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

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2004 by Gregory Kaplan

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.