God, Man And The World Poem by gershon hepner

Rosenzweig asserted
that Revelation and Creation and Redemption are,
when they have been inverted
on God and Man and World, six-pointed like a Jewish star.

Other thinkers may
make different points about philosophy. My favorite line,
language holiday,
comes not from Levinas or Buber, but from Wittgenstein.

Abraham Socher, Director of Jewish Studies at Oberlin, reviews Hilary Putnam's Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (TLS, November 7,2008) . He points out that Rosenzweig's 'Star of Redemption' was literally a star, . God, Man and World are of an upright equilateral triangle, while the basic relations between these entities, Revelation Creation and Redemption, are the vertices of a second equilateral triangle which when superimposed on the first, makes a six-pointed star. Putnam describes this as extravagant, if beautiful, and points out that the basic problem with the approach was most concisely expressed by Wittgenstein, who debunked philosophy as 'language on holiday, ' although he would have been impressed by the role such statements played in Rosenzweig's extraordinary life. 'But to do say, ' adds Socher, would be to turn Rosenzweig's God into a symbol; to reduce God to Man.



11/14/08