In the end shall Christians become Jews and Jews, Christians? On Franz Rosenzweig's apocalyptic eschatology (1).

Gershom Scholem's peerless 1959 essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism" distinguishes "two major currents" of thought. On the one hand with redemption "the restorative forces are directed to the return and recreation of a past condition which comes to be felt as ideal." On the other hand with redemption a "catastrophe" marks "the upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature." (2) He goes on to assert that existentialist thinkers, among whom he includes his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig, one-sidedly stress "consolation and hope" and neglect the "abyss" which sunders reality. (3) Given the ubiquitous ambiguity of redemption, however, I think Scholem fails to appreciate the nuance of Rosenzweig's thought.

What Scholem articulates and, I aim to show, Rosenzweig illustrates, is a tension within the messianic idea of Judaism between this-worldly and other-worldly, temporal and eternal focii of redemption. As Steven Schwarzchild has put it, Jewish eschatology reckons "the mixture of grace and morality ... of divine, incalculable action and ... human, rationally moral efforts." (4) But is this mixture benign or volatile, restorative or catastrophic? Rosenzweig's answer offers at once stimulating and disconcerting prospects. Specifically, I will argue that "two currents" (following Scholem) animate Rosenzweig's thought on redemption and, furthermore, the tension between them organizes Rosenzweig's thought on Jewish-Christian-pagan relations. Related questions arise as to whether a coincidence or a contest between Judaism and Christianity redresses the assumed pagan denial of death and whether, in the end, the Christians shall become Jewish or the Jews, Christian. To address these questions this essay considers, in turn, Rosenzweig's dual covenant eschatology, apocalyptic imagination, and messianic hermeneutics.

Eschatology and Dual Covenant Theology

In a recent New York Review of Books essay on Rosenzweig Mark Lilla neatly formulates the dilemma of redemption. "If redemption is wholly God's work, we are tempted to leave him to his work and ignore our own; if, however, we participate in this redemptive labor, the temptation is equally great to think we can redeem ourselves through temporal activity." (5) Does redemption come from outside or is it initiated from inside human life? According to Lilla, Rosenzweig gives an "ingenious explanation": the Jewish covenant is unconditional and passive whereas the Christians covenant is conditional and active. (6) Yet this alleged solution does not, in my view, adequately account for Rosenzweig's complicated, ambivalent position.

As befits a dual covenant theology, on Lilla's (and others') interpretation, Christianity and Judaism each play a complimentary if not a cooperative role with the other. Typically this program maintains that Judaism assures redemption by a covenant once made between God and His chosen People, Israel, while Christian salvation is secured with a new dispensation granted by God to those who declare their faith in the savior, Jesus Christ. And, indeed, just such companionship between Christianity and Judaism evidently provides Rosenzweig with justification for retracting a plan which he had previously conceived to undertake baptism by passing through the gates of Judaism and "not through the intermediate stage of paganism." (7)

However, Rosenzweig would twist the dual covenant formulation to suggest a distinctive eschatology. Specifically, he comes to invert the dual covenant's historical succession and theological priority. Thus a 1913 letter justifies his momentous decision--"Ich bleibe also Jude"--on grounds that the first covenant with Jews is nearer to God than the second covenant with Christians. In other words, Rosenzweig proposes that Judaism is not the superceded premise of Christianity, but rather its surpassing pinnacle. Whereas Christianity "reaches the Father" only by means of the Son, (8) Judaism makes no such approach to God. Because Israel "is already with" God. In short, the People Israel is always already--and the Christian individuals are not yet--redeemed. (9)

Still, Rosenzweig approved of Christianity's "Judaizing the pagans," that is, bringing pagans, through conversion, nearer to Judaism (and thus God). (10) For Rosenzweig, theological priority goes to Judaism and historical success to Christianity: as Christianity aims toward Judaism as its target, Judaism summons Christianity to spread the word throughout the world. This implies that Judaism has no relation to the world save through Christianity, an implication I probe in the next section.

Of course, Rosenzweig's formulation undermines both a standard Christian repudiation of Judaism and its Jewish rejoinder. Even liberal Christians who espouse a dual covenant condemn Jews for refusing to admit that "[a] development ... leads through Jesus, in whom alone Jewish religion 'consummates itself,'" in Rosenzweig's words. This condemnation assumes the Jews are "still waiting" for what presently comes by salvation through faith in Christ. Once again inverting priority and success, Rosenzweig avers "that [the] 'connection of the innermost heart with God' which the heathen can only reach through Jesus is something the Jew already possesses." (11) So, on this view, the condemnation is misplaced: not superiority but rather inferiority motivates Christian animosity towards Judaism. By the same token, this inversion undercuts a liberal Jewish response to Christian condemnation. Liberal Jews often claim that an 'ethical monotheism' calling for universal justice proves the durability of a Jewish covenant; Jews, "a light unto the nations," undertake a mission to reorient Christianity. But to Rosenzweig this claim betrays an atheistic "transformation of Judaism into something this-worldly [Verdiesseitigung]"; it mistakenly denies the "offensive thought" of a Jew who accepts God as "the plunging of a higher content into an unworthy vessel." (12) Turning Judaism into a historical success story perverts rather than exhibits its theological priority. (13) That this dualism runs the risk of identifying Christianity with Constantinianism and Judaism with a perfectly realized utopia would find repeated consideration from Rosenzweig.

