But now you point to a new principle of selection, through which the vast subject matter of learning you unfurl can again become a teaching, a principle more trust-worthy than anyone has attempted to set up. You introduce the concept of inner power. For inner power is what you demand when you ask the person who learns to stake their whole being for the learning, to make themselves a link in the chain of tradition and thus become a chooser, not through will but through ability. We accept as teaching what enters us from out of the accumulated knowledge of the centuries in its apparent and, above all, in its real contradictions. We do not know in advance what is and is not Jewish teaching; when someone tries to tell us, we turn away in unbelief and anger. We discern in the story of Hillel and the heathen, quoted ad nauseam, the smiling mockery of the sage, and it is not to his first words that we adhere, but to his final word: Go and learn....Teaching begins where the subject matter ceases to be the subject matter and changes into inner power.... [Edited for gender neutrality]
Suggested Discussion Questions:
1. What is inner power?
2. How does education enable this inner power to grow?
3. According to Rosenzweig, what is the value of education?
Time Period: Modern (Spinoza through post-WWII)