Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

A Reenactment, November 10, 2000

by Harold M. Schulweis

I read, posthumously, books on the philosophy of Judaism which credits me as one of the most influential Jewish theologians in contemporary Jewish life. That, in itself, is a wonder. It is a wonder that I am here in the synagogue -- any synagogue. For my story is a story of a Jew who was one small step away from the Christian baptismal font. I was born significantly on Christmas, December 25, 1886, in Cassel Germany. I was the only child of parents who typically were assimilated Jews of that time.

I was given a painfully superficial Jewish education: a Bar Mitzvah, attendance at High Holiday services, but everything Jewish was shallow and devoid of spiritual seriousness.

The Passover Seder was so raucous, and my uncles who attended the Seder scoffed at everything that was done, that my parents canceled the family Seder. Pesach was abolished. It was no great loss. I dreaded the sacrilegious character of the Seder.

My own background was not so unique to me. Franz Kafka was revolted by the farcical Judaism practiced by his nominally Orthodox father.   One of my friends, Gershom Scholem, who became the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, recalls that his father used to light his cigar from the Sabbath lights on the table and recite a mock blessing over tobacco.

As shallow and empty as was Judaism, so the secular world was sophisticated and profound. I was a student of art and philosophy, and deeply influenced by my teacher Friedrich Meineke.

Surrounding me were members of my family and friends, born Jews for whom the issue was "to return or to leave Judaism.” Two of my brilliant cousins were Hans and Rudolph Ehrenberg who did the honorable thing. They left Judaism. They converted to Christianity. I was taken by another remarkable mind, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a professor of Jurisprudence, sociology, and history. He made faith respectable and convinced me that I was missing something very important. For Rosenstock, it was faith that was based on offenbarungsglaube, faith in the reality of revelation. He saw in historicism faith in working out of history only the ruins of relativism. History is not the unfolding of being.  Man can be redeemed only through religion. Rosenstock himself converted to Protestant Christianity, and in the long days and nights of argument I was convinced that the only intellectually honest and spiritually meaningful way was to prepare for baptism at which Rosenstock would serve as my god father.

But I resolved that I would enter the church as a conscious Jew like Saul of Tarsus. I could turn Christian only as a Jew. That was the decent, honest thing to do. So, on October 11, 1913, I decided to go to Yom Kippur services in a small traditional synagogue in Berlin. I can never explain what happened to me, but I felt on Yom Kippur alone with God. I experienced a closeness to God more powerful than all of the arguments of philosophy and theology. I stood among Jews who were wearing kittel, shrouds as in the day of their death, and I heard prayers, songs, the prophet Isaiah's passion to loosen the bonds of the enslaved, the Avodah service, the falling on the face in prayer, the sound of the Shofar, Neilah and the infectious repetitious statement Adonai Hu Elohim recited seven times.

I left the synagogue as a briah chadashah, a new creation. Ask me why. What happened? I do not know. I only think of what the great mystic Meister Eckhardt once said: "Love has no why." But at that service, I sensed the seriousness of Judaism. I began to look at the prayer book, at the liturgical year, at festivals and fasts. I began to study Hebrew and literary sources; Bible, Talmud, rabbinic commentaries, medieval philosophy and poetry. I began to know Judaism "hymnically.” I had to live it. I had to practice it. Judaism was not a debate. It was a way of experiencing God.

I wrote to my cousin Rudolph, "It is true that to the Christian no one can come to the Father save through the Son. But the situation is different for me. I need no one to reach the Father. I am already with Him." I was offered a distinguished position in Berlin, a Jew in Berlin, a professor. But after the Yom Kippur experience I wrote to Professor Meineke, "In 1913, something happened to me for which collapse is the only fitting name. I know that the past I was pursuing was not for me. The study of history did not touch me. I had to descend into the vaults of my being where talents would not follow me." I was not interested any longer in being a professor. I am interested in answering questions which men ask, not questions asked by scholars. That kind of arid intellectualism is like a vampire that drains me of my humanity. Scholarship no longer holds the center of my attention. Cognition no longer appears as an end in itself. The book -- for what?

The philosophy of the time, especially that of the totalistic philosophy of German Hegelian idealism, belief in the geist of history. Geist lies at the heart of Hegel. Geist is spirit, the essence of an age. Geist is the gist of things. Geist is geyser -- the subterranean upsurging. Geist, as spirit explains all of reality (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) left me cold. For totalistic philosophy, omniscient and omnipotent, left out one thing: the individual. Here philosophy is deaf, dumb and blind to that which shatters my existential being. Philosophy has an answer for everything. It claims to have no fear of death. It proclaims that the body dies. The soul lives, and is part of the universal soul of the geist. The body is only singular - not universal.  The body is like a worm crawling in the folds of the naked earth. But the soul is united with the All and nothing dies in the All. Only the singular can die, and everything mortal is solitary. Who cares about the singular? So, philosophy smiles at death, for it is only the singular body that dies. But philosophy does not know the individual: the suffering, erring, lonely, doubting, despairing, hoping individual.

