 

8. ”For the individual, eternity is here shifted into time.”

“That moment directs the mind to…eternal life when God will sheathe the soul in His mantle.”

 

9. “Death is the ultimate, the boundary of creation. Creation cannot encompass death as such. Only revelation has the knowledge – and it is the primary knowledge of revelation – that love is as strong as death.”

 

10. “Revelation wakens something in creation that is as strong as death and sets it up against death and all of creation. The new creation of revelation is the soul, which is the unearthly in earthly life.”

 

11. On these Days of Awe there is a “transition from creation to revelation.”

“Man is utterly alone on the day of his death…and in the prayers of these days he is also alone.

“They too set him, lonely and naked, straight before the throne of God.”

 

12. ”In time to come, God will judge him solely by his own deeds and the thoughts of his own heart.”

 

13. ”On the Days of Awe, too, he confronts the eyes of his judge in utter loneliness, as if he were dead in the midst of life, a member of the community of man which, like himself, has placed itself beyond the grave in the very fullness of living.”

 

14. Irrespective of and beyond “all his vows, his self-consecration, and his good resolves,” he prays for “that pure humility which asks to be nothing but the erring child of Him and before Him, whom he implores to forgive him just as He forgave ‘all the congregation of the children of Israel, and the stranger that sojourned among them…’”

 

15. ”Now he is ready to confess, and to repeat the confession of his own sin in the sight of God.”

 

16. ”If he were oppressed by guilt against man, he would have to have it remitted in confessing it man to man. The Day of Atonement does not remit such guilt and has nothing to do with it.”

 

17. ”On this Day of Atonement, all sins are sins before God…And God lifts up His countenance to this united and lonely pleading of men…beyond the grave, of a community of souls, God who loves man both before and after he has sinned, God whom man, in his need, may challenge, asking why He has forsaken him, God who is ‘merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, who keeps His mercy unto the thousandth generation, who forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, and has mercy on him who returns.’

And so man to whom the divine countenance is lifted bursts out into exultant profession:  ‘The Lord is God:’ this God of love, He alone is God.”

 

18. ”Everything earthly lies so far behind the transport of eternity in this confession, that it is difficult to imagine that a way can lead back from here to the circuit of the year. That is why it is most significant that the structure of the spiritual year that the festivals of immediate redemption do not conclude the feast month of redemption which closes the annual cycle of Sabbaths.

For after them comes the Feast of Tabernacles, which is a feast of redemption founded on the base of an unredeemed era and of a people yet within the pale of history.”

In the Days of Awe, “the soul was alone with God.” “To neutralize this foretaste of eternity, the Feast of Booths reinstates the reality of time. Thus, the circuit of the year can recommence, for only within this circuit are we allowed to conjure eternity up into time.”