Editor's Choice:
Judaism's Twentieth-Century Conversations
by Randi Rashkover
·
Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999. 149pp. $18.50 (cloth).
·
Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of
Election. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. 191pp. $65.00 (cloth).
From its beginnings, Jewish identity has been in part determined by
encounters with other peoples. Long before Hegel, Judaism had already affirmed
that the recurrent dialectical encounter between Jews and other peoples may
have a positive effect on the continued formation of Jewish identity, the
Jewish identity.(1) The Bible is filled
with examples of Jews achieving deeper understandings of their own tradition
by virtue of such encounters. Jethro reminds Moses that governing involves
delegation of tasks. Ruth teaches us the value of loyalty and kindness. Later
exiled from the land of Israel, Jews encountered outside cultural, religious,
and intellectual influences, all the while developing mechanisms for
preserving their uniqueness and commitment to God's exclusive commandments.
Jewish history attests to countless manifestations of this dynamic from
Philo's Platonism to Maimonedes' Aristotelianism, up to and including the
secular nationalism of religious Zionists like Rav Kook. Although Judaism
hosts many opinions regarding the proper conditions and worth of these types
of encounters, one can identify a clear strain within the tradition,
crystallized in the thought of great Jewish thinkers such as Saadia Gaon and
Samson Raphael Hirsch, that applauds these types of encounters insofar as they
work in the service of enhancing Torah. The particular backdrop of the
Post-Enlightenment age has given Jews a unique opportunity and often a unique
pressure to encounter the other. Mendes-Flohr's German Jews: A Dual
Identity and Scott Bader-Saye's Church and Israel after Christendom
offer thought-provoking accounts of two particular instances of the Jewish
encounter with the other in this Post-Enlightenment age.
Retrieving the German-Jewish Renaissance: Mendes-Flohr's The German
Jews: A Dual Identity
Eloquently written and illuminating for scholars, teachers, and lay
readers, Mendes-Flohr provides an historical reassessment of German Jews'
commitment to German intellectual culture in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. His historical analysis derives from a composite of
letters, poems, essays, and personal anecdotes issued by those Jews, known as
the Literatenjuden (Jewish intellectuals), whose lives were ensconced in the
effort to discern and articulate a calling of two "spiritual
estates" (22), the Jewish and the German.
The Holocaust, Mendes-Flohr tells us, "casts a dark shadow on
German-Jewish history" (2). Under the veil of this shadow, post-World
War II historians and Jewish thinkers alike have constructed a falsely
simplistic image of the Jewish affair with German culture. Deemed naively
attached to a culture and people who then hosted the most brutal assault on
the Jewish people in history, the Jews of this period, says Mendes-Flohr, have
been indicted on charges of "courting peril by endorsing the myth of a
German-Jewish symbiosis. . ." (90).(2)
But such a view "[i]s burdened by the fallacy of retrospective judgement. . .
considered from the perspective of Auschwitz, those dangers assume a magnitude
that those contemporary with the Weimar Republic could not have foreseen"
(92). But this inquiry into pre-holocaust German Jewry goes beyond a mere
apologia for their response to Hitler's Germany and offers an even more
poignant illumination of the contours of their encounter with German culture
-- contours more complex, pained, and spiritually guided than hitherto
considered.
According to Mendes-Flohr, in order to properly enter the worldview of the
Literatenjuden it is necessary to challenge two commonly held assumptions:
(1) German Jews had confidently and unabashedly assimilated into German
culture of the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries; and (2) this
assimilation precluded any continued commitment to Judaism or Jewish identity.
In chapter 1, "The Bifurcated Soul of the German Jew," Mendes-Flohr
takes on the first of these myths with "a poet's attention to the painful
experiences that shaped [German Jewry's] grim. . . reality"
(2). Often thought of as foolishly smitten with Germany, the Jews of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany were neither deluded by a
false sense of acceptance nor undiscerning in their love for German culture.
German Jews were specifically attracted to the culture of Bildung --
"the educational ideal of self-cultivation" (2) represented by Kant
and Goethe. The Jewish attachment to the values of Bildung could be traced to
the Jewish interest in earning and then sustaining their emancipation status.
Jews sought to educate themselves in the culturally popular terms of the day
and also recognized how the success of Bildung and its corresponding vision of
a neutral society constituted the necessary environment for their continued
citizenship. Additionally, German Jews developed a nonpolitically motivated
affinity for Bildung insofar as this culture of self-education echoed a number
of centerpiece Jewish values, including an emphasis on education, a concern
for transcendent truth, and the commitment to the alliance between truth and
the ethical life.
