History and Repetition: On Rosenzweig’s Vision of Jewish Temporality

• In Event: German-Jewish Thought & Social Science

Abstract

Franz Rosenzweig’s near-conversion experience of July 7, 1913, and his subsequent return to Judaism has long been dubbed as an archetypal story of the “discovery of Judaism” in modernity. The stakes of Rosenzweig’s transformative experience are still debated, yet it is fair to say that this night and the months that followed encouraged Rosenzweig to reconsider the significance of Judaism to his life, but also, and more generally, to human experience in the modern era. Rosenzweig’s response to this challenge partly materialized in The Star of Redemption (1921). In this monumental work, the Jewish people were assigned a special role in world redemption, alongside Christianity. They were given the task of anticipating redemption in the present. This role entailed a unique form of Jewish temporal existence: their relations to redemption demanded that they will reject historical life for eternal life.

This paper seeks to unpack Rosenzweig’s famous, but enigmatic, notion of “worldly unliveliness” and its profound suggestion of a uniquely Jewish temporality. My argument is that Jewish unliveliness, for Rosenzweig, was not a form of complete alienation from the world, but rather entailed an intensification of the relations of the Jewish people with time. I claim that this intense relationship could only be understood through careful analysis of Rosenzweig’s concept of repetition [Wiederholung] in The Star of Redemption. My argument focuses on the role of the cycles of the weeks and the years in the temporal orientation of the Jewish people, specifically on the function of repetition in the negation of history. To unwrap Rosenzweig’s radical vision of time in The Star of Redemption, the paper discusses Rosenzweig’s theory of repetition in the context of modern philosophical works on repetition. The paper borrows specifically from Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of time and eternity in his Repetition (1843). In my reading, Rosenzweig, who worked in the “neighborhood of the Kierkegaard revival,” shared with Kierkegaard an understanding of the place of repetition in the construction of life in the midst of time.

Author

• Gilad Sharvit, UC-Berkeley