On the significance of the messianic idea in Rosenzweig.

The works of Franz Rosenzweig have not only become a locus classicus for understanding what it might mean, from a modern Jewish perspective, to conceive of history "messianically." The history of their reception among post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers is itself a remarkable reflection of both the potential and the ambivalence of what Gershom Scholem called the "messianic idea" for understanding contemporary Jewish existence. Rosenzweig is certainly a figure that Jewish thought has struggled with in attempting to make sense of the Jewish situation in the post-Holocaust era.

Thus, Emmanuel Levinas, who was of course crucially influenced by Rosenzweig and who drew heavily on Rosenzweig's thinking about the modern Jewish experience, commented in a 1981 interview:

       His thinking is also very seductive for me, because it is the
       thought of modern Judaism, that is, of Judaism that has gone
       through assimilation. This is not at all someone who didn't enter
       into it; he's a European Jew who left it, and left it without
       shaking off his European history as one shakes off dust from
       one's feet. That is very important. Modern, then, but modern in a
       certain sense, that is, before puberty. For men of our time, I
       call "puberty" the fact of having known Hitlerism and the
       Holocaust. Rosenzweig missed the ultimate ordeal [epreuve]. (1)

Emil Fackenheim is another contemporary for whom Rosenzweig's texts are key to thinking about Jewish existence. But unlike Levinas, Fackenheim is unequivocal in finding in Rosenzweig a problematic interlocutor. In To Mend the World (1982), referring to Rosenzweig's much-discussed journey from near-conversion to Christianity to an embrace of Judaism as a distinctive path, Fackenheim writes:

       Events since Rosenzweig have shown, for all with eyes to see,
       that the price for his return to Judaism can no longer be paid.
       Rosenzweig was able to carry out his postmodern return to the
       premodern Jewish faith only by making all Jewish existence
       ahistorical or, which is the same thing, by sacralizing it.
       (While much in world history was of great moment, in Jewish
       history nothing of moment had happened or could happen between
       Sinai and the Messianic days.) Yet, less than four years after
       Rosenzweig's death events began to unfold--events still far from
       over and done with--which, for better or worse, have cast the
       Jewish people back firmly, inescapably, irrevocably, back into
       history: not into sacred history, but rather into the
       flesh-and-blood history of men, women, and children--as
       Rosenzweig himself well put it, the history of Mord und
       Totschlag. (2)

These lines exemplify Fackenheim's treatment of Rosenzweig in To Mend the World, which may be characterized as a reading against the grain. Fackenheim finds immense value in Rosenzweig's reorientation of the agenda of Jewish thought--as in this quoted passage, which praises Rosenzweig's valorization of flesh-and-blood history. But he finds in those valuable aspects of Rosenzweig's reorientation of Jewish thought the very reasons for the inadequacy of his thought to the contemporary situation.

In what follows, I will try to show that the line of thinking that informs the above-quoted remarks on Rosenzweig is deeply at odds with the messianic philosophy of history that is suggested by Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption and related writings. In doing so, I shall proceed from the assumption that to read history backwards risks distorting the meaning not only of past events and utterances, but also the enterprise of philosophical discovery that we share with the authors whom we study, and that forms the basis of our study. We may have many reasons for disagreeing with Rosenzweig about philosophical questions, but to base our disagreements on the accusation that he did not live to know what we know puts them on very shaky ground indeed. That this is so constitutes a major difference between arguments about philosophy and arguments about historical or scientific fact.

Christoph Schulte has particularly highlighted the way this danger comes into play in readings of pre-war German-Jewish writing, readings that necessarily operate, whether explicitly or implicitly/unreflectedly, from a position of "indignation and disappointment, shame and hatred in the face of the Germans' mass murder of the Jews." In this context, Schulte cautions against using "history" as a standard for deciding "questions of legitimacy or normativity":

       "History" doesn't pass or execute judgments. World history is not
       the world's judgment [Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht das
       Weltgericht (3)].... Nor did "history" stage the Shoah, we know
       better than that. Perpetrators and victims have names. Here,
       history did not have its own, terrible power. Whoever ascribes
       such a power to it becomes an apologist for the perpetrators, who
       would then of course only be "implements" of history. But often
       it is simply more convenient to blame history instead of
       people. (4)