Philosophy is above the individual. It is concerned with a world of abstraction, of concepts and categories the whole, but it knocks me. It knows nothing of the roar of my soul: me! me! me!

What does philosophy care that the fear of death knows nothing about this so-called division into body and soul, that it bellows, “I, I, I!” I protest my selfhood against the inexorable who threatens me with extinction. I shake for here and philosophy with its vacant smile points to there — to a beyond. I want to remain; I want to live. Philosophy commends suicide, the obliteration of my individual self in the universal geist. Philosophy swallows up my self. Death is nothing. I protest in the name of "I" that has a first name and a last name. I am not swallowed in the whole, in the all.

I served in the German armed forces at the beginning of 1915, and I was assigned as an anti-aircraft gunner at the Balkan front. On army postal cards I sent my thoughts and my philosophy to my mother. That became the basis of my book, The Star of Redemption, which referred to the Magen David that symbolize three basic ideas. On the upper triangle — God, world and man. And on the lower triangle — creation, revelation and redemption. That became the schema of my book on the philosophy of Judaism, how creation, revelation and redemption connect world, man and God. The morning of creation; the noon of revelation; the evening of redemption. [creation prayer - p. 15, revelation prayer - p. 15, redemption prayer - p. 18]

I wanted to free myself from the old way of thinking, from the thinking which claimed to be timeless, eternal, metaphysical, and which I found to be one dimensional. For me such thinking was a monologue. I sought something else. Das neue denken. Call it sprach-denken -- speech thinking which is time-bound and best found in dialogue. Something happens in a dialogue that is a new way of understanding. When I address you and listen to your response I am surprised, I am moved sometimes to change, sometimes to experience something that I could not anticipate. That’s not true of monological thought.

Dialogical thought which will become so important in the writings of my close friend and colleague, Martin Buber, hints at the language of revelation. I have experienced it often. Alone in my study when I write, when I think by myself for myself it is one thing. But there are those moments when someone asks me a question and it completely changes my thinking. It is a revelation. [I have seen it in the interaction in the Bible study at VBS].

I have found much theology of modern men and women to be a monologue. It is a soliloquy - a thinking as if there was no other. I called it in one of my articles "atheistic theology.” And that theology is written by Jews and Christians alike. It is a theology without God, a revelation without God. It is redemption without God. Everything is reduced to the human. But you cannot reduce reality to natural understanding. You cannot reduce revelation to history. Revelation breaks into the world and transforms creation, revelation impinges upon history and give it direction. Only with revelation is there an above and below, a before and hereafter.

It was not the university that I wanted. It was to transmit what I have felt and learned in the Jewish community. I believed in education. I believed in Judaism. But Judaism has to be verified by which I mean it has to be made true, by which I mean it has to be lived, that it has to be practiced.

But how to deal with the Jewish community as it is. In one of my letters to Hermann Cohen I wrote of the need to establish an academy for the science of Judaism, an institution that would train teacher-scholars who would connect the classic texts of Judaism, its lore, its poetry, its philosophy, its mysticism with an alertness to the needs and challenges of contemporary Jewry.

This idea gave birth to a fries Judische lehrhaus, a free house of Jewish learning. I decided on Frankfort, because Frankfort was a bourgeois well-to-do city where I would fight for the soul of Jews.

I thought long and hard about it. What I wanted was not another place to study Jewish books. Books are not now the prime need of the day. What we need more than ever are human beings - Jewish human beings. I want teachers who come from different places: historians, artists, musicians, writers, not Jewish experts but Jewish sensitivities, Jewish desire, Jewish yearnings. I don’t want recipes or programs or platforms. I don’t want an institution which will make people religious or Orthodox. There is in western orthodoxy too great an excess on the law that turns our people away. Nor do I want to promote liberal Jewish theology or Zionism.

Who are we appealing to? What is the situation of the Jews in our times? Begin with the home they come from is no longer the hearth from which the bloodstream of all Jewish life is pumped into which it returns. The Jewish home has lost its dominating position in Jewish existence. Their life, their real life comes from outside.

The synagogue is also disconnected from life. Preaching is fine. One of my deepest influences was a great rabbi preacher teacher, Nehemiah Nobel. But he was a rarity. Preaching is not speaking. That is its great limitation. In preaching the partner is missing. And when the partner is missing there is no motivation or immediacy in the preaching. The preacher lacks a criterion for the volume of his sound. In this the preacher resembles the deaf, for he too hears no reply.

