Lethargic Man (anag.)

I wrote before about how one of the strengths of Rabbi Ludwig Philippson, in his 1844 commentary on the Torah, is his ability to pull patterns out of what look like random things in the text. I said I wanted to translate two examples, but this turned out to be a much larger undertaking than I expected. In the end, I decided to feed the text into a translation engine, but this also involved a large expenditure of time, correcting the things the translation engine (or the OCRing of the original text) got wrong.

This is actually the second text I wished to translate. (The first might not necessarily be longer, but it's buried somewhere inside the long Schlussbetrachtung zum ersten Buche Moscheh, and I'd need to at least skim translate that to find it.) In this passage, Philippson considers in turn the meanings of the names of the Mishkan, its component spaces, its dimensions, the materials it was constructed from and its colours, before bringing all of this together into a summary of the deeper meaning of the Mishkan, the like of which I have never read.

I'd originally intended to write here: This is a long text; so I suggest that rather than reading it online, you print it out and read during the long drawn-out parts of the High Holydays services. But then life got in the way and I'm only finishing it now. So I suggest instead you print it out and read it during the long dark autumn or winter Friday nights. (Hah, who am I kidding that anyone's going to read a text this long? I suspect I'm translating this mostly for my own benefit to be able to reread easily and fast in the future.) If you do print it out, note that the page with the Tetragrammaton needs to be disposed of in due course in a geniza.

Two comments up front: Firstly, the translation below doesn’t capture one aspect of the original text, which is that it looks like this: in blackletter, with long S’s, and with abſolutely no paragraphing (apart from daſhes to introduce new ſections).

( View page scan )

The other is to raise the issue one word that Philippson makes copious use of, but which I’ve had difficulty translating. That word is Vermittelung. Vermitteln means to impart or mediate, but Philippson uses it to describe the connection between God and Man. I’ve translated it as “intermediation”, or “connexion” (using this spelling for a nineteenth-century feel); I don’t feel this really does the job well, but I can’t think of anything better. (Where you see "connection" spelled with CT, this is not a continuity error, but rather rendering the more unambigous word Verbindung.)

(If you're reading this on a smartphone, now would be a sensible time to start viewing in landscape orientation.)

Some time ago, when a friend WinoLJ/DW saw me reading my way through the Torah commentary of Rabbi Ludwig Philippson—the original edition of the chumash used in my shul, the modern edition of which on the bookshelves contains no commentary—she asked me what kind of commentary it was. Not having assembled any thoughts beforehand, all I could do was answer "er..." Since I never answered her properly, it occurs to me that I could do so here, to a wider, but hopefully also interested, audience.