God’s power expresses itself with pure necessity precisely because its interior is pure caprice, unconditional freedom. As a ‘created,’ self-contained, ‘concealed’ God [God] could do without creating, assuming – which will hardly do – that as such [God] could emerge from [Godself] altogether, and create. But as ‘manifest’ God, [God] cannot do otherwise than to create. Those who ascribed inner, substantive necessity to the divine creative act are right … [b]ut this inner necessity was based on the transformation of the concealed into the manifest. And … those others who asserted the divine caprice were on the right track by pointing to the inner nucleus of boundless freedom in God. To be sure this nucleus, as it bursts forth, forfeits its inner boundlessness and manifests itself as serene, necessarily creative, omniscient omnipotence.
Franz Rosenzweig, *The Star of Redemption*, translated by William W. Hallo from the 2nd edition of 1930, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014/1985, 116.
Image: Detail of an image of the stained glass work in Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem, Israel, “The Tribe of Levi,” Marc Chagall / CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
Matters of Interpretation 