"Die Bauleute -Über das Gesetz" ("The Builders - Regarding the Law") -Franz Rosenzweig- translated by Rebecca Rogowski

Franz Rosenzweig

• Born 25.12.1886 into a secular bourgeois jewish family
• 1905-1907 Study of medicine
• 1907-1912 Study od modern history and Philosophy
• 1912 Ph.D.
• Night of 07.07.1913 Discussion on religion “Leipziger Nachtgespräch” (Leipziker Night Dialogue" with Eugen Rosenstock. Considers conversion to Christanity. But he wished to enter Christianity as did it`s founders, as Jews, not as pagan. He wanted to go through Judaism to Christanity.
• 11.10.1913 Attends Yom Kippur services. Deeply moved he decides to stay Jewish.
• 1913-14 Jewish Studies in Berlin
• 1914-1918 Soilder 1.World War
• 1920 Head of the "Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus" ("free Jewish house of learning") in Frankfurt. The overall aim was to educate the Jews who had their spiritual and intellectual home outside Judaism, to reinterduce them with the metaphysical and religious background of the traditional faith.
• 1921 Publication first part of "Stern der Erlösung" ("Star of Redemption"). laid out according to the classical scheme God - World - Man. Jewish religious philosophical writing, but stands also between German Neukantinaism, the philosophy of life and the existential philosophy (whilst this term technically is ahistoric).
• Febuary of 1922 Diagnosed with lateral sclerosis with progressive paralysis
• Translation of poems by Judah HaLevi
• Summer 1923 Smicha by Leo Baeck
• 1923 Publication of "Die Bauleute"
• Spring 1925 Starts working on translation of TeNaK "Verdeutschung der Schrift" ("Germanisation of the Scriptures") with Martin Buber
• 10.12.1929 Death

Glossary
Abraham Geiger( 1810-1874), German-Jewish theologian, author, and the outstanding leader in the early development of Reform Judaism.
Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88) was a German rabbi and religious thinker. Hirsch was born in Hamburg where he received a general as well as a traditional Jewish education. Hirsch believed that the only way to preserve the Orthodoxy of his community was to obtain permission from the German authorities to establish a separatist organization. Seen as the founder of modern Orthodoxy.
Martin Buber (1878–1965) was a prolific author, scholar, literary translator, and political activist whose writings—mostly in German and Hebrew—ranged from Jewish mysticism to social philosophy, biblical studies, religious phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, education, politics, and art. Most famous among his philosophical writings is the short but powerful book I and Thou (1923) where our relation to others is considered as twofold. The I-it relation prevails between subjects and objects of thought and action; the I-Thou relation, on the other hand, obtains in encounters between subjects that exceed the range of the Cartesian subject-object relation. According to Buber, the mitzvah as law contradicts the spontaneous, immediate commandment of the moment and thus becomes obsolete.
Kantianism is the philosophy of Kant (1724-1804) and his followers. Kantianism sought to unite empiricist and rationalist philosophy. Kantianism seeks to determine what pure reason is capable of achieving for itself, answering the questions, "What can I know?" "What shall I do?" "What may I hope?" insofar as pure reason can provide the answer.
Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in Germany from roughly 1870 until the First World War. This movement drew inspiration from a diverse cast of philosophers who in the middle of the nineteenth century were calling for a return to Kant’s philosophy as an alternative to both speculative metaphysics and materialism.
Existentialism (1) Existence is always particular and individual(2) Existence is primarily the problem of existence (i.e., of its mode of being); it is, therefore, also the investigation of the meaning of Being. (3) That investigation is continually faced with diverse possibillities (4) Because those possibilities are cinstituded by the individual’s relationships with things and with other humans, existence is always a being-in-the-world—i.e., in a concrete and historically determinate situation that limits or conditions choice.

Questions

1. How does Rosenzweig say people should relate to Mitzvot?
2. How would you define "innere force" ?
3. Can you see how to implement the idea of "innere Kraft" ("inner power") in your own live?
4. Do you feel a strong connection to a specific Mitzva ?

Dear Friend,
To Martin Buber

"And all your children taught by the Lord, and great peace to your children!" (Isa. 54:13) - read not banajich: thy children, but bonajich: thy builders."
I was truly astonished whilst reading your speeches on Judaism, as they are now collected from a decade into a little volume, to what extent you have really been the forerunner and advocate of our generations, mine as well as those coming after me. [...]
For the transformation becomes quite real only when it has taken hold of the whole realm of teaching, [although it leaves out of consideration a very important aspect].
You know what my point is. [...] Finally, combined with the twin problem of teaching, it becomes the question: what shall we do? But while the twin problem (the teaching) has undergone a visible development, so that the answer comes here at the moment when the question is completely ripe, the question of the law still seems to be posed in 1919 hardly differently than in 1909. For this is how you describe the task of our Jewish learning, that nothing, absolutely nothing Jewish must be alien to it any more. There, those distinctions of essential and non-essential are no longer valid [...] If thus, to all appearances, the essential and the non-essential for such learning are so intermingled that before the general this too all inner distinctions disappear, [...] you now point to a new principle of selection, by means of which the infinite learning material that you spread out can again become a true teaching, a principle that is more trustworthy than all those that you have tried to establish, for it is not itself a part of the material; it is not a principle at all, but a force.