Oddly enough, however, the Jewish encounter with, or acculturation to, this
worldview of self-cultivation did not provide a one-way ticket to easy
assimilation. While eighteenth-century German Enlightenment devotees
maintained a commitment to the vision of a neutral society, nineteenth-century
Germans preoccupied with marking the definitions of the German national
identity "parted from that model of the modern state -- dismissively
associated in the minds of many Germans with France. . . [and]
developed an alternative conception of the state as principally serving a
Volksnation, or a given people. . ." (15-16). Caught in the
entanglement produced by changing ideologies, the Jews of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Germany were not seduced and ultimately foiled by a
nonexistent German reality, but were "painfully aware. . . that
they were assimilated in the accusative -- and not assimilated in the
dative. . . [T]hat is, they were not assimilated into German
society" (3). Struggling to choreograph a fruitful encounter between two
great spiritual and intellectual worlds, German Jews were cognizant of their
separation from Germany as both Jews and as sponsors of a German culture no
longer widely supported.
Having shattered prior images of Jewish naivete, in chapters 2 and 3
Mendes-Flohr further develops the portrait of the Jewish-German encounter,
focusing attention on the German Jews' tie to their Jewish identity. As early
as 1783, when Moses Mendelssohn wrote his classic Jerusalem, Jews
conjoined their attraction to German Enlightenment values with their
commitment to their Jewish identity. "Behind Mendelssohn's impassioned
defense of the rational structure of Judaism was a healthy desire to preserve
Jewish identity" (14). Similarly, German Jews of the nineteenth century
embraced the then in vogue doctrine of historical progress without nodding to
Hegelian tendencies to devalue Judaism as anachronistic. Instead, they took
this doctrine to mean that "Judaism could be acknowledged as one of the
eclectic cultures composing German Kultur" (39). In shedding light on
this dual commitment to German and Jewish identities, Mendes-Flohr is not
attempting to whitewash the fact that Jews found it difficult to maintain a
dual identity. Recreating the high moments of an exchange between Ludwig
Strauss and the young Walter Benjamin in 1912, Mends-Flohr makes readers privy
to the confusion that plagued Literatenjuden and their struggle to enunciate
the essence of the Jewish identity by which they remained bound. And he
maintains that the existence of this struggle itself evidences Jews' continued
need to assert their Jewish identity. Not only did Jews remain committed to
their own identity, but they ultimately understood their encounter with German
culture within the framework of their own Jewish self-understanding. More than
an actual meeting with German citizens, the Jewish-German encounter was an
"inner Jewish dialogue" (93) -- a conscious effort for Jewish
self-examination in light of the cultural, spiritual resources of the Bildung
culture.(3)
The years 1900-33 in German Jewish history were marked by a renaissance in
Jewish life and culture. While such a movement may be difficult to explain
from a picture of a strictly assimilated German Jewry, it becomes far less
surprising in view of Mendes-Flohr's more contoured analysis of the
German-Jewish encounter as an "inner Jewish dialogue." Already in
1916, with the publication of Martin Buber's journal Der Jude, many
German Jews entered a new phase in the dialectical encounter with German
culture. Able and inspired to move beyond the crisis of dual identity
characteristic of the late nineteenth century, Jews began to assert a more
pronounced affiliation with their Judaism, now reinterpreted through the lens
of their encounter with Deutschum. In chapter 4, Mendes-Flohr presents
the life and thought of Franz Rosenzweig as "the focus and symbol of
this. . . renewal. . ." (66).
The child of a family that could be traced back on one side to Modercai
Jaffe, a great kabbalist and Talmudist of the sixteenth century, and on the
other to Samuel Meyer, a pioneer of the Enlightenment, Rosenzweig "saw
his family history as representative of the spiritual biography of German
Jewry" (67). But Rosenzweig became heir to the spiritual biography of
German Jewry through his intellectual inheritance as well. Having devoted much
of his early studies to the German idealists, particularly Hegel, Rosenzweig
soon called strict idealism into question and like many other young
philosophers of his day began entertaining a return to religion. Initially
attracted to Christianity, the religion of choice for some doubting idealists
(Judaism was considered anachronistic by most non-Jewish and some Jewish
Hegelians), in a final visit to synagogue on Yom Kippur in 1913, Rosenzweig
dramatically reversed his position and left synagogue committed to a return to
Judaism. Shortly thereafter, Rosenzweig enrolled in courses taught by Herman
Cohen, his primary intellectual link to the German-Jewish encounter.
