Rosenzweig’s and Ours

Christianity is Judaism for the Gentiles. That is the maxim attributed, not quite accurately, to Franz Rosenzweig, whose life, Mark Lilla rightly observes, “is among the most moving in the history of twentieth-century thought.” Born in 1886 and dying in 1929, after heroically bearing multiple illnesses, Rosenzweig almost became a Christian and then, returning to Judaism, wrote some of history’s most searching and imaginative inquiries into what St. Paul calls “the mystery” of living Judaism in its relationship to Christianity.

I suppose it was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who alerted me to the importance of Rosenzweig, and I remember reading first his exchanges with the Christian thinker Eugene Rosenstock. Later, I undertook to plough my way through Rosenzweig’s big, convoluted, and richly, indeed wildly, elusive The Star of Redemption. I found, as others have, at least a dozen ways of figuring out his argument, probably all of them wrong. After years of neglect, there is now, as Lilla reports, something of a Rosenzweig revival, although he is being revived to sometimes conflicting purposes. “The battle against history in the nineteenth century,” Rosenzweig wrote, “becomes for us the battle for religion in the twentieth century.” By history he, and most German intellectuals of that time, meant the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of history meant Hegel.

Lilla writes: “If Hegel and his epigones were right, the whole of human experience had been explained rationally and historically, anesthetizing the human spirit and foreclosing the experience of anything genuinely new, personal, or sacred. It meant, in Max Weber’s chilling phrase, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’“ Or what Francis Fukuyama more recently-taking Hegel as his reference point-called “the end of history.” The doctrine of the Incarnation, Rosenzweig believed, threw Christianity into engagement with history; Christians are “alien citizens,” pilgrims on their way to a future fulfillment. As Lilla puts it, “Christian culture moved the waves of history forward, out of antiquity into the medieval world, then to the centuries of Protestantism, and finally to the modern age when, by being secularized, Christianity triumphed. In this way, Christianity prepares the redemption of the world through activity in time.”

With Judaism it is very different. “The Jewish people,” said Rosenzweig, “has already reached the goal toward which the other nations are still moving. . . . Only the eternal people, which is not encompassed by world history, can-at every moment-bind creation as a whole to redemption, while redemption is still to come.” Christianity and Judaism have complementary roles in the unfolding of the drama of redemption. Here is how Lilla describes it: “By complementarity Rosenzweig did not mean that, in order to be itself, Judaism somehow needs Christianity; it does not. But the world, it seems, does. As early as 1913, not long after his aborted conversion to Christianity, Rosenzweig expressed the view that Judaism ‘leaves the work in the world to the Church and recognizes the Church as the salvation for all heathens in all time.’ Jews do not proselytize but it is good that Christians do. Christianity, on the other hand, needs Judaism if it is to perform this function: while it is busy converting the pagans without, the example of Judaism helps Christians to keep at bay the pagan within. ‘If the Christian did not have the Jew at his back,’ Rosenzweig asserts, ‘he would lose his way.’ Christians are of aware of this, too, and hence resent the Jews, calling them proud and stiff-necked. The very existence of Judaism and its claim to have experienced eternity shames the pilgrim Christians, who become anti-Semites out of self-hate, out of disgust with their own pagan imperfections.”

Lilla concludes that Rosenzweig’s thought emerged out of “a European philosophical tradition and referred to a unique cultural situation that has been extinguished by history. In that sense, Rosenzweig’s thought is dead.” He then goes on to add, “What remains very much alive are the vital challenges he saw before Judaism-of assimilation, of Zionism, of power politics, of living in a world shaped by Christianity-challenges that have, if anything, intensified since his death.” I am afraid that Lilla quite loses me here. The challenges of history-making are precisely, Rosenzweig insisted, the task of Christianity, not of Judaism. For that reason he was, inter alia, an ardent anti-Zionist.

The title of Lilla’s essay is “A Battle for Religion,” but it is the battle for religion that, it seems to me, is missing from the essay. Rosenzweig remains a very important figure, and his importance is caught by some Jewish thinkers, such as David Novak in his Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification. The intriguing question is what a Rosenzweig-Rosenstock exchange would be like today, when the circumstance of Judaism and Christianity is in so many ways dramatically different-after the death of the Kultur Protestantism apotheosized by Hegel, after the Holocaust, after the establishment of Israel. What now is the relationship, in the providence of the God of Israel, between the people of the Eternal Present and the people of the Eternal Future? Or have they now, at least in certain respects, exchanged roles? About the power politics of the Middle East one is doubtful that Rosenzweig would have much of interest to say. On today’s “battle for religion,” his thought would be-his thought is-very much alive.