Rosenzweig's 1921 opus The Star of Redemption elaborates the inversion of historical succession and theological priority. On the one hand the covenant of Christian faith partakes in or, better, generates human history; its path to redemption is expressed through social-political institutions, Church and State. On the other hand the covenant of Jewish practice circumvents temporal change, as expressed liturgically by the cyclical re-enactment of its redeemed status. (14) Put otherwise, the Christian covenant promulgates a mission to conquer the pagan universe and the Jewish covenant issues its mandate by adumbrating the mission's objective. (15) In Rosenzweig's concise formulation, Christianity is always "on the way" to redemption while Judaism has already arrived "at the goal." (16)

While utterly distinct, in this view, Christianity and Judaism are mutually reinforcing. But the distinction virtually suppresses the mutuality. Thus Rosenzweig baldly states Judaism and Christianity supply "two distinct historical manifestations of revelation ... [and] two eternally irreconcilable hopes for the Messiah." (17) Insofar as the Jewish People stand in the present as the actuality (or, from a historical viewpoint, prospective fulfillment) of redemption, their ritual practice stands apart from the ordinary history which Christianity not only inhabits but, even more, conducts. (18) Embodying the telos, Judaism is not so much unhistorical as it is transhistorical: it simultaneously encompasses (as anticipatory) and surpasses (as ulterior) the vicissitudes of temporal change. Rosenzweig's somewhat priestly account segregates Jewish redemption--"ausserhalb einer kriegerischen Zeitlichkeit"--from the historical alterations and the political vagaries which mark the Christian way to redemption. (19) The Christian approach to and the Jewish accomplishment (20) of living with God are coeval, structurally equivalent positions. The end of time (merely) "restores" their coincidence following a provisional separation.

Rosenzweig's apparent dual covenant program therefore reduces Christianity and Judaism to opposing essences while it nevertheless fails to reck-on the incipient antagonism between them. Neither the radical opposition nor the irenic symbiosis is satisfactory. Another current in Rosenzweig's thinking seems to concede this point. Before getting to that, it bears mentioning that a dually covenanted eschatology attained by the Jewish People and promised to the Christian individual has recently won a stunning endorsement. "Reflections on Covenant and Mission" issued by The Consultation of the National Council of Synagogues and the Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, USCCB, reads in part as follows. "While the Catholic Church regards the saving act of Christ as central to the process of human salvation for all, it also acknowledges that Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God." (21) While this dovetails with Rosenzweig's dual covenant program, the statement continues: "The Catholic Church must always evangelize and will always witness to its faith in the presence of God's kingdom in Jesus Christ to Jews and to all other people." Would Rosenzweig approve the Christian Church seeking to evangelize the Jews? Perhaps he would, although this approval would seem to contravene a dual covenant eschatology.

A Modern Apocalyptic Imagination

I submit that this possible contravention results from a tendency in Rosenzweig's thought which does not condone the view that, as Paul Mendes-Flohr has put it, the Jews are "blissfully sequestered in a spiritual reality that anticipates the Kingdom of God." (22) Indeed an undercurrent, spanning the course of Rosenzweig's writings though deepening in later essays, stirs the placid symbiosis of Judaism and Christianity sketched above. This undercurrent concedes a vital antagonism between Judaism and Christianity. (23) Specifically, it returns the Jews into history--albeit as a subversion of history, a specter of worldliness, foreshadowing the afterlife, the pious remnant in an apocalyptic scenario. What I term Rosenzweig's apocalyptic sensibility coheres with John J. Collins' definition of the genre "in which a revelation is mediated by an other-worldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world." (24) The coordinates of apocalypse, I contend, suffuse Rosenzwieg's thought.

Recall Rosenzweig's 1913 letter claiming that the Jewish People are already with God whilst the Christian individual approaches God through the mediation of Jesus Christ. To this he adds, parenthetically and significantly: while "the people of Israel" dwells with God, this could not be said likewise "of individual Jews." (25) The distinction between individual Jews and the Jewish People cannot be overestimated. For while the Jewish People collectively embodies transhistorical redemption, the individual Jew who participates in this collectivity at best incompletely exhibits the redemptive occurrence. In order for the anticipatory form of Jewish liturgy to point beyond historical time, Rosenzweig underscores the dislocation of transcendence from immanence within the configuration of Jewish-ness: inasmuch as Jewish People are redeemed collectively, the Jewish person is not redeemed individually. (26)

In his 1913 letter, Rosenzweig also makes a move that is as decisive as it is for most readers, I suspect, too grim. He writes: "The church knows that Israel will be spared [aufbewahrt] until the last day, (27) when the last Greek has died, when the work of love is completed, when the Day of Judgment, the day wherein hope reaps its harvest, dawns. But what the church admits for Israel in general she denies the individual Jew." (28) Divergent interpretations of this striking passage may recommend themselves, but at least one implication, devastating as it seems, is inescapable: the Church will "spare" Israel until the last day and then ... no longer! The People Israel, ritually grounded "outside" of history, will in the end have ontically departed (or been evacuated?) from it. To be sure, Rosenzweig avers, the Church overreaches in zealousness when it converts (or annihilates) the individual Jew. For then it categorically mistakes the fulfillment (qua Israel = God's chosen people) for the anticipation (qua Jew = member of Israel). (Might this constitute Rosenzweig's preemptive reply to the "Reflections on Covenant and Mission"?) Nonetheless, the Jewish People as a whole, collective entity or body may (or must?) not outlive the end of their historical manifestation--whereas the Christian individual is not subject to this (historical) limitation while, in contrast, he or she never inhabits a world beyond the historical one.