Enamored by Cohen's thought, Rosenzweig nonetheless began to question
Cohen's formulation of the Judentum-Deutschum partnership. According to
Mendes-Flohr, the young Rosenzweig did not so much object to Cohen's
commitment to two spiritual resources as to the value Cohen assigned to each.
From Rosenzweig's perspective, the Literatenjuden were correct to recognize an
alliance between Judaism and German philosophy; Rosenzweig himself took
Germany to be the site of the "new Babylon. . . a land of two
rivers" (23). Where the Literatenjuden failed, however, was in their
inability to fully recognize Judaism in both its "metaphysical and
epistemological distinctiveness" (76), as well as in its vitality as a
form of life for active Jewish communities. For while Moses Mendelssohn strove
to argue for Judaism's inherent rationality, his identification of Judaism as
"revealed religion" nonetheless pointed to German culture and
philosophy as the fundamental source of that rational truth itself. And while
Herman Cohen celebrated Judaism as the world's primary source of ethical
monotheism, Cohen's vision of Judaism lacked an emphasis on the real life of
the community. For Rosenzweig, authentic Judaism was both a way of life and
philosophically distinctive. Herein, says Mendes-Flohr, is Rosenzweig's
response to the German Jews' effort to understand the essence of the
Jewish-German encounter. Those Jews struggling to understand the balance
between their Judaism and their commitment to Bildung were fighting a false
fight, pained over a false dichotomy. Judaism is home to both a
particularistic people and a philosophical universalism. "Though embodied
in the life of a people, Judaism attests to revealed, metahistorical and hence
metacultural truths."(82) Undoubtedly a people apart, the Jews
nonetheless live in expectation of an end of days beyond the particularities
of history. Theirs is a particularity for the purpose of a more universal
reality.
Mendes' Flohr's reading of Rosenzweig as both heir and culmination to the
German Jews' "inner Jewish dialogue" fills an important vacuum in
recent Rosenzweig studies. While the past ten years have witnessed a swelling
of secondary works on Rosenzweig's thought, few present it in the frame of
modern Jewish history.(4) Such a
reading becomes even more significant in view of the fact that given
Rosenzweig's familial and intellectual lineage, he clearly saw his own work as
immediately responsive to the situation of the early twentieth-century German
Jew. Where Mendes-Flohr's account lacks, however, is in its ability to
articulate fully how or on what grounds Rosenzweig understood Judaism to be
the authentic conjoining of Jewish particularity and German universalism. A
proper explication of Rosenzweig's vision of the metaphysical contribution of
Judaism would require a work more theologically oriented than Mendes-Flohr's,
for by metaphysical truth Rosenzweig understood theological truth, a point to
which Mendes-Flohr does not attend.
Of greatest value in Mendes-Flohr's reading of Rosenzweig is his ability to
align Rosenzweig's work with the struggle of Literatenjuden before him and
recognize his return to Judaism as the culmination of this struggle. That
Mendes-Flohr recognizes Rosenzweig's contribution to Jewish life and learning
as the culmination of the often painful inner Jewish meeting with German
culture evidences Mendes-Flohr's own appreciation for the struggle of the
German Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an inner
Jewish dialogue that afforded Jews a valuable opportunity for self-reflection
and a more enlightened understanding of their own tradition. We can hope that
this historical retrieval may work to inspire contemporary Jews to engage in
similar encounters.
Extending the Conversation: Scott Bader-Saye's Church and Israel after
Christendom: The Politics of Election
One hundred years ago, when German Jews laced their libraries with the
works of Goethe and Kant and the general intellectual tide of the day was
critical of religion, few would have anticipated a time when Christians would
become one of Jews' most eager and active conversation partners. Nonetheless,
in late twentieth-century America, Jews and Christians have come together for
conversation, sometimes to increase their mutual understanding, other times to
share in what they see as a battle against American moral atrophy. Scott
Bader-Saye's Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election
is one recent example of this kind of Christian-Jewish exchange. A thoughtful
and often inspiring effort to reconsider Christianity's political calling in a
post-Constantinian age, by way of a Christian reassessment of the Jewish
politics of election, Bader-Saye's work will undoubtedly be recognized by
Christians engaged in similar efforts, most notably Rosemary Ruether, Kendall
Soulen, and Oliver O'Donovan. But it is not only valuable to Christians.
