  The Star is such a multi-faceted work, however, that generations of readers have discovered in it myriad philosophical insights which far outspan its systematic aspirations. The book’s influence on later Jewish thought and continental thought may well be said to rest far more heavily on the fruitfulness of some of those individual insights in the book that appear to be decidedly anti-systematic, than on the book’s own overall commitment to systematicity. The book offers a rich account of the temporal situatedness of the human being, and suggests that the actuality we experience can only be understood through the tenses of past, present, and future. It exemplifies the fusion of philosophy and theology which the “new thinking” is meant to realize; and its philosophical utilization of theological concepts like “creation,” “revelation,” and “redemption,” seeks both to aid philosophy in fulfilling its own 2500-year potential, and to answer those perennial questions of Jewish and Christian theology that have perplexed religious thinkers throughout the ages. The Star works out its own aesthetics and history of art. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Star is its formulation of a “speech-thinking,” which presents language as the “organon” through which the unifying relations between beings occur and can be understood. At the center of this speech-thinking is a philosophy of dialogue which traces the awakening of selfhood through an I-You relation into which the self is called by the Absolute other. The book introduces a form of dialectical logic meant to rival Hegel’s. It offers a series of interpretations of Biblical texts meant to evoke the uniqueness of the Bible as a written text which nevertheless makes it possible to hear the divine word. The Star presents Judaism and Christianity as communal forms whose institutions and liturgical calendar enable human beings to bring eternity into time. And the book includes within it a sweeping history of religion and philosophy, politics and culture, from ancient times to the present. In short, much like the systems of German Idealism, the Star offers the reader numerous points of access; but all these points of access are meant to hold together within a single overarching vision of truth and the path to it.