Thus arises Rosenzweig's trenchant, unsettling thesis: the Jewish people are only tangentially historical; their purpose is to implode history. For the Jewish people do not so much abandon the historical world as they stand within and over against it, as "an effecting from an outside." (29) With the end of history, the Jewish people will no longer stand as an impertinent reminder to those who have not yet attained redemption. In the meantime the Jewish People obtain an exclusively negative ontological status. Consequently, Scholem accuses Rosenzweig of condoning political quietism. But even if one were to argue pace Scholem that Jewish resistance is not passive, but active, a Jewish opposition that does not sponsor quietism nevertheless does admit a kind of fatalism. (30) Here Rosenzweig arguably invokes an apocalyptic sensibility without a teleological progression: Israel is subject to a non-linear, a-temporal determinism. (31) As the Star clarifies, "the eternal people's" unique status as a Blutgemeinschaft, whose genealogy is not inscribed by historicity or described by ontology, is predetermined by the "wish to bring about the Messiah before his time' and the temptation to 'coerce the kingdom of God into being.'" (32) Created as a biological entity and redeemed as a liturgical community, Israel wants no more than to burst in and alter reality, to catalyze time from outside and gird being from beyond it. Thereby opening the way for redemption, as it were, the People Israel paradoxically renders each moment of its life "eternal." (33)

Yet the predetermined fate of its "eternal life" comes at a high price for Israel; it exacts the cost of its ordinary mortal existence. (34) To ascertain this disturbing implication, notice how Rosenzweig's phenomenology of ritual constructs the spatial and temporal frames of Judaism and Christianity. On the one hand, as Christianity progresses linearly through time, it spreads geographically around the globe in a seemingly endless mission to bring Judaism nearer to the pagans. Specifically, it expands its purview by successively conquering and converting more and more foreign territory. (35) On the other hand, as Judaism persistently reiterates its liturgical cycle, the spatial framework of the Jewish people (i.e. the space in which Jews practice their Judaism) intensifies and concentrates itself into a more and more narrowly delineated ken. (36) To wit Rosenzweig exploits a familiar narrative: God deemed creation good and humanity made it holy on the Sabbath; the Land of Israel subsequently localized holiness, as did the Temple even further; finally, synagogue, home, and table become the evermore confined spaces in which redemption eternally recurs. Precisely because Judaism confines worship to the "four cubits of the halakhah," it occupies "the world-to-come [kunftige] (37) in this world." In short, the Christian "way" follows a centrifugal course by extending its reach and the Jewish "life" follows a centripetal force by closing in on itself. (38)

Furthermore, as the concentration of Jewish life advances to the end it finally arrives with the eternal kingdom of God coming to reside at the point of circulation for the Blutgemeinschaft. So reads the crux, I believe, of Rosenzweig's masterwork: "[With] the uniting of God, in which the individual elements ... are absorbed into this last one ... the merely Jewish feeling has been transfigured into world-redemptive truth. In the innermost constriction of the Jewish heart there shines the Star of Redemption." (39) The constricted Jewish heart, which intensifies and purifies reality, is quintessentially "erlost." From this intensity and purity there radiates throughout the pagan world, via the mediation (and physical extension) of Christianity, the wider prospects for redemption. (40) As a realized eschatology, so to speak, "eternal life," extracted from the chaos and confusion of world history, is at best anticipated by the "eternal way." (41) As a corollary proposition, the Jews do not participate in or partake of earthly matters: they are not only an extra-territorial people; (42) more so, they are an extraterrestrial non-entity.

Here Rosenzweig's apocalyptic imagination clearly shines through. Positioned at the "core" of the starlight which Christian "rays" spread through pagan darkness, the Jewish people remain inert and blind to the spatially extended world. To some extent the companionship of a dual covenant reasserts itself: Jewish "contraction" finds its counterpart in Christian "expansion." (44) And yet this configuration (as a variation on the way-goal figure) is prima facie more antagonistic, disruptive, violent. For insofar as the Jewish people has "reached the goal ... it cannot belong to the procession of those who approach this goal." Indeed, Israel opposes the eternal to real, actual, historical existence. "Its holiness hinders it from devoting its soul to a still unhallowed world, no matter how much the body may be bound up with it." (45) It is the tragedy--or travesty--of eternal life that Judaism's eternity nullifies the Jew's livelihood.

This potent claim is corroborated elsewhere. As Rosenzweig hints in his 1913 letter, the soul of the Jewish people is separated from the body of the individual Jew. From this follows a dramatic, "catastrophic" result: "this people must deny itself active and full participation in the life of this world with its daily, apparently conclusive, solving of all contradictions." After all, such participation "would render it disloyal to the hope of the final solution [die endliche Losung]." (46) Duly cautious about interpreting this phrase in retrospect of the Holocaust, the uncanny resonance of Rosenzweig's (unprecedented?) language with the Nazi's formulation of the "Endlosung" cannot go unmentioned. (47) We must not avert the implication that the Jewish person's and his or her body's provisional, partial "daily" life is not the same realm in which the Jewish People and its soul operates. Since "life" for the "eternal people" is immortal, we might say, individual Jews are in the world even as the Jewish People is not of it. (48) Jewish inhabitation of the world is, in a word, unreal.

