Franz Rosenzweig’s Reading of 
The Song of Songs
David B. Siff

In this paper, I will discuss Rosenzweig’s analysis of the Song of Songs (Star, pp. 198-204).  Rosenzweig’s understanding of this text is based heavily on his idea of the link between love, revelation, and language.  For Rosenzweig, love is revelation, and love and revelation occur through language. Therefore, we will first explain Rosenzweig’s views on language, love, and revelation, and proceed to discuss his analysis of the Song of Songs.

Language
Rosenzweig’s rejection of the philosophical tradition stems from a rejection of universalizing thought.  Philosophy, in general, seeks to understand all of reality in terms of a single type of being (water, reason, etc.) rather than as a set of independent beings relating to each other.  He saw reason as a kind of discourse which tended to universalize, and which did not allow for multiple subjects (or, in fact, any individual subject separate from “Universal Reason”).  Rosenzweig posited language as an alternative model for reality, because it allows for individual subjects, who can move other, love each other, and reveal themselves to each other.
Language is a better model of reality, in Rosenzweig’s opinion, for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it allows for (and embodies) the presence of two subjects, an “I” and a “thou.”  It has not only a narrative style embodied in the past tense, but also an imperative which is always in the present (even when it is being quoted: “she said, ‘do this!’”); the imperative case thus allows for an I-Thou relationship, which for Rosenzweig means not merely acceptance of the other, but a demand on the Thou to respond (Batnitzky) and become an “I”.  In that relationship, the relationship of one person speaking to another, Rosenzweig emphasized the primary and immediate experience of presence between two people in spoken dialogue.  It is only in speech that one encounters the presence of another; such encounter is impossible in the language of reason.  This imperative case, which cannot be in the past tense, for Rosenzweig proves that there is an irreducible present tense, qualitatively distinct from the past tense.  He sees the past tense as describing objective, universal facts; the present tense, on the other hand, is associated with presence, relationship, and meaning.  It is the present tense, that of relationship, which allows for I-Thou relationships; when something is described in the past, the relationship is He-It (there is not even space for the “I” of the speaker).
The past tense, for Rosenzweig, is symbolic of the “created” world, in which everything is separate.  Also called “saying” (as in “saying x about y”), it includes math, reason, etc., which do not actually relate to an others, and which do not speak from an individual standpoint.  The present tense, also called “speech,”  symbolizes presence, and is exemplified by the imperative tense which is always in the present and is capable of embodying a living relationship.  The future is typified by silence, which is an aspect of redemption.  Hence, one can construct the triad:
|	Creation	|     |	Revelation	|      |	Redemption	|
|	Past	    	| --- |	Present	       	|---- |	Future		|
|	Saying		|     |	Speech		|      |	Silence		|

Secondly, language has value laden terms like “good” which are only meaningful from a personal, idiosyncratic perspective; one can say “that’s good” in regular discourse, but not in universal philosophical discourse.  Such value terms thus express the uniqueness of the speaker as an individual, as an “I” with an opinion and a unique standpoint.
Third, in the process of hearing and subsequently speaking, Rosenzweig saw a spiritual and vital dynamic which awakens humans as spiritual beings.  In this process, one integrates the previous speaker (in fact, all previous speech) but also contributes one’s own choice of words.  When one speaks, one affects another human being, continuing this process.  Hence, any individual speech act combines the individual’s speech with God’s initial speech.  Rosenzweig sees speech as spontaneous, alive, and even spiritual (Glatzer, 178); its vivacity testifies to the vivacity of the human soul.  Speech itself calls for a response, thus awakening the “I” in both the self and the other.  Built into human speech is the possibility of intersubjectivity.  
Death
The opposite of speech is silence, which for Rosenzweig symbolizes death. (Braiterman 206)  Rosenzweig seems to distinguish between two types of death.  “Created Death” is the natural death faced by the soul which has not yet been moved.  The soul faces its own death, but has not been moved by love, and is terrified of this death.  This is how the mythic man appears in the simple, natural world, in the mythic past prior to revelation.  This death thretens to make man a mere “it,” and thus throw him back into the third person past tense.  This death (as opposed to the “redemptive death” which man looks forward to) challenges any notion of meaning in the world, suggesting the meaninglessness of the individual life (Oppenheim 459).  
In the awareness of death, one becomes aware of one’s “I,” and cannot accept the philosophical solutions which deny the import of the individual subject.  One cannot accept that “Reason” or “God” is the only true subject, but one also faces an abyss of meaning.  In facing one’s death, one stands completely alone, but stands on the assertion of the significance of one’s individual existence.