For this is what it means when you demand of the learner that he employs himself in learning, to add himself as a new link to the chain of tradition, and thus, not with his will, but with his ability, becomes the chooser. [...] True teaching begins only there, where the substance ceases to be substance, and is transformed into force, in the force, which now itself increases the substance, and be it by the most modest word, and thus only makes a truth out of that claimed infinity of the substance. The way to the teaching, at least the only one that may be pointed out to every inquirer with a good conscience and with the well-founded prospect that he will find it, leads through the knowable, but the Teaching itself is not knowable, it is always only a future thing, and the question of one who asks about it today is perhaps already a part of the answer that will be given to another tomorrow, and certainly the main word of the answer that will be given to him, the inquirer today. No, the teaching is not a knowable thing, it is only my and your and our knowledge. If you have thus redeemed the doctrine from the pompous poverty of some basic concepts, to which the 19th century [...] wanted to restrict it, and have thereby freed us from the already imminent danger that we had to believe our spiritual Jewishness to be dependent on the question of whether we were able to be followers of Kant or not, then it is all the more strange that, immediately after that liberating signpost to the new teaching, you try to answer the other side of the question "What shall we do?", the question of the law, you leave this law, and us with it, completely stuck in the fetters which the 19th century has also put around it, as well as around the doctrine. For what you recognize here as a legitimate representation of the law, in order to deal with it and to turn your back on it after a past and, as is to be expected, fruitless confrontation, and to refer yourself and us inquirers to the reverent, but practically indifferent and personally abstinent, knowledge of the law as the only task.
Is this the genuine Jewish law? Is not what you speak of - and I say it right away: speak true - rather only the law of the Western-Orthodoxy of the past century?
For here, too, the formulaic constrictions were not created only in the 19th century; like the formulas in which the liberalism of the Reformers tried to banish the Jewish spirit, the reasons for which Hirsch's "Yissroel man" is supposed to keep the law can also refer to a long line of descents; but only Hirsch and those who followed him seriously tried to build Jewish life on the narrow basis of these reasons. No, the nothing but/ only of the Orthodoxy must not make us shy away from the law, just as the nothing but/ only of liberalism, after you had taught us to see, could still disguise the teaching. Judaism embraces those nothing but / onlys, but not as a Nothing. The law cannot be dealt with simply with a yes or a no to the pseudo-historical theory of its origin or the pseudo-legalistic one of its obligatory force, as they were recorded by Hirsch's orthodoxy as the outline of its solid but narrow and in all its pomp unattractive edifice, how the teaching dismissed with a yes or a no to the pseudological theory of the unity of God or the pseudoethical one of charity, with which Geiger's liberalism painted the facade of the new business and residential house of emancipated Jewry, pseudo-historical, pseudo-legal, pseudological, pseudoethical: because a miracle is not history, a people is not a legal fact, blood testimony is not a mathematical example, and love is not social. But regarding law and teaching, the way leads us only if we know that we are still at its beginning and have to take every step ourselves. But what is the way here, with the law? [...] All this is now also true for the doing and the law. Only that the doable, cannot be known like the knowledge, but only be done. But the picture is the same, thus we have to dedicate ourselves first to everything that is doable. And the circle of this kind of doable is basically larger than the circle of duties of orthodoxy. For here, as it is the case with the teaching, there is no longer the rigid distinction of the essential and the non-essential. This separation led to the creation of a sharply separated Jewish district within the life, which was strictly separated from the district of the non-Jewish. [...]

Precisely that which Orthodoxy had fundamentally released, precisely that must be formed Jewishly. In the space which lay outside of that borderline, the minhag, the custom, and the ta'am, the sense, thus a positive one enters in place of the negative permitted. Where there was living Judaism, this has always been so; but if in former times this fact, at least in regard to the minhag, had been officially critical or mildly ironic, in future it will gain full principled seriousness. In principle, no district of life may be abandoned any more. Everywhere the custom (minhag) and the meaning (ta'am) must be given the same rank and the same inviolability as the law. In contrast to what was permitted, there was an essential forbidden thing, which in a certain way gave the commandment a negative character. The classical expression for the fulfillment of the duty, which says approximately: to get rid of one's duty, it has taken on a fatal meaning. Since the duty and thus the law became something that one wanted to get rid of. [...] Even the forbidden, by refraining from it, now becomes positive. One keeps the prohibitions of work on the Sabbath for the sake of the commandment to rest, one feels in abstaining from the forbidden food the joy of still being allowed to be a Jew with the everyday and all-human of bodily life, the omission itself becomes doing. With that, however, the borderline between the Jewish forbidden and the permitted Not-Jewish is broken and now flows into each other. There is no longer a coexistence of Jewish and Not-jewish doing [...] there as here grown freedom blossoms around us. [...] But again we have to realize that with this unifying expansion of the Jewish tubal nothing - really - is yet done. Everything that is tubal and to be done is not yet deed, everything that is territorial and to be territorial is not yet commandment. But a commandment, that immediately, at the moment it is heard, is translated into action, is what the law must become again. It must regain its modernity. [...] Here, too, the decisive thing happens only in the selection, which from the abundance of the doable willlessly makes the ability. This choice cannot be other than completely individual. Whether, therefore, much or little is done, indeed whether anything is done at all, is immaterial in relation to the one inescapable demand that only by virtue of power is it done. [...] The deed arises only at the border of the merely tubal, there where the voice of the commandment momentarily lets the spark jump over from I must to I can. To us that inner boundary line is blurred and an outer one must exist - for surely not every deed that finds no place in the law we know expands its limits, any more than any of our knowledge becomes doctrine; but we cannot know whether it will not: we do not know the limit and do not know how far the pegs of the tent of the Torah can be moved out and which of our deeds is destined to move them out. That they will be moved out, and by us, may be considered certain; for how could anything remain outside in the long run; then in that case the border would become what it must not become: rigid and known, like that inner border between forbidden and permitted, which was flooded to us; yes, all of a sudden it would have become such an inner border again and would have taken away from our doing its noblest inheritance: that we only need to be sons in order to become builders.