The dislocation of Jewish heart and Jewish body is an internal struggle that mirrors the battle (to the death?) of Judaism and Christianity (over paganism, as I suggest below). For the People Israel, creation and redemption fold in on the point of revelation. (49) Yet this point squeezes out the living, breathing Jewish individual who remains no less pagan because earthly, no less Christian because historical. (50) In other words, the strict identification of beginning and ending (within Judaism) correlates a metaphysical fullness with an ontic emptiness. (51) This position resembles the philosopher Edith Wyschogrod's characterization of a "forward-looking romantic apocalypticism" which converts the plenitude of God's creative actuality into the void of infinite redemptive possibility. In its proleptic fulfillment of redemption the Jewish People adumbrates a fundamental lack or abyss; it collapses past and future into the present instant and empties reality of its being. As theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer unpacks the modern apocalyptic, "a universal consciousness can fully realize itself objectively and actually only by negating its own subjective ground or center.... Death is objectively meaningless and insignificant. But it is subjectively more real than ever, and thereby death becomes the one and only portal to a full and final subjective fulfillment." (52) Inasmuch as death completely saturates life, with 'the end of the world' as it is experienced presently (by the People Israel, for Rosenzweig), it paradoxically fills being with nothing. Wyschogrod comments: "It is as total presence that we encounter this abyss and name it in the only way possible, through silence." (53) So too in Rosenzweig's view the Jewish plenum reaches its apex in the congregation's silent prostration before God on Yom Kippur. (54) Therefore, it seems as if the Jewish People is the non-existent sign which de-negates mortal existence with its historical machinations and geographical adaptations. And this affords the ultimate denegation, or negation that denies itself, of life by death.

To sum up, Rosenzweig's modern apocalyptic vision has two distinct but related features: (1) the difference between people and individual; and (2) the pathos of Jewish dislocation from a world of Christian messianic expansion. We might say that, for Rosenzweig, the individual Jewish body is the dialectical negative of the collective Jewish soul taken up and living eternally in the "people Israel." If, therefore, Judaism straddles history and eternity, it is the body that suffers from its historical dislocation and vulnerability to Christian expansionism whereas it is the people as 'soul' which is the bearer of a realized eschatology. And yet the advent or even the prospect of the eschaton marks a 'complete Judaization' which is a full dissolution of the Jewish people as a distinctive people. (55)

In the end, for Rosenzweig, Christianity replaces paganism with Judaism, adapting Judaism to pagan environs. Judaism remains throughout supernal. But in historical time Christians increasingly take over the place of Jews. And once the proper time has arrived Jews will have served out their purpose as anticipatory. Moreover, the time must come, indeed, it is coming, since "what is not to come save in eternity will not come in all eternity." (56) The end of days is not a regulative idea, pace Hermann Cohen, an endlessly extended horizon towards which the Jewish People strives. Rather, it involves a violent struggle within Judaism, pitting Jew against Jew. In a pregnant 1924 comment on a poem by Judah Ha-Levi, Rosenzweig measures the value of "the false messiah" who, returning again and again, "divides ... those who have the strength of faith to be deceived, and those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived." This lasts "until the one time when it will be the reverse ... and the one who still belongs to the hopeful and not to the faithful ... risks the danger of being rejected." (57) Hope or faith--Jewish or Christian (?)--it is perhaps impossible to untangle. Consequently and paradoxically, the continually reenacted eschaton heralds the apocalyptic termination, even transposition, of liturgical Jewish people and, indeed, historical Christian individual as well as earthly pagan existence.

Is Scripture a Messianic Idea?

In seeking the harmonious eschatology outlined by a dual covenant theology, Rosenzweig's thoughts on Judaism and Christianity demonstrably pass through (or break against) an apocalyptic incursion of the otherworld into this world. (58) Pointedly, what enjoin the paradoxical apocalyptic eschatology are the religious traditions' putative relations to scripture. Redemption is adjudicated by a messianic hermeneutic. For scripture dictates a messianic idea (as Scholem would have it) presaging resolution and inciting disruption among its Christian and Jewish adherents. Rosenzweig's key to unlocking the mystery of the end, I propose, is to coordinate spoken word and written text with their proper hearers and readers. In accord with a classic typology Rosenzweig deems speaking as dynamic, historical, expansive openness and writing as inert, frozen, spatial confinement of redemption. The ironic twist in this binary structure is that scripture pronounces not only Jewish and Christian but also pagan redemption.

Notice how Rosenzweig's Star begins with the justification for thinking, namely, human mortality: "In death, in the fear of death, begins all cognition of the all." (59) It goes on to align visions of the self-sufficient totality of thought and being with efforts by "paganism" (Heidentum) to mollify life's impending termination. For the pagan assumes an equivalence of reality and ideality which surpasses worldly limits and differences. (60) But Rosenzweig avers that the plenary presence of totality is thoroughly disrupted by loss, pain and death. The only path open to healing (Heiligkeit) cuts through irruption and integration, revelatory dialogue and redemptive community. The question remains how pagans are drawn onto the healing path, how revelation addresses paganism through scriptural communities.

