God’s Commands and the Laws of the World: Rosenzweig’s Die Bauleute as a Critique of the Legal Theologies of Modern Judaism and Liberal Democracy

Throughout all the revivals and appropriations of Rosenzweig, his text “Die Bauleute” has conspicuously been left by the wayside. Scholarship has largely considered (and ignored) this text as a banal apology for the halacha with little to no enduring intellectual significance.

The present paper attempts a fundamentally new reading of this text. To be precise, it is an attempt to dispel the notion of “Die Bauleute” being an incoherent mess of ad-hoc ideas, and to argue for it forming the foundation for a critique of legal theologies, within and beyond the confines of Judaism.

The central contention is that in “Die Bauleute”, Rosenzweig himself was grappling with a problem he only had a premonition of: a fundamental shift in the understanding of the halacha that would lead to Jewish forms of life, be they liberal or orthodox, falling into self-contradiction.

This point will be unfolded in three parts.

First the text’s core idea – the distinction between the meaning of and the reason for the halacha - will be identified and contextualized within Rosenzweig’s broader thought. This will yield an understanding of the Rosenzweigian view that the halacha is rooted in the created world (and the human interpretation of it), rather than in divine revelation.

This understanding – in the second part - forms the interpretative background to the text’s critiques of Jewish forms of life. These critiques, as will be shown, have only become more salient in the present incarnations of these life forms.

In the third part we will then turn to Rosenzweig’s own halachic method; a method based in the interplay of legal obligation and ethical/divine possibility. From here we will look beyond the confines of Judaism and see how this method provides a way out of the paradoxes plaguing the relation between law and ethics in liberal-democracies.