Let us pause for a moment to recall how modern philosophy has traditionally conceived of its interest in the historical. Taking Kant's "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784) as a classic statement of this interest, we may read there, under its "Eighth Proposition," that

       Human nature is such that it cannot be indifferent even to the
       most remote epoch which may eventually befall our species, so
       long as this epoch can be expected with certainty. And in the
       present case, it is especially hard to be indifferent, for it
       appears that we might by our own rational projects accelerate the
       coming of this period which will be so welcome to our
       descendants....
       It would be a misinterpretation of my intention to contend that I
       meant this idea of a universal history, which to some extent
       follows an a priori rule, to supersede the task of history
       proper, that of empirical composition. My idea is only a notion
       of what a philosophical mind, well acquainted with history, might
       be able to attempt from a different angle. (5)

Two aspects of Kant's thinking about history stand out here: First, that as human beings, we are invested in the question of whether there is historical progress, and whether human agency can contribute to such progress. We may not agree with Kant about whether we may be allowed to "expect with certainty" an epoch that will be more "welcome" than the one we live in now, but to be human is to not be indifferent to the question of what direction history is taking. Second, while historians study "history proper" in its "empirical composition," the "idea of universal history" that is philosophy's interest (based on the general human condition of non-indifference to history that we have just mentioned) is simply the recognition that the idea of universal progress is not something we can get away from, whether or not we think that the human situation is improving. The idea of progress a priori determines our thinking about historical facts--before and independently of any specific knowledge about those facts.

Let us consider now Gershom Scholem's classic introduction to the "messianic idea in Judaism":

        Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always
        maintained a concept of redemption understood as a process that
        takes place in the public sphere, on the stage of history, and
        in the medium of the community; that is, takes place decisively
        in the world of the visible and which cannot be thought apart
        from such appearance in the visible ...
        The Messianic idea came into being not only as the revelation of
        an abstract proposition regarding the hope of humankind for
        redemption, but rather each time in very specific historical
        circumstances. The predictions and messages of the biblical
        prophets come to an equal degree from revelation and from the
        suffering and desperation of those to whom they are addressed;
        they are spoken from within situations and again and again have
        shown themselves to be effective in situations where the End was
        perceived to be imminent, to be about to break in abruptly at
        any moment. (6)

If we compare this with Kant's characterization of philosophy's interest in history, we may make three observations:

(1) Like the "idea of universal history"--of an ultimate direction or telos of history--that human beings cannot be indifferent to, the "messianic idea" maintains a reference to a "concept of redemption," which is the object of human hope.

(2) The object of this messianic hope must not be thought of as an abstraction--and thus not an a priori like Kant's notion of universal history--but belongs to the empirical realm of historical specificity; it "takes place decisively in the world of the visible."

(3) But unlike the Kantian telos of a universal history thought as progress, the messianic event cannot be the culmination of a linear temporal process. Instead, "the End [is] perceived [as] imminent," "about to break in abruptly at any moment."

This classic formulation of the Jewish "messianic idea" provides a helpful backdrop against which to take up Franz Rosenzweig's deployment of a messianic temporality in the systematic critique of traditional Western philosophy that forms his central philosophical contribution. While this critique culminated in his magnum opus, the Star of Redemption (written 1918/19, published 1921), and some important essays, notably "The New Thinking" (1925), the impetus behind it is expressed in letters and essays dating back to the famous 1913 conversion crisis and its aftermath. It is during this period that Rosenzweig first posits the dualism between Judaism and Christianity that becomes essential to the structure of the Star. Initially, to posit such a dualism is a means of asserting, against Christian-supercessionist interpretations, that Judaism is not obsolete. In 1913, Rosenzweig writes to Rudolf Ehrenberg (who was, along with Hans Ehrenberg and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of the central figures with whom Rosenzweig had intense discussions surrounding his decision to remain a Jew--all three of them having themselves converted from Judaism to Christianity) that he now realizes that in their stance toward the world--in their missionary aspirations--Judaism and Christianity are essentially different. That is, he recognizes that it is no longer necessary to "begrudge the church its scepter," its claim to universal sovereignty. Further, he now comes to regard it as mistaken to view the synagogue as having a "bent scepter" or as having "no place in this world." Rather, in their political-historical significance, Judaism and Christianity represent two, diametrically opposed paths: While the Christian path leads "the world" and consists of a universal Christian mission, the Jewish path "negates" the world and shuns any mission. (7)

In his letter Rosenzweig also expresses this difference in temporal terms: What Jesus says in John 14:6 about the redemption of the world, "No one comes to the Father except through me," is amended by Rosenzweig as follows:

       No one comes to the father [except through the son]--but it is
       otherwise if someone no longer needs to come to the father
       because he is already with him. And this is the case for the
       people of Israel ...

