Are we religious? I ask W. I'm never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that's already something. There's an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that's certain. But are we religious, I mean, really religious?
Wasn't it pathos which nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig?, we wonder. Wasn't it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one night in particular – June 7th, 1913 – which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.
He confronted the Nothing, he said. He'd come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn't what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed – when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him – Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.
Kneel and try to pray: that's what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naif or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig's crisis. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.
Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he re-converted back to Judaism. If he was to become Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.
But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one's relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you'll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig's account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It's all about pathos.
But there's pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig's despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the nothing might mean?
Hadn't our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn't we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naiveity or romanticism? We plunged into no crisis. We did not contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn't translate into an action.
Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W. We always fall short. But short of what? What idea could we have of faith, of the pathos of faith, as it streams infinitely far above our stupid heads?
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