Love
For Rosenzweig, it is love that solves the impasse created by man facing his death.  Love always comes from some outside (transcendent) source, begins with being beloved, and calls one to love in response.  It is a miraculous, overflowing experience that is entirely individual (“I” am loved), where the beloved has an immediate and direct experience of the “I” loving him, and learns he is an “I” who also needs a “thou.”  It is an experience of the present (as opposed to death’s fixation on the past and future), which is “wholly active, wholly personal, wholly living, wholly speaking.” (Star, p. 202)  In its totally present nature, it is timeless, existing in a present that temporarily obscures the vision of past or future.  
This love is understood as being a kind of speech. Speech as understood by Rosenzweig is structurally similar to love: it embodies an I-Thou relationship, calling forth the “I” of the other in response.  It is totally present, spontaneous, and individual.  Thus, Rosenzweig writes, “love is—speech, wholly active.” (Star, p. 202)  Rosenzweig sees speech as a model for relationship in general, and thus describes love as expressing itself in the “speech of life”: “It must speak, for there is simply no self-expression other than the speech of life.  And by speaking, love already becomes superhuman, for the sensuality of the word is brimful with its divine supersense.  Like speech itself, life is sensual-super sensual.” (Glazer 58)  Love, like language, is more than what an individual human is capable of initiating on his own: it must come from outside, and it transcends human’s “natural” capacities.  
Love solves death’s impasse (or at least allows man to have a healthy relationship to death as eternal life) by reorienting man away from the past and toward the present, and away from his obsession with himself and toward relationship.  By filling him with an awareness of the eternal present, love banishes his fears about the past or future, and reveals a power behind the world and history that loves him, thus allowing him to live in faith. (Oppenheim 461)  Death is now seen as redemptive death, the kiss of God (Braiterman 211) and the present is in fact enriched by man’s awareness of death.  Love transforms fear of death, and solipsism, into a positive relationship to eternal life. (Braiterman 217)

Revelation
Revelation is God’s act of loving a man, revealing himself to a particular person as an “I” and calling forth the “I” from him (“where are you?”).  As love, it is an overflowing experience of speech, entailing a proximity between two speakers, in which the lover gives himself freely (Haberman 324) and calls forth for the beloved to love in response.  These two speakers are not conflated, but rather stand independent while in an intimate relationship, both continuing to speak their own “I”.  (Cohen)  As love, it always occurs to the individual: “it occurs to the point, the rigid, deaf, and immovable point, the defiant I, which “I just happen to be” (Rosenzweig)  Human love itself is seen as itself divine love (because human action and divine action operate together in any action), and love itself is the meaning of the term “revelation” as used by Rosenzweig. (Braiterman 216)  Revelation takes its character of revelation when the “I” that is loving is seen to be God.  Such a revelation can occur through the Bible (if one can hear the voice of God speaking directly to one’s own soul through the text), through human love, or simply through “listening to the words spoken by the beats of one’s own heart.”
Rosenzweig’s philosophy thus makes room for revelation, in contrast to the prevalent humanism of his day.  Whereas humanism put an emphasis on fulfilling one’s own destiny, and the redemption of the world hinging on man’s actions, Rosenzweig’s understanding of revelation is that it calls for humans to fulfill God’s will.  In order to fulfill this commandment, man works toward redemption; hence, redemption requires the efforts of both God and man.
Just as love is understood as expressing itself in speech, revelation too is seen in terms of speech.  Revelation, like speech, is both the direct ecstatic moment between the I and the Thou, and the medium embodying that moment (Greenberg 97).  Just as love and speech draw on past experiences of love and call forth love in the future, and hence bridge past and future, revelation stands between creation and redemption, calling forth the created universe to move toward redemption.  Like the speech of love,  “revelatory speech is fluid, and can never be fixed, reduced and/or measured, unlike the speech of law, mathematics, or art.” (Greenberg 84)  In speech, the listener is called to hear, and hence be receptive to the speaker; this too is how love speaks.  Revelation expresses love, and awakens man’s “I.” 
Rosenzweig understands the Bible itself to be a historical revelation.  In other words, the authors of the bible had a revelatory experience of the divine, which they tried to capture using whatever language they could.  At the same time, the Bible is revelatory in the present, in that the word of God constantly seeks to speak through the text, to break through the narrative structure of the text. The Bible is meant to embody such a relationship in the present, to be revelation, to be read today and call to a human heart.  Each new revelation is new, and unique to that moment; the Bible is both a record of a historical occurrence of revelation, and a revelatory speech act in the present.
p. 198, bottom, -199, top.
The Song of Songs is read by Rosenzweig both as being about love, and as being love itself.  That is, it depicts the process of revelation, but it also is the process of revelation.  It depicts the process of God becoming an “I” in search of a “thou”, who speaks to (loves) the human soul, filling her with love and obligation.  The divine I and the soul’s I switch off rapid fire, in close proximity and yearning but always separate.  The soul yearns to transcend her “creatureliness” (existence as scientific, objective fact, not in light of divine transcendence and ultimate meaning) and to be pure love.  Recognizing the impossibility of adequately loving the divine, she turns back to earth as a lover, to work toward redemption.  So it is a parable depicting the relation of God to the soul.
But, centrally for Rosenzweig, it is more than parable, more than a depiction of the historical process of revelation. “It is not enough that God’s relationship to man is explained by the simile of the lover and the beloved.  God’s words must contain the relationship of lover to beloved directly…. And so we find it in the Song of Songs.” (tr. Greenberg 88)  It itself is a process of revelation—the language is not about anything, except for the single phrase “love is as strong as death,” pointing to the dynamic we have discussed which itself transcends the possibility of descriptive narrative, of logic, of reason.  If it is to testify to such a love, it itself cannot be contained within the past tense, and must actually be the language of love.  In the language, written by a person moved by God’s revelation, we have man’s word (written by the human author) and God’s word (which initially moved the human author to speak, and which speaks directly through the revelatory text).

