Limmud Oz was an incredible opportunity to remind oneself of the interesting things in life. The chance to listen to renowned Jewish scholars covering a broad array of topics was just what I needed to get back into reflective mode. From deep analysis of medieval poetry and yiddish literature, to advocating for Aboriginal social justice, hearing a Monash Lecturer question two proud Australian Palestinians why they can't make room for the Great Zionist Dream, witnessing Israel's youngest Knesset member explain her one-state solution and concluding the weekend with a comprehensive kabbalah lesson. Every interval, you had to pick one and miss 11 others!
Along with now wanting to build up Aboriginal communities, tell Netenyahu how to solve the Middle-East conflict and start plowing through all the great Jewish writers, I left committed to trying to work out the basic gist of all this Jewish Neo-Kantian Phenomenologism, which I incessantly see referenced (with a Sholem Aleichem novel or two for when that stuff gets a bit too complexifying).
My post Limmud-Oz Journey began by looking into a further David Solomin one hour lecture time-lining major Jewish thought post the Western-European enlightenment (1700s). So… Moses Mendelssohn, a practicing German orthodox Jew, apparently won an essay competition that Kant came second place in. And apparently after that, Kant still praised Jerusalem (Mendelssohn’s famous apologetic masterpiece) as being irrefutable. Then, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason explained that what we know of reality can only be through categories of relation in our minds (i.e. time, space, cause and effect etc.), but reality as it is in actual fact is incomprehensible. Hegel’s dialectic theory (thesis + antithesis = synthesis) then philosophises about how this reality-as-it-actually-is (Hegel’s geist) is slowly coming to a state of self-realisation via the universal strivings of the human mind. Kierkegaard then kicks off the existentialist movement by not only asking ‘What the heck does that mean?’ as I’d like to know, but ‘what does all this mean for me?’ Then comes the Jewish Hermann Cohen who, after spending most of his life denying the existence of all the stuff Hegel was into, decides that Kant’s reality-as-it-is is G-d. Cohen’s Correlation theory stated that the only 2 interdependent things in reality are Being (G-d) and Becoming (Humanity). Later to befriend Cohen, is Franz Rosenzweig whose Star of Redemption states that there’s actually 3 symbiotic entities comprising reality: G-d, Humanity and the World. G-d is revealed to the world through the process of ‘Creation’, to Man through ‘Revelation’ and Man is revealed to The World through ‘Redemption.’ Franz also befriended the Chasidus-loving Martin Buber, for whom I’ll have to refer you to Ittay’s Limmud-Oz discussion to get more detail, but basically he claimed that “G-d is in the spaces between people.” The lecture then finally began to look at what I’d been waiting for: the assimilated Husserl’s fathering of Phenomenology. However, as time was now running short, Husserl was only quoted as being the teacher of Heidegger, who is was only quoted as being a supporter of Hitler and thus disparaging the French Jew Emmanuel Levinas who ended up in a German POW camp. Levinas was quoted for influencing people like Derrida by showing in his Totality and Infinity that contrary to Heideggere, it’s impossible to reduce the difference between oneself and ‘other.’ The lecture then concluded with Rav Soloveitchik influenced by all of the above, and Rabbi Sacks.
My Journey now begins with me learning Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (which I will do, but based entirely on Amazon reviews) and Levinas’ Talmudic writings from a student of one of his students J