"Already-being-with" thus characterizes the Jewish relationship to God, its condition of being "elected." It is the same temporal mode of "eternity" that Rosenzweig later associates with the existence of the Jewish people, which is portrayed in the Star as

       the only [community] ... which cannot utter the 'we' of its unity
       without hearing deep within a voice that adds: 'are eternal'....
       What for other communities is the future and is thus something
       which still lies beyond the present--for this community alone it
       is already present; for it alone the future is nothing alien
       [nichts Fremdes], but something proper to itself
       [ein Eigenes]. (8)

This eternity is not understood by Rosenzweig as "a very long time" (S 250/224); the one "eternal people" lives not "in between" the beginning and the end of time, but "outside" time and history. "Its eternal life constantly anticipates [nimmt vorweg] the end" (S 467/420). This notion of Vorwegnahme--which is no mere intellectual "anticipation" but actually a "foreclosure" or "preempting" of the end, a "bringing to an end before the end"--shows up already in the 1913 letter to Ehrenberg: Until the end of the world, "Israel's life" consists in "anticipating/foreclosing/preempting [vorwegnehmen] this day in its avowals [Bekenntnis, in the sense of religious confession or creed] and actions, to stand as a preliminary sign [or prefix, Vorzeichen] of this day."

"Not having to go through the son" in order to reach the end of days amounts to "not having to go through worldly history," as Rosenzweig underlines in this early characterization of Jewish election:

        The people of Israel, chosen by its father, fixes its gaze
        [blickt starr] over and past the world and history at that last
        and most distant point, at which [God] its father, this same
        one, the one and unique one, will be "all in all."

This last reference is to the characterization of Christ's resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, according to which Christ reigns until the end of days, upon which he himself becomes subject to God as the father, who then becomes "all in all." "The world and history," which the Jewish people can look across and beyond, and thus disregard, is the purview of Christians, who "must go through the son," and thus through history, in order to finally reach God. It is thus no longer necessary to "begrudge" the church its sovereignty, as Rosenzweig puts it regarding his earlier view: The synagogue may indeed have "a broken scepter," it may be "blindfolded" in that it "must itself give up any worldly labor," but it is "immortal," and in its efforts to "keep itself alive and purified of life," it participates in the same "hope for the end" and the same project of universal salvation as does the church. "Thus the church and the synagogue are dependent upon one another." From this definition of Judaism in terms of eternity, Rosenzweig in the Star develops a new conception of the Jewish people, in which the idea of chosenness converges with a messianic view of history: the Jews are chosen in the sense of having a unique role to fulfill in world history. Their existence testifies to a messianic history, because unlike the Christians, whose path to redemption leads through history, the Jews are always "already with God"; their relationship with redemption is an immediate one. It is in this sense that, Rosenzweig argues, the Jewish people is "outside history."

If we recall the features of Jewish messianism that emerged from Scholem's account, we may notice again that Rosenzweig, with his distinction between Christian history and Jewish eternity, has broken with the idea that Jewish existence should be understood as a linear historical process, along the lines of Kant's view of history as a teleological progression. Alongside the truth that is revealed within history (the truth of Christianity), there is the truth of a revelation that comes from outside history (to which "the life of Israel" attests). Thus, to the extent that messianism has a place in Rosenzweig's philosophy of Judaism, it is not as a way of understanding Judaism as a force in history in the ordinary sense, but a way of bringing into focus the "eternal," non-historical aspects of Jewish existence. This is where Fackenheim's terminology, in his above-quoted assessment of Rosenzweig's significance for contemporary Jewish self-understanding, is at odds with what Rosenzweig himself was attempting. While Rosenzweig's schema allows us to think of Sinai and the Messianic days as coinciding in a single moment--that moment of "already-being-with" in which the Jews find themselves--we must not think of Jewish history as inhabiting a stretch of time "between" those events, as if they were factical, temporal events. And what this means is not, as Fackenheim writes, that Rosenzweig has "made Jewish existence ahistorical." Instead, his schema suggests a new concept of history. For how could our very understanding of history fail to be affected by the positing of an "outside," of a messianic dimension that is liable to "break in abruptly at any moment," as Scholem put it?

