This sentence is from Hermann Cohen, the eminent German philosopher who founded the neo-Kantian school of Marburg and of which Franz Rosenzweig was, to a certain extent, the spiritual heir.
It may seem curious, even amusing, but at the time when everyone is returning to school, back to work, the daily grind, the Jewish people are making their religious and spiritual return.
If we wanted to risk a formula that would sum up in itself the doctrinal whole of Judaism, we would say that the notion of eternity (hayye olam) must end up replacing the notion of the transience of historical development (hayye sha’a). Even when the praying Jew is called to the Torah on the Sabbath day and finishes reading or listening to the passage from the biblical pericope, he pays homage to God who implanted this eternal life in us (we-hayyé olam nata’ betokhénou).
From the beginning of this month of September, he is called upon to examine his conscience, to look back on the past year in order to judge himself and his actions. At the end of this examination of conscience, the believer comes face to face with himself. His most intimate being laid bare, he hopes for divine redemption. Rosenzweig even goes so far as to write that the objective of this day of fasting and confession is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on this earth.
In the section devoted to this day of Yom Kippur, which has become the feast of redemption, Rosenzweig writes this:
These dread days… are distinguished from all other feasts in that there, and only there, the Jew is on his knees. What he refused to the king of Persia, what no force in the world could extort from him, but also what he is not bound to render to his God on any day of the year, and in any act of his life, there he does it. And it is not in confessing one’s fault or in praying for one’s sins to be forgiven, to which this festive period is nevertheless primarily dedicated, but only by contemplating the immediate proximity of God, therefore in a state that transcends the earthly misery striking today…
Yom Kippur means propitiation and yom ha-kippurim, to use the original biblical expression, therefore means day of propitiations. That is to say, this day of fasting during which the people of Israel pray for the remission of the sins of the whole universe and not only for their own. He implores God to grant universal redemption, the salvation of all mankind, of all that bears a human face. He is inspired by the example of the patriarch Abraham who, unlike Noah at the time of the Flood, did not pray only for himself and his own, but extended his blessing to others, notably the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
On this day when Jewish spirituality culminates, God is supposed to grant mankind the remission of their sins. Compared to Rosh hashana, the austere Jewish New Year, it is a kind of court of appeal or cassation: who has not obtained his pardon at Yom Kippur, will no longer have a catch-up session. It’s a two-round election: if you miss your goal ten days before, Yom Kippur must save you, otherwise farewell!
Historically, the day of Yom Kippur in the year 1913 is of crucial importance since Jewish philosophy was on the verge of losing one of its best jewels: the young philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (died in 1929) who was not yet thirty years, decided after months of a devastating existential crisis to no longer carry out his intention to convert to Protestantism. However, a few weeks earlier, he had informed his confidant Eugène Rosenstock-Huessy, who had taken the plunge at the age of seventeen. Coming from a family of the Judeo-German bourgeoisie who were fairly assimilated but not converted, Franz was shaken by what was happening around him: his own cousins had converted, all the Jewish youth wandered, left to their own devices, in born of a truth or a faith that she no longer found in the ancestral religion.
And now the almost fortuitous participation in the Yom Kippur religious service in a miserable Polish oratory in Berlin gave the young man new reasons for hope. The religious fervor of these simple men who confessed their sins and poured out their souls before God got the better of his doubts. It was no longer the imposing decorum of the great liberal synagogue in Berlin where the organ and the singers of the opera reduced the participation of the faithful to the minimum portion…
Less than a year later, the First World War was going to destroy everything. Enlisted as a health auxiliary in the Balkans, Rosenzweig wrote his great work in the trenches of Macedonia The Star of Redemption where he divides reality into three parts God, the world, and man faced, in that order, with creation, revelation, and redemption. The austere festivals of New Year and Yom Kippur are called festivals of redemption since it is in their wake that humanity will finally be redeemed.
The liturgy of this day of prayers and contritions is a successful mixture of private petitions (for oneself and for one’s people) and intercessions in favor of the whole world. Prayers pray that no woman accidentally loses the fruit of her womb; they also ask God to “give grain to the sower and bread to the eater.” Finally, they beg God to spare all countries of the world the plagues of famine, war and epidemics.
At the height of the day, the ritual of the High Priest in the Holy of Holies is repeated: at least four times, the faithful prostrate themselves face down and only rise once the Great Name of the God of Israel is invoked.
During the afternoon we read the book of Jonah, this angry but naive prophet who had forgotten that the God he serves is above all a God of love and mercy, close to the human race, quick to forgive. and not to anger It is a magnificent plea in favor of divine mercy which replaces rigor. Nineveh will not be destroyed, its thousands of inhabitants will not be exterminated because all, the monarch at the head, have made an act of contrition and have repented. And their repentance was accepted.
One can ask the following question: but why Judaism which, unlike Christianity, does not believe in the original sin of Psalm 51, has centered all its religiosity around the confession of sins and the need to purify oneself? ? Isn’t there a sort of obsession with purity that would refer as a corollary to the sinful nature of man, the very one he refuses?
In fact, as Rosenzweig shows in the penultimate part of his star of redemption, the people of Israel do not live in History, they are not stuck in historical development, made up of wars, rivalries and tensions generated by States, but in eternity, in a kind of metahistory . By celebrating such festivals, this people scattered throughout the world, anticipates an eternity to which it aspires with all the fibers of its being. He prays for the messianic advent to finally take shape, for the world of creation to reach a state of post-redemption.
Born in 1951 in Agadir, father of a young daughter, Professor Hayoun is a specialist in medieval Jewish and Judeo-Arab philosophy and the revival of Judeo-German philosophy from Moses Mendelssohn to Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. His latest books are about his three authors.