They Have Renewed Their Soul

The author - one of outstanding philosophers modern Judaism, tells about ways of returning of the assimilated Jews to Judaism. Among them, in particular, such poets, writers, musicians and philosophers, as Henry Heine, Binjamin Fondane, Frants Kafka, Arnold Shyonberg.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ............... 5
Prelude
 Prodigal sons ASSIMILATION 11
Vertical invasion ............ 15
The challenge facing a disaster ......... 20
The challenge of Eretz Yisrael ...... 24
Part One
 Dialectics Jewish man. . .27
Nodal points and the line tension ...... 29
"Anti" and his mask .............. 39
"Meta" and its forms .............. 57
Part Two
 BIBLE OF RIGHTS. . .81
Ontological psychodrama .......... 83
Typological sociodrama .......... 95
Prophetic metadrama ........... 109
Part Three
 OT for the resumption of renunciation
COMMUNICATION .................. 123
Dissimilation options ........... 125
Received call .............. 134
The return of Marxism .......... 156
Pilgrim of hope. Ernst Bloch ........ 170
The temptation to cross the star of deliverance.
Franz Rosenzweig .............. 182
From baptism to the "Kol Nidrei".
Arnold Schoenberg .............. -96
"Kol Nidrei" ................ 219
NOTES .............. 225
INDEX OF NAMES ............ 231

INTRODUCTION

October 1984, Hall "Van Lear" in Jerusalem. Front of the hall crowded with friends and students who have come here to celebrate with Andre Neher his seventieth birthday. Neher excitedly shows a birthday present: in the morning out in Russian collection of selected chapters from his works. For him - as evidenced by the shining face - this is not just another regular, more precisely, four hundred and publication of his works and not just another regular, more precisely, the thirteenth language into which they are translated. The reasons for his excitement became clear to me much earlier, when one day, sitting at a table where we, students and scholars of the Torah, there is always going to class, I saw the same expression on his face shining in that day came a new member of our close circle, whose name has long been a symbol of the struggle in which Neher was involved for many years, and now sat with us live holder of the name - Joseph Mendelevich.

And now before Neer opens the opportunity to participate in the struggle for a new front, due to the fact that his works will soon get to the Jews in all parts of Russia, and he always wanted to be in the center of the great battles of his people: the physical and spiritual recovery after his crash, receiving Sephardi Jews in the West after the upheavals in North Africa, Aliyah to Israel ...
Today it is a thrill just as, if not more so due by the fact that due to the magical connection between the author and the reader will have an opportunity to join this branch of the children of Israel, as if appearing out of nowhere after a long road to recovery, and he always wanted to join to all currents of the people of Israel to the faithful as he, orthodox, and to unbelievers of kibbutz 'Tashomer gatsair "to Ashkenazi and Sephardic, to the supporters of Greater Israel and to the left activists, the Jews and the Christians ...

For behind all the ideas in Neer is his love for people. And that you immediately feel, dear reader: the people - that's what the heart of this book. Just as Neher wrote not about prophecy and the prophets ("Amos", "Jeremiah"), recreating their inner struggle, just as he did not write about the relationship between science and Judaism, and the Jewish scholar David Hanse, recreating harmony, and the last shall be attached to his famous rabbi Magaralu from Prague, and to his illustrious teacher-astronomer Tycho Brahe, just in this book Neher says to you is not an abstract return to ourselves and to the faith of his people, but about the people who "have updated their soul." Do not just say, and shares with them the heavy drama of their identification. And in his other books about Jewish identity, of course, more systematic - one of them, "The Keys to Judaism," the most intense, and perhaps the most daring, went in Russian publishing house "Library Alia" - we see that same rule of man recovered from most of human existence, and raised to a higher level of human dignity and the power of thought Neher music of his words.

Because Neher has not only words but also the music. And that, I'm sure you too will feel immediately, dear reader, even in translation, though he let the most perfect, can not convey all the subtleties of sound, which the author is able to reveal the word. But also because this book is designed as a piece of music. In it, as in the symphony, the theme is repeated from the beginning to the end, and the melody Kol Nidrei leitmotif of Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur in 1913, which was decisive for the "returnees" Franz Rozentsvit-ha, which begins the Prelude to Number Nidrei in the epilogue, written by Arnold Schoenberg, which is more than any other of his works of Schoenberg expresses return to his people.

Note that dodecaphonic music of Schoenberg entered into a life long Andre Neher. Before the war, the young Neher mastered it, however, as an amateur musician, and not as a Jewish philosopher, but even then he did not doubt that in fifty years, it has reemerged in Jewish overtones. It was the same with the works of Heine and Goethe, on which he worked before the war German culture fascinated by the beauty of a young Neher, so far, under the impact of the war, has not decided to radically change the direction of its activities. And now, after fifty years, as an exhilarating background reappear Heine - in the first lines of this book - and Goethe - in one of the last books Neher, "Faust and the Maharal of Prague" where the contrast of the myth of Faust myth of the Golem emphasizes the importance of Maharal views.

Music of Schoenberg's "Faust" by Goethe, boldly transposed into the Jewish registers ... On fine examples shows us Neher job seeker the lost spark, which is designed to every Jew: "The original light was scattered in the Earth's space for the Just for Tzadik: Op Zara latsadik. A righteous man - is anyone who draws from the original light, who once time in his space, his momentary, in his night, his death seeks to explore our place in this world, in order to extract from them forever, space, transcendent, divine light and life. Righteous anyone who agrees to be a seeker of the Lost World " ("Key to Judaism", page 63).

Jewish hopes of drawing breath from the depths of some of the great souls, this book, dear reader, is addressed to your soul.

Daniel Weil (Jerusalem, 1990)