The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig

Author:Franz Rosenzweig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

The Kingdom

THE NEIGHBOR

The act, then, is directed toward the world. The world is that other pole toward which love of neighbor is striving. The idea that God creates already contains an allusion to something else, something which he creates; the idea that he reveals himself, the allusion to something else, something to which he reveals himself. So here too there is the allusion to a something which man loves. In the commandment, this something is designated as the neighbor. More precisely the word designates, in the Hebrew original as well as in Greek, the nearest neighbor precisely at the moment of love, the one who is nighest to me, at least at this moment, regardless of what he may have been before or will be afterward. Thus the neighbor is only a representative. He is not loved for his own sake, nor for his beautiful eyes, but only because he just happens to be standing there, because he happens to be nighest to me. Another could as easily stand in his place—precisely at this place nearest me. The neighbor is the other, the plesios of the Septuagint, the plesios allos of Homer. Thus the neighbor, is as stated, only locum tenens. Love goes out to whatever is nighest to it as to a representative, in the fleeting moment of its presentness, and thereby in truth to the all-inclusive concept of all men and all things which could ever assume this place of being its nighest neighbor. In the final analysis it goes out to everything, to the world, though for the present we will leave aside how it does so. Let us turn first, rather, to that other pole, the world.

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