In this vein, Christianity and Judaism offer discrete (whether complimentary or contradictory) modalities for addressing the pagan aversion to death. These modalities are speaking and writing. A striking passage in Rosenzweig's 1925 essay "The New Thinking" betrays the ambiguity of covenant which promotes redemption as spoken and/or written. The essay differentiates paganism from "speech-thinking [Sprachdenken]" which "rests ... on needing the other and, what amounts to the same, on taking time seriously." (61) (In the triadic configuration of Jew, Christian and pagan, many "others" are evidently in play.) Thought, spurred by death (as the Star asserts), is transformed in the call-and-response of dialogue, whether it is contentious or collaborative. For dialogue replenishes (written) thought with (spoken) life, breathes life into the word. With serious implications for worldly existence, then, the discernment of truth by speech-thinking is not simply a matter of principle and demonstration so much as of life and death, not epistemology but ontology. (62) And life and death exhibit a choice or the destiny on offer by different communities as revealed through alternative scriptural touchstones with divergent paths. Says Rosenzweig:

        The messianic theory of knowledge which ranks truths according
 to the price of their verification and the bond which they
        institute among human beings cannot however lead beyond the two
        forever irreconcilable expectations of the Messiah: of the
        coming and of the coming again. It cannot lead beyond the And
        [Und] of these final stakes in the truth. Only with God stands
        the verification, only before God is the truth one. Earthly
        truth remains therefore split--divided as the extradivine
        factuality, as the primal facts of world and humanity. Together
        with their And they return in the ultimate facts of Judaism and
        Christianity as the world of law and the faith of man, the law
        of world and the man of faith. (63)

This passage must be carefully parsed. This is because the participial adjectives designating "the coming [kommende]" and "the coming again [wiederkommende]" of the Messiah ambiguously brook two different meanings. On one side, the terms refer to Christ who has already come and is expected to come again, that is, to First and Second Comings. On the other side, they refer to the doctrine of the two Israelite messiahs, David and King Messiah (or Elijah and David). If David (or Elijah) is always 'coming' to bring an end history in its messianic days, yamot ha-mashiach, then King Messiah (or David) 'is coming again' with the after-days, acharit ha-yamim. (64) Hence, occurrences of redemption are at once anticipated and actualized by both Christians and Jews. However, the anticipation-actualization structures are temporally distinguishable. Christianity strings together past and future; Judaism straddles the boundary within time and outside time. As Rosenzweig's cryptic passage suggests, therefore, each tradition-community is necessary but neither is sufficient for discerning the end(s) of redemption. But is it Judaism and Christianity that are "irreconcilable" or their intramural visions of messianism?

The ambiguity persists in Rosenzweig's 1926 essay "Scripture and Luther." In justifying the style of Rosenzweig's and Buber's German Bible translation, the essay notes how Schleiermacher's influential theory of interpretation seeks to balance the accounts of writer and reader. What links them is, as has Dilthey elaborated, a mutual participation in "life." Yet as with any "pagan" worldview this thread evades the limits of death, or it fails to take mortality seriously by simply inoculating it with life. Rosenzweig accordingly uncovers two binary pairs at work in translating the letter into the spirit, namely, writing/reading and speaking/hearing. He begins with the assumption that "all real translation of Scripture" follows a "religious compulsion." For writing and reading gives or directs what speaking and hearing receives and decides. Furthermore, each speaking/hearing of the written/read Bible articulates "a different religious hope, to which all that is profane in Scripture--and what is not profane!--is only a shell beneath which one day something holy, something holy for me, may be revealed." (65) If the written/read text is static and enclosed then it bursts open dynamically with the spoken/heard word, turning what obscures as profanity into what illuminates as holiness.

At first glance, the putative symbiosis of writing/reading and speaking/hearing befits a dual covenant in which the People Israel has already reached what the individual Christian will always approach. For its part Christian salvation, lodged between a First and a Second Coming, occupies a "Zwischenreich." (66) The Christian scripture is temporal and relative; its "man of faith" (as dubbed in the "New Thinking" passage above) is transitional, ephemeral, speaks and hears, affirms and witnesses. In the Christian hermeneutic, demythologization "Judaizes the pagans" by filtering God's message through prevailing cultural media. Just as Jesus' call for conversion was initially wrapped in mythological terms, so its contemporary relevance might be expressed in existential categories. Indeed Christ's appearance (the kerygma's medium) is continuously revised to accommodate cultural empires as they rise and fall. Hence the demythologization of God's direct contact with Israel lays bare a universal presence for humanity because it circuitously mediates the plenums of creation and redemption via revelation. Christian scripture is the fulcrum of historicity, of generation and corruption, "the law of the world." By contrast, Judaism marks the completion, "the faith of man" written and 'sealed in the book of life' (as the Yom Kippur liturgy states). For the Jews scripture establishes a practical (in every sense of the word) reality enjoyed by the eternal people while announcing a final consummation. Judaism does not undo myth; it enacts myth. The Jewish hermeneutic is replete with scripted passages so that, from a mortal perspective, it seems to write the empty, dead letter, "the world of law."

If to Rosenzweig "the conversation of humanity began with this book," with its proleptic fulfillment in Jewish performance, then perhaps it might end beyond the book, with its historical realization via the Christian proclamation. For Rosenzweig's scriptural hermeneutic takes its "starting point" with Judaism and "sets [it] up as the goal" for Christianity. (67) And yet once Christianity reaches its goal, Judaism loses its purpose. Thus I find a curious logic at work in Rosenzweig's hermeneutic strategy. For at some point the Jewish People must break out of its enclosure even as the Christian (or Jewish qua historical) individual must break into it. Rosenzweig's apocalyptic eschatology comes to the fore in the following questions. In the symbiotic order of Jew and Christian, what room is left for the pagans? For whose benefit does Judaism broadcast and Christianity bear the prospect of redemption? In order to break out of the dual covenant's hermeneutic circle (writing/reading, speaking/hearing, Jewish/Christian), a cataclysmic apocalypse dispels the Jewish liturgy even as it discharges the Christian mission. Only this event delivers the Bible over to the pagan humanity it promises to reach. By putting into juxtaposition a Jewish exclusivism based in genealogical descent and a Christian imperialism grounded in cognitive assent, the final outcome of this discord is the redemption of everyone else. No matter how (differently) Christianity and Judaism share in God's covenant, their respective hermeneutics conflict and each, in its own way, remains incomplete and delimited. (68) Even together the parts do not add up to the whole. Rather, the whole transcends--grounds and surpasses--the immanent parts. Only thus may the historical world receive God's intervention; only thus may the ritual performance verify God's purpose. "Any human utterance may conceal the possibility that one day, in his time or in my time, God's word may be revealed in it." (69) We might expect that an explosive message should burst into, and break apart, a prosaic medium. And it seems the pagans are the primordial instigator and the ultimate beneficiary of this message in and against this medium.

