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breaks wit h t he c lassic primac y of the (intellec tualist) Logos and foregrounds the
immediac y of c reation, enc ountered, rather than understood, more mythic than
rational. We esc ape mythic atemporality, Cohen urges, not through reason but
through revelation, whic h speaks to us, primordially, in a c ommand, to love God;
and, therefore, our fellow humans... Revelation c reates c ommunity, and c ommunity
creates the individual, c apable of dialogue wit h God. T hus t he birt h of the I–Thou
relat ionship, c ruc ial t o several philosophers of t he day, inc luding Buber.
T he st ar of David, signified in Rosenzweig’s t it le, is his emblem of t he dynamic
relat ions of c reat ion, revelat ion, and redemption that link God, man, and the
universe. Like Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig translated muc h of the Bible into German,
c ollaborating with Buber, who c ompleted the work on his death. He helped found
the Free Jewish House of Learning in Frankfurt and translat ed Halevi’s lit urgic al
poet ry. But , unlike Halevi, Rosenzweig saw Israel’s int imac y wit h God as a c ont ac t
with eternity that somehow draws Jews out of history, living redemption while the
world prepares for it in more mat erial ways. He t hus opposed Zionism, and,
perhaps as tellingly, told an inquirer who asked whether he prayed with t efillin,
“Not yet.”
Martin Buber (1878–1965) was raised in the home of his grandfather Solomon
Buber, a well-known sc holar of Midrash. He studied with Dilthey and Simmel,
became a youthful Zionist leader, and was drawn to the tales of the Hasidic Master
Nahman of Bratslav, whic h he adapted into German. His novels gave modern Jews
friendly ac c ess t o t he Hasidic world, and his Zionism proposed a Jewish–Arab
c ommunity in Palestine, where he settled in 1938. His I and Thou (1922)
foregrounds the relationality of human with human or of human with God. We
c onstitute both self and other in radic ally different ways when we use an it or
c onfront a thou. Authenticity, freedom, even genuine presentness depend on the I–
Thou relation. God is the eternal Thou, never made an it by spiritual fatigue, but
glimpsed through human enc ounters with others, and with art. When we speak to
God, not about Him, we encounter the living presence. Revelation is humanity’s
c ontinuing response to that presenc e, epitomized in Israel’s c ovenant with God.
Emil Fac kenheim is best known perhaps (although his c areer began with
st udies of Avic enna’s doc t rine of love and Hegel’s religious dimensions) for t he
p ro minenc e he gives the Holoc aust. His c onc lusions are not intellec tual but
exist ent ial. T heir c ore, like t he det erminat ion of t he prot agonist in Bernard
Malamud’s The Fixer, is a det erminat ion “not to give Hitler a posthumous victory” –
to find some mode of act ion or expression t hat will affirm Jewish vit alit y and
strengthen the c ommitment of Jews.
Emmanue l Levinas is a Midrashic thinker, a master of aspec ts, and thus a
phenomenologist, much admired by postmodernists, perhaps in part because he
shuns sustained argument and system with the same discomfort that post-
Holoc aust music ians may show for melody, harmony, or symmetry. But Levinas is
an avowedly ethic al and indeed a c onstruc tive thinker. In speaking of the c laims
made upon us by the fac e of the other, he speaks, in his own way, of the same
person whose c loak and millstone the Torah c ommands us not to take in pledge,
the stranger whom we are commanded to love and told that God loves, the same
thou that Buber and Rosenzweig find at the roots of our humanity and God’s
commanding word – although Levinas quarrels with Buber’s somewhat romantic ,
non-int ellec t ual c onst rual of t he I–Thou relation. In the dialec tic of rabbinic thought