Insofar as Bader-Saye provides a new model of Jewish-Christian relations, his
work invites a Jewish response. Jews need to hear this invitation and like
their German Jewish ancestors, risk an encounter with this religious other,
not only for the sake of establishing better relations with Christians but
also for the purpose of involving themselves in the dialectical
self-examination that inevitably ensues from this type of exchange.
A call to reexamine the position of Christianity in late twentieth-century
western world, the book is, the author claims, a direct response to two
momentous historical realities. The first is the end of Christendom. While
Bader-Saye acknowledges that the process of Christendom's demise began before
the twentieth century, it has only been in the past fifty years that the
Christendom paradigm has passed from the American religious scene in
particular. Consequently, the time is ripe to ask the following question: If
Christianity no longer assumes a political position of strength and influence
world-wide, what political position, if any, ought it to assume?
Second, Christianity has been prompted to self-examination by the event of
the Holocaust. Granted that the destruction of the Jews was sponsored by the
Nazi party and its particular brand of racial ideology, the question remains:
What role did centuries of Christian anti-Judaism have in the success of the
Nazi program of destruction? Plagued by this question and the history of a
doctrine of contempt, the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches have
embarked on new efforts to reconsider their position on Judaism. Yet,
according to Bader-Saye, while these efforts have resulted in new doctrinal
positions,(5) still needed is an
examination of how these new formulations affect the life of Christian
communities. "[L]ittle has been done so far to ask how the church's own
life and witness are impacted by the conviction that the church's identity is
grounded in Israel's election" (2).
Bader-Saye argues that Christians must begin to recognize the connection
between these two seemingly separate historical realities. As he discusses in
chapter 1, noteworthy Christian theologians have for some time now
steadfastly worked to reenvision the political role of Christianity in the
post-Enlightenment liberal society. He looks specifically at the efforts of
Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank, who both turn to the ancient Greek model of
the polis and its vision of the virtuous life as a directive for Christian
communities in search of political guidance. While Bader-Saye applauds their
search for a solution to the political confusion confronting late
twentieth-century churches, he nonetheless maintains that they have "done
so by appropriating a political and moral discourse from outside the church's
biblical idiom" (6). The answer to the church's true political calling is
closer to home, rooted in the Jews' covenantal relationship to the electing
God. Consequently, argues Bader-Saye, the church's political position is
inextricably linked to its response to the Holocaust. In turning to the Jewish
covenantal reality as the directive for its true political calling, the church
transforms its understanding of Judaism and allows itself to be positively
influenced by its unique Jewish heritage.
In chapter 2, Bader-Saye attempts to characterize what he calls the
Jewish politics of election. For this characterization he relies heavily on
David Novak's The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People
and Michael Wyschogrod's The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel,
two relatively recent works that attempt to refamiliarize Jews with the
biblical-rabbinic doctrine of election.
Calling upon David Novak's theological definition, a Jew, Bader-Saye
claims, is "one who participates with the Jewish people in the history of
God's election and covenant" (30). Leaning further on Novak's own
analysis, he states that Jewish election refers to "the communal and
carnal, eternal and unconditional choosing of Israel by
God. . ." (31). He sees as particularly important the fact that
God's election of Israel is the election of a people and not individuals; God
elects all the descendants of that people, not only those said to be
physically present at Sinai. Furthermore, Israel's election is what Michael
Wyschogrod has termed a carnal or corporeal election. God elects Israel not on
spiritual criteria but strictly by virtue of the "seed of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob" (33). Consequently, God's election of Israel is unconditional.
"Since the covenant was not based on obedience, disobedience could not
overturn it" (33). As the election of Israel is God's loving work, Israel
derives its identity as a people, therefore, from God himself.
Guided by Novak and Wyschogrod, Bader-Saye is not incorrect in this
theological reading of Jewish identity as grounded in God's election.
Furthermore, he rightly claims that it is precisely because Jewish identity is
lodged in an act of the loving God that the Jews were able to maintain an
identity as a people even after their exile from the land of Israel.