Scripture, therefore, is not a book: it is a mode of writing/reading (death) that brings divinity into the ambit of speaking/hearing (life). It is the way by which Judaism and Christianity relate to each other in the vector of a third other--the pagan.

       For the voice of the Bible is not to be enclosed in any
       space--not in the inner sanctum of a church, not in the
       linguistic sanctum of a people, not in the circle of the heavenly
       images moving above a nation's sky. Rather this voice seeks again
       and again to resound from outside--from outside this church, this
       people, this heaven. It does not keep its sound from echoing in
       this or that restricted space, but it wants itself to remain
       free. (70)

The Bible remains outside of any specifically redemptive covenant (be it cataclysmic or restorative) if only to redeem all of the innumerable covenants with-in its scope. As a model of holiness, scripture is set apart from any single community and yet embraces every community (even that as yet unformed: the community with nothing in common). As with all gifts or signs of divinity, scripture exceeds the giver and compels the receiver to reciprocate. (71) Scripture is a gift bequeathed by the Jews as the possession of the Christians for the sake of the pagans; it departs from Judaism, passes through Christianity, and incorporates paganism. With more than a tinge of irony Rosenzweig states, "the Bible is written for the sake of the reader who has been denied it." (72)

Despite its perplexities and paradoxes, Rosenzweig's hermeneutic approach of a dual covenant conjoined with and opposed by an apocalyptic sensibility becomes unavoidable as both Judaism and Christianity encounter the pagan world. Given the renewed challenge which a neo-pagan secularization poses equally to Christianity and Judaism, Rosenzweig opines in his 1929 "Bible" article (for the Encyclopaedia Judaica) that both new and old testaments not only "establish a connection between generations," sustaining church and synagogue--faith in this-world and hope for the other-world. Even more, scripture "must guarantee the connection between the center and periphery," Judaism and paganism, even as it drives a wedge, Christianity, between them. (73) For Rosenzweig, scripture holds a community together by putting it into apologetic contact with adversarial communities; like any speaking which takes writing seriously, it thinks through the other. (74) Its empty form (or medium) filled with variable contents (or messages), center and periphery are set in a dynamic relation, contracting and expanding, withdrawing from and engaging with friend and foe alike.

This strange and powerful opinion confers on scripture its messianic quality, for scripture instructs communities on how they might consummate redemption. But not every community attains redemption in the same manner and measure. Perhaps Christianity promises this-worldly restitution. But Judaism sanctions otherworldly disruption. However at odds, these scriptural communities intersect. For paganism must drink from the water of both wells as it moves outside of history precisely by rooting itself in the earth (autochthonous). Just this coordination signals Rosenzweig's agreement with Scholem's assertion that "the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment ... [since] there is nothing concrete which can be accomplished by the unredeemed." (75) Indeed: paganism lives in deferment of redemption altogether; Christianity lives in deference to its finality; and Judaism lives in deferral of its immateriality. Thus arises the utmost paradox: a discrete view of divine consummation is inevitable and impossible, self-affirming and self-defeating. For scripture's "world-historical significance" is at once based on and opposed to living the covenant with one or another--eternal and historical, terrestrial and supernatural--life. (76)

Notes

1. I am indebted to the feedback from Randi Rashkover, Robert Erlewine, and audience members who heard versions of the paper at Stanford University, Rice University, and American Academy of Religion western and southwestern regional meetings.

2. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 33, 3, 12; and cf, the dispute at Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 63a.

3. Scholem, Messianic Idea, 35. Elsewhere Scholem writes, "the deep-seated tendency to remove the apocalyptic thorn from the organism of Judaism makes Rosenzweig ... one of the most vigorous exponents of a very old and very powerful movement in Judaism," viz. the restorative current (323).

4. See Steven Schwarzschild, The Pursuit of the Ideal, edited by Menachem Kellner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 226.

5. Mark Lilla, "A Battle for Religion," New York Review of Books (December 5, 2002), Internet edition.

6. This distinction in fact appears in various strata of Jewish texts. Jon D. Levenson's Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1985), for instance, ascribes conditional covenant to the revelation at Mt. Sinai and unconditional covenant to David's exchange with God at Mt. Zion.

7. Nahum N. Glatzer, editor, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 24-25. See Maurice G. Bowler, "Rosenzweig on Judaism and Christianity--The Two Covenant Theory," Judaism 22:4 (1973): 475-81; David Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 93-113; Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); 79-86; and Steven Schwarzschild, Franz Rosenzweig: Guide to Reversioners (London, 1960), 31-36.

8. Cf. John 14:6.

9. Glatzer, 27-28.

10. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, editor, Judaism Despite Christianity: The 'Letters on Christianity and Judaism' between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 112.

11. "... Provided that his Judaism is not withheld from him by force" (Glatzer, 27-29).

12. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften III (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 697, 693, 694, and Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, edited by Paul Franks and Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 24, 19, 20.

13. For an alternative account see Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

14. To be sure, Judaism also has a narrative tradition through which it expresses a temporalized covenant--though it is held in check by the liturgical cycle. See Randi Rashkover, "Rosenzweig's Return to Biblical Theology: An Encounter between the Star of Redemption and Jon Levenson's Sinai and Zion," in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11:1 (2002): 75-89.

15. The notion that Christians spread the word of God in preparing a way for the Messiah's arrival is not original to Rosenzweig. See the (oft-censored) passage in Maimonides' Mishnah Torah (Hilkhot Melakhim u-Milkhamotehem) translated and discussed by Menachem Kellner, "How Ought a Jew View Christian Beliefs about Redemption," in Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer, editors, Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 273.

16. "Das Judische Volk ist fur sich schon an dem Ziel, dem die Volker der Welt erst zuschreiten," Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 331, cf. also 329, 342-343, 358-59, and Der Stern der Erlosung, Frakfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 368 and 416. Cf. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120-21, 264, 291-295.

17. Glatzer, 202, 206.

18. On Rosenzweig's phenomenology of the liturgical calendar in Judaism (Star, 298-335), see Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 136-51; and Stephane Moses, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 186-200.

19. Star, 332. Rosenzweig dubs Judaism "the eternal life" and Christianity, "the eternal way." On theological assumptions behind the liturgical calendar's establishing "temples in time," see Israel Knohl's phenomenology of the priestly sacrifice and its prophetic transformations in The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

20. By this I allude to John 17:4, although "accomplishment" is not really the most accurate term since it implies development and progression, whereas the Jewish People do not grow into this state--they are always already in it.

21. "Reflections on Covenant and Mission" issued August 12, 2002: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/research/cjl/Documents/ncs_usccb120802.htm [last accessed 12/01/03].

22. Paul Mendes-Flohr. "'The Stronger and Better Jews': Jewish Theological Responses to Political Messianism in the Weimar Republic," Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era, edited by Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 165-66.

23. Star, 415-17.

24. John J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (Semeia 14; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 9, and The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans and Livonia: Dove, 1998), 5.

25. Glatzer, 341.

26. Rosenzweig implies that the Jew, in Schwarzschild's words, "always and everywhere is a stranger in Judaism and with God and that, as a matter of fact, our commitment to the eventual Messianic Kingdom must perforce estrange [the Jew] from the existing conditions of the world at all stages prior to that of the Messiah." See his Guide for Reversioners, 14. The issue is treated differently by Leora Batnitzky, for whom "each [Jew] who will see the whole" serves as "a check against totalizing politics" (Idolatry and Representation, 177-87). As I understand it, the category of the whole "Jewish People" is a construct that is never realized or "seen" but only performed or, better, mimed by the liturgical cycle. The individual Jew (but not "Judaism") is, quoting Randi Rashkover (personal communication), "between the two extreme positions of before and after redemption"; this ideal is "verifiable through practical action [I would say: spiritual exercise] and not only epistemologically accessible."

27. Cf. Luke 21:20, 22-23.

28. Glatzer, 344, and Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften I (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), Band 1: 136.

29. Star, 225.

30. Compare Scholem's earlier essay "On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption" in The Messianic Idea, 320-25 (esp. 323) with his later essay, "Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption," in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 20-41 (esp. 40). Scholem's misattribution of "quietism" to Rosenzweig and Rosenzweig's apocalyptic sensibility are discussed by Paul Mendes-Flohr, "'The Stronger and the Better Jews,'" 159-85, idem. Divided Passions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 357 (on Star, 337-74, 413-17), idem. "Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism," in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 158 (on Judaism Despite Christianity, 168); and by Elliot Wolfson, "Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig," in Zeitschrift fur Neuere Theologiegeschichte 4: 1 (1997): 39-81.

31. On the notion of a non-teleological eschatology, see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 22.

32. Star, 227. "That the kingdom is 'among you,' that it is coming 'today,' is a notion of the future which eternalizes the moment" (Star, 226); this phrase links up Jewish and Christian notions of redemption (cf. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 98a, Matthew 10:7 and Mark 1:15).

33. Neither permitted to grow nor susceptible to decay, outside natural-historical generation and corruption, Rosenzweig's Jewish People are immortal; see Star, 227, 299, 409, and Moses, System, 177.

34. Alexander Altmann writes, "it is the task of the Jew to sacrifice life in the world for the purpose of testifying to the messianic goal of history" ("Rosenzweig on History," in Mendes-Flohr, The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 129). I do not see this as a "task" (for it is not willful) so much as a predetermined role. Still this does not confirm the "quietude" which Scholem condemns, because this "sacrifice" demands 'active' Jewish resistance or, better, repudiation of Christianity; it surpasses the active-passive dichotomy.

35. See Star, 348-49, 354-59, 397.

36. See Richard Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 26.

37. See various references to Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 8a at Star, 336, 405-409, and 420. Note Rosenzweig's 1917 essay "It is Time: The Study of Judaism": the Jewish world is "not a preliminary stage to that other world" since it is that other world already accomplished, in anticipation of a final historical redemption. See On Jewish Learning, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 29-30. Cf. Mendes-Flohr, Passions, 356.