The old joke rhymes, "Ask me a question, somebody. I have an answer." The answer should flow from the question and not be prepared beforehand.

The synagogue preacher is a monologist. He is a ventriloquist. Isn’t that amazing how you can believe that the dummy speaks and asks and questions? But, it is really the preacher who speaks but doesn’t move his lips.

But still they come, and some of them will fill all of their house. Why do they come? Because Jewishness is alive in them. Otherwise they would not come.

I want the new teacher to come without a plan. I want him to come to listen. I want the teacher to hear and not to be a stuffed shirt, boring with a stuffed syllabus of his pedagogic plan. I want for there to be a "learning" together with Jews. The student is all important. They come from outside and they are secularized. It is important to recognize their secularization. Judaism has to be secularized as well. It has to be made worldly. I do not make fun of the secular Jew who is the socialist; and his convictions for socialism, even in its atheistic form, contributes more to the establishment of the kingdom of God than to the religious institutions. Let them come with their secularity and their socialism and let them be led to return to the sources of that conviction. Let the liberal theologian come and study the text. They can discover the Other which addresses them. Let the Zionists come and let them begin to understand, hopefully, that Zionism is not all in the land or in the space, that the Zionist is not a person in love with geography but that he also has to ask himself the purpose of it all, the purpose of the land, the purpose of the Zionist dream, the spirituality beneath the land.

I have attracted all kinds of people to teach classes: Martin Buber, Gershom Sholom, and those not that “Jewishly knowledgeable,” but interested — Eric Fromm and Ernst Simon, for example. I think it is impossible to have an intelligent doctor not be motivated to learn in order to teach; this lawyer who has not had such a great training in Judaism to apply his intelligence to master some aspect of Judaism so that he can teach.

We are facing a revolution in teaching. Jewish learning can no longer start from the Torah and lead into life. It is the other way around. It must start from life and lead into Torah. It must start from the periphery into the center.

In February 8, 1922,  I was troubled by nervous symptoms and I visited my friend, Professor Richard Koch. I’ve been noticing some strange symptoms in me. The first time my knees had given way during a pleasurable excitement. On occasions I felt giddy for no reason. I was able to go downstairs only very slowly. I was unable to swallow normally and often after eating I had to cough up food. I was afraid of falling. After extensive examination, his diagnosis was "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with progressive paralysis of the muscles and voice. The end was expected within a year."

In addition to the paresis of the legs, there is a slight aphasia, an impairment of the powers to use or comprehend words. I spare you the details, but all of this went on for a period of eight years. Something pleasant happened. Edith and I were at last to have a child. It made up for everything. I continued reading and writing. And while people will not understand it, dying was even more beautiful than living.

In December 1922, I lost my ability to write entirely. I maintained a little ability to speak, however indistinctly. But I have my wonderful wife by my side. For a long time, I dictated to my wife who wrote down my letters.

Getting me out of bed and dressing me took between 2 and 2 ½ hours. Eating took a great deal of time. I tried to read, and nurses were summoned to turn the pages by a clearing of my throat or a turning of my head. I lost the use of my hand, and I had to begin dictating to my wife. Even this oral dictation had to come to a stop because of the increasing paralysis of the organ of speech.

A special typewriter was bought to facilitate communication, manufactured by the General Electric Company. The construction of the machine was such that the person working it had only to move a simple rubber over a disk containing all the character until the point indicated the desired character. At first I could operate the machine by myself, but later on I had to point out the characters with my left hand. My arm and hand were supported in a sling hanging from a bar next to me. Eventually, my ability to indicate the characters lessened so they had to be figured out by guess work. My beloved Edith was the only person who could do this. But I did not allow my illness to darken my life. The words “pain and suffering” seem odd to me. I wrote to Mother that a condition into which one has slithered gradually and consequently got used to is not suffering but simply a condition — a condition that leaves room for joy and suffering like any other. It may appear “suffering” from the outside is actually only a sum of great difficulties that have to be overcome.

My burial took place on December 12 in the new cemetery of the Jewish community. I wanted no funeral orations, but I did ask my friend, Martin Buber, to read Psalm 73. Three friends were chosen to recite the Kaddish. These are some of the sentences I found in Psalm 73: "My mind was stripped of its reason, my feelings were numbed. I was a dolt without knowledge. I was brutish toward you.   Yet I was always with you. You held my right hand. You guided me by Your counsel and led me toward honor. Who else have I in heaven? And having You I want no one on earth. My body and mind fail; but God is the stay of my mind, my portion forever. As for me, nearness to God is good; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may recount all Your works."

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