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

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2004 by Gregory Kaplan

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.