38. Star, 328-331.

39. "In der innergsten Enge des Judischen Herzens leuchtet der Stern der Erlosung," Star 410-11, Gesammelte Schriften II, 456-7. On the Kabbalistic tropes of the "chariot" and the "shekhina," see Moshe Idel, "Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah," Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 163-71. Cf. Rosenzweig's note, "Kusari: Das Herz der Welt," in "Judische Geschichte im Rahmen der Weltgeschichte" [1920], Gesammelte Schriften III, 549.

40. The quoted passage appears under the subsection "The Unity of God," followed by the subsection "The Christian Doctrine of the Last Things."

41. The heart's identification of promise and fulfillment conveys the perfectly realized salvation, the eschaton in real time. On the trope of the "heart" see Glatzer, 27-29. On realized eschatology, see Rudolf Bultmann: "The meaning in history lies in the present and when the present is conceived as the eschatological present by the Christian faith, the meaning of history is realized," in The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 155.

42. Star, 304; on Jewish People as extra-territorial, see Funkenstein, Perceptions, 295.

43. Star, 298; and cf. Funkenstein, Perceptions, 300.

44. Star, 404.

45. "... Mag es dieser Welt noch so sehr mit dem Leibe verhaftet sein," Star, 331-32.

46. Stern, 368-69 [emphasis added]; Star, 332 inexplicably translates the indefinite article ("a final solution") for the definite article ("die endliche Losung").

47. This resonance merits further consideration, beginning with Berel Lang's trenchant discussion in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 84-92.

48. Here, as elsewhere, Rosenzweig transforms a Christian theologoumenon into a Jewish virtue, a strategy which Funkenstein has adumbrated (Perceptions, 269). In this case, compare references to a "celestial Jerusalem" in Galatians 4:25, Revelations 3:12, 21:2. Incidentally, the extraction of Jewish People if not individual Jews from history might explain Rosenzweig's relative indifference as opposed to hostility towards Zionism: certainly individual Jews might (even must) attain political power, but the Jewish People simply cannot. We require separate treatment for the role of the Jewish body as genitalia and heart rather than bones and flesh (a la St. Paul).

49. Jewish revelation ceaselessly re-lives its creation and redemption (Star, 303).

50. For an alternative reading, see Robert Gibbs, "Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin," in Toward the Millenium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, edited by Peter Schafer and Mark Cohen (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1998), 363-382. On the mediation between the poles of historical individual Jew and liturgical ontological Judaism, see Rashkover, "Rosenzweig's Return to Biblical Theology," 80.

51. On Rosenzweig's apocalyptic inversion of ontic factuality and ontological condition, see Wolfson, "Facing the Effaced," 54. See also Zachary Braiterman, "Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig," in Beginning/Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, edited by Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid (Seven Bridges Press, 2002), 215-38. For an alternative view see Moses, System, 26, 134-138.

52. Thomas J. J. Altizer, "Apocalypticism and Modern Thinking," Journal for Christian Theological Research 2:2 (1997), http://apu.edu/~CTRF/articles/1997_articles/altizer.html [last accessed 12/01/03] and "Modern Thought and Apocalypticism," in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, volume 3 (New York: Continuum, 1998), 325-359. On the ancient trope see John J. Collins, "Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death," Catholic Bible Quarterly 36 (1974), 21-43.

53. Wyschogrod adds, "hope lies in both negating and affirming this void by an absence of speech that is nevertheless language, even if the subject of language disappears," in "Value," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 376.

54. See Star, 324. And the proper name of God remains unspoken (Star, 384-85).

55. I credit Randi Rashkover for the insight and the formulation of this paragraph.

56. Glatzer, 358.

57. Rosenzweig's comment on Ha-Levi's "Good Tidings" is translated by Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), 259.

58. Rosenzweig advocates "apologetic thinking [which] remains dependent on the cause, the adversary" (Philosophical and Theological Writings, 98.

59. Stern, 3.

60. On paganism see Philosophical and Theological Writings, 120.

61. Philosophical and Theological Writings, 127.

62. See Scholem, "Rosenzweig and His Book," 40.

63. Gesammelte Schriften III, 159. A nuance is missed by the English translations at Glatzer, 206; Philosophical and Theological Writings, 136; and Franz Rosenzweig's 'The New Thinking', edited and translated by Barbara E. Galli and Alan Udoff (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1999), 99.

64. See Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim u-Milkhamotehem 11:1, 12:2.

65. Franz Rosenzweig, "Scripture and Luther," in Scripture and Translation, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 66.

66. Judaism Despite Christianity, 112-13, 136, Star, 337-40, 420 and Franz Rosenzweig Briefe, edited by Edith Rosenzweig (Berlin, 1935), 302, 316-17, 331-32, cited by Altmann, "Rosenzweig on History," 129.

67. Star, 420.

68. Put schematically: for Christians, covenant bridges the distance and proximity-letter or spirit-of scripture; while for Jews, covenant disrupts the past and future-letter and spirit-of scripture.

69. "Scripture and Luther," 64, and cf. 59.

70. "Scripture and Luther," 56.

71. See Star, 274.

72. "Scripture and Luther," 57.

73. Glatzer, 275. On the vital terminology of center and periphery, see Alan Udoff's "Retracing the Steps of Franz Rosenzweig," in Franz Rosenzweig's 'The New Thinking', 153-73, 192-213.

74. See Philosophical and Theological Writings, 98.

75. Scholem, Messianic Idea, 35.

76. Glatzer, 275 and Gesammelte Schriften III, 839-40. "For while the course of the one world history that began with this book may change its protagonists, it cannot lose connection with its origin and each successive step of its development. This connection is precisely what we call world history. No future can undo the past, just as no past can prevent the coming of that which is to come."