nephesh → is it flesh, or a dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘You?’
Man is made of clay and inflated with nephesh.
prohibition of cannibalism; mandate of work (man has to work to remain in heaven).
In the original creation story, god saw it was good; here, the woman sees it is good.
When she eats the apple, the problem is not that the woman judges autonomously what is good, but rather that in doing so, she eats by starting from her own maxims, i.e. perverting the relation between her and the creator.
Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the snake. ‘Nobody is at fault’
Tegtmeyer reacts to prof reading Schelling’s Weltalter by saying “Schelling is good but sometimes crazy.”
Shoah
It was carried out by
- Bullets (just shot)
- Concentration camps (f.e. Auschwitz 1 - the place whose motto was “Arbeit macht Frei”). These existed to lock up people who were dangerous.
- Extermination
The radicalism of the shoah implies that Jewish thought can no longer remain politically inert; it cannot dissociate from its political history.
Leibniz’ answer to theodicy is that we live in the best possible world, and some evil is unavoidable.
Voltaire replies that “if such a natural form of evil can exist [referring to an earthquake that happened on the day of all saints], there can be no god.”
Benjamin was apparently Jewish; he was a refugee in Paris, was stripped of citizenship by the Germans, committed suicide on the way to Spain.
some interpretations say that Marxism is a kind of messianism.
Hegel said it’s dialectical
Adorno said we have to stay in the negative
And Benjamin develops a critique of historiography starting from the metaphor of the angelus novus.
Commandment to the jews to not give hitler a posthumous victory. Jews may not despair to god or man, they may not despair to their own existence. In doing so, they realize what Hitler wanted to do - they co-operate with their own destruction.
The answer to the evil of the second world war is the strengthening of the Jewish identity.
https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/the-return-of-history-and-the-end-of-dreams/
Zionism is a consequence of this.
tikkun olam → sjabirat
toldot
book of names
in the toldot you find humanity realized.
apocalyptic vs. rational messianism.
destruction → conservation → elevation
die Philosophie des Geistes