p. 199-p. 201.  
In this section of his commentary, Rosezweig is trying to demonstrate that the Song of Songs has the immediacy of speech, and is speaking to the human soul—that is, it is love just as much as it is a parable about love.  It is about the very real love between God and the soul, and Rosenzweig resists any attempts to distinguish that love from the love between people (indeed, the love between people may be exactly the arena where one experiences God’s love).  The song uses brief sentences, typical of speech, constantly speaks directly from the “I” to the “thou.”  It is a living dialogue, in the present and imperative tenses (which both allow for the experience of presence, as we have discussed).  It is an overwhelming yearning for intimacy which is all vital, all in the present.
Before the 19th century, Rosenzweig argues, there was no difficulty seeing divine and human love as the same (as he does).  Just as speech embodies previous speakers (including the mysterious source of language itself) as well as the current speaker, love embodies the current lover as well as the mysterious, transcendent “first lover.”  Thus, for Rosenzweig, human love is divine love; love, as it reaches beyond the confines of the solipsistic self, must necessarily be super-human.  
In the 19th century, however, no relationship between God and man could be imagined.  God was seen as entirely transcendent, relating to the world only in universal ways, certainly not through love expressed to individuals.  Hence, the song was understood merely as a song about human love, and the language of God and of men was separated (for Rosenzweig, of course, they exist in the same words).  The song also devolved from being understood in terms of love (I-thou) to being understood as an epic (He-She); thus, its revelatory directness was lost.  Since the “word of man” was separated from the divine source which gave it vitality (as all love is divine), that word lost its aspect of love and immediacy., and was “petrified into the dead objectivity of the third person.”  The revelatory nature of the song, awakening in us the capacities of love, ceased to function when it was separated from revelation, from its transcendent source.  It ceased to be revelation, and it ceased to be love.
Rosenzweig depicts another development, whereby the song was understood to be part of a human wedding rite.  The love was rediscovered, but the scientists still did not realize that “love cannot be simply human.”  That is, love itself transcends the capacities of the solipsistic human, and must require a “first lover” (similar to the first cause of ancient philosophy).  The similes required of love are required because its emotional experience transcends what can be grasped by rational language.  Love is, in fact, eternal—that is, it is divine, it transcends the limitations of objective reality, and it is utterly timeless.  The timelessness is experienced, on a human level, in the total experience of the present—what he calls “transitory”.  Thus, the use of similes, and the transitory nature, do not show the insignificant nature of love (as philosophy would suggest) but rather testify to its divine origins.  Being outside of the grasp of reason testifies to its central importance in the human experience.

p. 201
Rosenzweig takes up the grammatical analysis of the song with a focus on those terms which indicate the individuality of the love relationship.  Love is always between two individuals- God loves a particular soul, in a particular moment, in a totally unique act.  The subject “I” as well as the term “good” (which indicates a point of view) are from such an individual perspective.  This is pure speech, pure presence of I and thou in a lived moment.
The only phrase which breaks the flow of this speech, which uses objectifying language, is the phrase “love is stronger than death.”  Creation (the narrative tense of language, and also death) is emerging into the realm of revelation (speech in the present tense, the love which has topped death) but revelation (love, the present) has topped creation (death, the narrative tense).  “This is the only thing that can be stated about love”—for love is in the present, and “saying” is in the past, as opposed to “speech” between two subjects, which is in the present.  Love conquers all, its heat reviving creation from the coldness of death, giving vitality to individuals which otherwise are not fully alive, not loving, not moved by God.  The soul recognizes her divine affinity, her godliness (her capacity to speak and to love), and is purely “I”, refusing to be reduced to a description of something in the past.  She soars above creation, moved by God’s love, no longer chained to the past.
The speech of love is all present—it never fades into the past, never dwells long enough to reflect on it as a past event.  It is pure present, pure presence.  They are in extremely close proximity, in a dance in which their identities are maintained.  The content of all of the imperatives is the same: love’s demand to the beloved that she should love.  