That taking this idea of messianic interruption seriously is a prerequisite for a view of history that entails a radical openness to the future is illustrated by a late text by Rosenzweig about the Jewish messianic experience. It is an interpretative note he added to one of his translations of Jehuda Halevi's poems. The poem is entitled "The Joyous Message" or "Joyous Tidings" ("Die frohe Botschaft"), and Rosenzweig reads it as a believer's testimony to the appearance of a figure who turns out to be a so-called "false messiah"--indeed, he claims that this testimony must be Jehuda Halevi's own. Rosenzweig regards the narrator-author's misplaced faith and his ensuing disappointment as a necessary component of faith.

      The anticipation of the Messiah, which Judaism lives on and lives
      for, would be an empty theologoumenon, a mere "idea," chatter-were
      it not continually realized and unrealized, were it not constantly
      taken in and disappointed by the figure of the "false Messiah."
      The false Messiah is as old as hope for the true one. He is the
      changing form of this unchanging hope. Every Jewish generation is
      divided by him into those who have the strength of faith to allow
      themselves to be deluded and those whose have the strength of hope
      to resist delusion. The former are better, the latter are
      stronger. The former bleed as sacrifices on the altar of the
      eternity of the people, the latter serve as priests before this
      altar. Until that time when it will be the other way around and
      the faith of the faithful will become truth. While the hope of the
      hopeful becomes a lie. Then--and no one knows whether this "Then"
      won't happen even today [noch heute]--then the task of the hopeful
      will have come to an end, and whoever then, on the morrow of this
      Today, still belongs to the hopeful and not to the faithful, risks
      being rejected [verworfen, which has the additional connotation of
      "morally corrupt"--D.H.]. This danger looms over the seemingly
      less dangerous life of the hopeful. (9)

What emerges from this account is that messianism in its most radical sense is not reducible to "hope" as we ordinarily conceive of it. The hopeful do not expose themselves to the danger of being deluded, and so perhaps they don't even hope. This view of the messianic situation is consistent with Rosenzweig's characterization of a Jewish non-linear temporality, in that the faithful are not portrayed as inhabiting any "between." This stands in contrast to Fackenheim's criticism that for Rosenzweig, "in Jewish history nothing of moment had happened or could happen between Sinai and the Messianic days."

Even Scholem's own account of messianic experience falls into this trap. Like Fackenheim, he conflates the meaning of the messianic idea with a view of history as a linear succession of temporal events, and like Fackenheim, he posits the messianic situation as a situation of historical inaction or ineffectiveness with his famous reflection, at the close of his essay, on the "price of messianism":

       the price which the Jewish people has had to pay out of its own
       substance for this idea which it handed over to the world. The
       magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless
       powerlessness of Jewish history which in exile was unprepared to
       become active on the historical plane.... In Judaism the
       Messianic idea has thus compelled a life lived in deferment....
       Precisely understood, there is nothing concrete which can be
       accomplished by the unredeemed. This makes for the greatness of
       Messianism, but also for its constitutional weakness. (10)

But is there really no passage possible between what Rosenzweig calls messianic faith, and what Scholem calls history? Can we not rather conceive of messianic faith, with its radical openness to the future, as the very prerequisite for action? Thus, Jacob Taubes, commenting on Scholem's assessment, finds instead that "every endeavor to actualize the Messianic idea was an attempt to jump into history, however mythically de-railed the attempt may have been." (11)

