Leo Baeck's summary - second installment

Wow!!!!!

I have just finished Leo Baeck's article and I'm still regaining my breath. The article is excellent and, to tell the truth, I don't think Borowitz makes a good job of explaining Baeck's thought. In the article, it becomes clear how central the dialectical relationship between Mystery and Commandment are for his understanding of Judaism. At first, I found the definition of these concepts quite tricky:

• Mystery is the knowledge of what's real in the world, about the real meaning of life, our presence here and the origin of all things;
• Commandment is the knowledge of what is to be realized, the direction we are moving towards, what we need to do in order to get there.

In Baeck's words: "The foundation of life is the mystery; the way of life is the revealed. The one is from God, the other to be achieved by man." (p. 195)

Without using this term, Baeck defines a "Theology of Dialectics":

• Every mystery means and suggests a commandment; every commandment means and suggests a mystery
• Olam ha-bah and Olam ha-zeh exist only in relationship to each other
• "God gives man's life and God demands man's life from him" (p. 198)
• Individuality and commonality between human beings are also expressed in dialectical terms: "Our soul is what is divine in us; it is our mystery and shares the mystery of all souls; and yet it shows also our individual stamp, that which is unique within us, our very self, that which belongs to it alone." (p. 198)
  

There is no space for opposition between mysticism and ethics, according to Baeck the history of Judaism reveals simultaneous concern for these two dimensions, with a higher emphasis to one or the other in different periods of time. Even the players were almost always the same, with the author of the Shulchan Arukh also involved in Jewish mysticism. When the religion gets too close to only one of these poles (mystery/mysticism vs. commandment/ethics), it stops being Judaism and that's what happened to Christianity after Paul - it stopped being concerned with this world and became too focused on the spiritual dimension of religion. On the other hand, the rational-only concept of religion could never be applied to Judaism either, and here there is a clear dispute with Cohen.

The commandments, therefore, are rooted in mystery and need to be understood as the Jewish way of the sacred pervading every aspect of our lives. Another quote (p. 201):

Every partition of life into the profane and the sacred is to be avoided, and the sanctuary dare not possess merely one day beside all the other days. The word "remember" is inscribed above this law: "That you may remember and do all my commandments and be holy unto your God."

The Shabbat, in this context, brings together the physical recess from the everyday sphere and the religious rest, a connection with God, a Messianic experience. It contains simultaneously memory of creation and hope for the future, it "possesses the great contradiction of any end, a perpetual renaissance." (p. 202)

The final paragraph of the article summarizes why the rational component of religion (ethics) had to be joined by a personal-spiritual dimension:

The Law, and quite especially the sabbatical element in it, has educated that capacity in man which is born only of depth of life - the capacity to be different. Without this, life cannot be unique. Whoever experiences mystery and commandment becomes unique among men, different and individual within the world. (...) Whoever experiences both [mystery and commandment], both in unity, lives in the world and yet is different, is different and yet is in the world, lives for other men and with other men and yet within himself, within himself and yet also for other men and hence with them. This is the gift and possession of Judaism. And it may well be its historic task to offer this image of the dissenter, who dissents for humanity's sake...