p. 202-204
Rosenzweig then hints at the metaphorical content, without allowing himself to abandon the present tense.  These pages are about the process of revelation, and although Rosenzweig tries to write them in the language of love (spontaneous, passionate, romantic) such that they themselves are revelation.  His attempt at times falters because he is also trying to convey the content, his understanding of the relationship between God and the soul (e.g. “the lover indicates the ground of their love in a protocosmos of creation”).  
The phrase “my sister, my bride” suggests that God and the soul were originally separate, in the state of ‘brother and ‘sister’—separate individuals, as depicted in the “Creation” section of the  Star.  The idea of ‘bride’ suggests an anticipated marriage, a permanent reunion. In the past (indeed, in part 1 of the Star, describing the state of the universe unmoved by revelation/love), they were not together:  the soul did not already love.  It is of this past that she is embarrassed, of the fact that she stood separate from God in the first place.  But then, in the light of God’s love, she takes pride in her individuality, and what was a source of shame is a source of pride (“I am black but comely”).  She finds the bliss of a singular, unique relationship with God (“I am His and he is mine”).  She begs that her love not be described by others in the past tense, but rather that she be allowed to express her own love, purely in the present.  She will do so, by becoming a lover; his love has transformed her, so that she loves based in her own will, which is in response to His.  She is His.
But then she realizes that she cannot marry him, that he is only her brother, that she can not live in the same infinite space and in total intimacy with God.  She has his name, the ability to call out to him which was given to her through love, but in reality she is separate from him, not married to him, and her transformation has no effect on the outside world, is not even recognized by the outside world; it is a personal spiritual transformation, which yearns to extend beyond the bounds of the personal I-thou relationship.  The soul turns out, beyond this relationship, to ask of the world “who would grant” that she would truly be his, to bring this love into eternal reality.  
This shifts the gaze from revelation to redemption, to the eternal future, which is the only place where this love can actually be fulfilled.  Redemption is also identified with Rosenzweig with eternal life, in which there is an eternal closeness (if not union) between the soul and God.  Rosenzweig has conflated the eternal life of redemptive death, with the spiritual life of redeeming the world.  Redemption is redemptive death, the silence of being eternally in union with God, as well as the spiritual transformation of the universe, bringing it permanently together with God.  This is marriage—the permanent union with God which happens with redemption, as well as with redemptive death.  
The marriage with God happens not in the transitory moment of revelation, but through the historical effect of revelation in the world, through life.  The soul turns, and looks for supernatural community (of love) in the world, becoming a lover of another soul, as well as bringing God’s love to bear on another soul.  She turns toward a new beloved, toward redemption.

“A Love Supreme”
The Song of Songs, for Rosenzweig, is a parable about revelation and is itself revelation.  It is insistently in the present tense, spoken by the unique subject in a transitory moment of overflowing passionate love.  It is about revelation, but it is itself revelation.
Rosenzweig’s discussion of the Song of Songs provides a fulcrum point in his discussion of the nature of reality.  It is here that love happens, overcomes death and solipsism, and then faces forward to the future, to redemption.  The Song of Songs is quintessential revelation, as for Rosenzweig, revelation is love.  It is also speech, pure presence, pure relation, all of which are privileged in Rosenzweig’s scheme.  It brings together his identification of revelation as love, on the present tense in language as presence and as beyond the grasp of the rational, and of love as speech which occurs purely in the present tense.  It is the climax of Rosenzweig’s description of the revelation which stands at the core of existence, and which bridges the past and future of human existence and of history.
Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption, presents a philosophy based not on reason (that is, an objective description of a universe which is all reducible to a single unifying “all”) but rather one based on revelation: individual entities which interact ontologically and historically.  He uses language as a model for this, the present tense symbolizing the pure presence of the I-thou relationship.  This I-thou relationship between the soul and God gives the impetus to move from the He-It of created history, standing in the past, to the we-it of human community acting to redeem the world.  Hence, revelation answers the challenge posed by the final line of The Miracle of the Antichrist, that “no-one may redeem humans from their suffering, but we need forgiveness for he who encourages others to bear their doubts concerning their redemption.”  In fact, revelation offers a model whereby it is a love both human and divine which is capable of redeeming mankind and the world.

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