Like Fackenheim, Scholem welcomes a Jewish "return to history" in the form of Jewish statehood. But as a "utopian return to Zion," it has for him at best an ambivalent relationship to "the crisis of the Messianic claim," which still poses a threat. Taubes is more explicit in this regard: While he understands the messianic as also a force in history, he cautions against "the illusion that redemption ... happens on the stage of history," an illusion that he ascribes to the Zionist return and that poses "a danger in the present spiritual and political situation of the Jewish people." Taubes thus offers a more complicated schema than the simple ahistorical/historical opposition that Fackenheim operates with in his assessment that while Rosenzweig "in his own time ... gave the most profound modern account of the Jewish people ... as eternal because it was in history but not of it," "in our own time, he would have to recognize that ... this people has returned into history" (MW 92). The problem here is that Fackenheim resorts to categories of past and present that are foreign to the Rosenzweigian understanding of the Jewish messianic schema.

That taking that messianic schema seriously is not incompatible with social and political engagment (and indeed, in this particular case, with the affirmation of Jewish statehood) is illustrated by Ernst Simon  in a 1964 text entitled "Sacred Sobriety" ("Heilige Nuchternheit"), a title drawn from a Holderlin poem:

       The constant reference of the life of faith to everyday
       earthliness gives the pious Jewish home in its best form
       something of that mood that Holderlin ... called "sacred-sober"
       [heilig nuchtern]....
       Jewish existence stems from the depths of time, just as its
       fundamental book begins with the first sentence of creation, and
       is attenuated toward the future. In the everyday of history, its
       messianism is strangely un-utopian. The fundamental mood of this
       messianism, which however is continually interrupted by massive
       historical eruptions, is one of skeptical hope. Every current
       messianic promise or eschatological call that understands itself
       as the fulfillment that has come [here Simon mentions
       Christianity and Communism as examples--D.H.] are joined with
       fervor, for a while, by many individual Jews or entire groups.
       But a core of the people winds up turning away from them with a
       scrutinizing eye, and continues on its way under the beloved
       burden of the law. This core can unburden itself only when the
       world is redeemed. Until then, however, it must patiently work at
       redemption, in the region of the "interhuman" (Buber), in the
       social and political realm. (12)

Here Simon, taking his lead as much from Martin Buber's dialogism as from Rosenzweig's conception of Jewish existence, might have found a way to translate the latter's concept of messianic faith into a stance that bridges the apparent gap between historical and ahistorical, between action and paralysis. The messianic end here is "un-utopian," and waiting for it is a "sober labor at redemption," nourished by an attitude of "skeptical hope."

Notes

1. Salomon Malka, Lire Levinas (Paris: Cerf, 1984), 105. "Interview with Salomon Malka," trans. Jill Robbins and Marcus Coelen, in Jill Robbins (ed.), Is It Righteous To Be? Interviews With Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 94-95, trans. mod.

2. Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World. Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1989), 33, cf. 95. Hereafter abbreviated as "MW."

3. A negation of Schiller's famous line, "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht": "World history is the world's judgment."

4. Christoph Schulte, "Nicht nur zur Einleitung. Deutschtum und Judentum. Ein Disput under Juden aus Deutschland." Introductory essay to Schulte (ed.), Deutschtum und Judentum. Ein Disput under Juden aus Deutschland (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 9.

5. Immanuel Kant, "Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht" (1784). "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose," trans. H. B. Hisbet, from Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge UP, 1970).

6. Gershom Scholem, "Zum Verstandnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum" (1959), Judaica (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 7, 14. "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism," The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 1, 4-5, trans. mod.

7. Letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg dated October 31 and November 1, 1913, in Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.1: Briefe und Tagebucher, 1900-1918, 132-37.

8. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlosung (1921), 4th ed., Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1976), 331-32. The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (1970; Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1985), 298-99. Hereafter referred to as "S." All translations modified.

9. Franz Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi. Funfundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte (1927), Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV.1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), 202-3. See the translation in Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi. Translating, Translations, and Translators (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995), 259.

10. Scholem, 73-74/35.

11. Jacob Taubes, "The Price of Messianism," Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 33, no. 1-2 (1982), 599-600. Taubes continues: "It is simply not the case that Messianic phantasy and the formation of historical reality stand at opposite poles."

12. Ernst Simon, "Heilige Nuchternheit" (1964), in Brucken (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1965), 468-70. Simon's essay also makes a significant attempt to explain what this kind of engagement ought to mean for achieving justice in the Jewish state.