Nonetheless, he goes on to claim: "In Abraham God determined to create a
new kind of nation, a placeless people whose identity was grounded in blessing
rather than belligerence" (36). Knowingly or not, Bader-Saye moves from
the understanding of Jews as a people whose identity is defined by God's
election to an understanding of the Jews as elected by God to be a
"placeless people whose identity was grounded in blessing rather than
belligerence." As I will discuss further below, while many Jews
(particularly religious Jews) will agree with this definition of an identity
based in God's election, those same Jews would take Bader-Saye to task for
claiming that with this election, God has determined them to be a placeless
people. Similarly one may question whether Israel's unique identity was
grounded in blessing rather than belligerence, for the Bible attests to
countless battles between the Israelites and those whom God sought to destroy
so as to secure Israelite inheritance of the land. For now, suffice it to say
that Bader-Saye is interested in drawing a portrait of the Jews as a people
who maintains a political identity separate and different from the other
nations of the world, rooted in God's own desire for a just and blessed world.
Election, however, is not only God's choice of Israel but Israel's response
to God. The biblical God elects the Jewish people to be a holy people, who
imitates God's own ways. God elects the Jews into a covenant or a
"relationship of mutuality" (38), secured by a life of Torah. Bader-Saye
is also right to draw from Novak's own emphasis on the materiality of this
life of obedience. The Torah prescribes a life of holiness in all aspects of
life. In the end, like Novak, he wants to highlight the political nature of
this covenant; he quotes Novak, who says, "More than anything else the
covenant is a political idea and a political reality. By 'political' I mean
the whole range of human communal existence and its place in the very nature
of things. . ." (41). The Jews are therefore a people whose
political life is a life of holiness strictly devoted to the
"glorification of God's name" (41) over and against any particular
nationalism or self-interest.
Finally, God's election and the Jews' response through covenant are
fulfilled in God's redemption, the "goal or promise, the ultimate purpose
toward which election and covenant move" (31). But what do Jews say
redemption is? Bader-Saye acknowledges that there is no consensus within the
Jewish tradition on the question. The tradition generally sways between two
views -- what Novak labels the "extensive" or "minimalist"
view and the "apocalyptic" or "maximalist" view. The
former suggests that redemption looks like an "extension" of the
present -- i.e., Jews will be able to freely live a life of Torah; "other
nations will either convert or be subordinated to Israel's rule as the
authority of Torah is extended over all people" (47). Conversely, the
"maximalist" view, to which Novak holds, contends that redemption
will usher forth "qualitative" changes in reality, "which will
extend even to the Torah" (47).
Although Bader-Saye avers that he merely wants to "listen in on this
Jewish conversation" (28), he nonetheless privileges Novak's maximalist
view of redemption over the more traditionalist or Maimonedian minimalist
view. He is going to want to base his vision of a post-Constantinian
Christianity on the Jewish view of redemption and hopes to establish
simultaneously new bridges between the two religions. Consequently, he
inevitably favors the maximalist view precisely on the grounds that it alone
posits the possibility of a change in the content of Torah that will make the
reality of obedience through the cross a conceptual possibility. Consequently,
he provides no textual verification for the minimalist perspective, but quotes
passages from Jeremiah and the rabbis to justify the maximalist view. Bader-Saye
also favors the definition of redemption offered by the prophet Zechariah,
drawing out five additional features of redemption: the gathering of the Jews
from the diaspora into a united people; the wiping out of Israel's sin; the
restoration of the land of Israel (although he qualifies this by saying that
"the restored Jerusalem will be a city without walls" (45); peace
and plenty; and the ingathering of the gentiles to "the peaceable
kingdom. . ." (46). In sum, the Jews are a people who live a
political life under God and anticipate a visible redemption that includes all
the nations of the world in a peaceable kingdom of plenty.
How is this vision of a politics of election significant for Bader-Saye's
own effort to reconstitute a vision a post-Constantinian Christianity? Why is
it that he clearly favors one view of the Jewish redemption over another? We
begin to get the answer to this question in chapter 4, where he presents
a creative and provocative analysis of the relation between the church's
doctrine of supersessionism and its failure to articulate a viable vision of
the redemption it proclaims has come through Jesus Christ.
More specifically, Bader-Saye argues that supersessionism began with the
effort by members of the early church (themselves a sect of Judaism) to
formulate their belief in Jesus as the Messiah in relation to a dominant
Jewish tradition that insisted on rejecting it. Consequently, many "went
so far as to imply that God's election had been transferred to a new
people" (53). The Jews, according to this belief, forfeited their right
to inherit God's promises. Their status as elect had been transferred to those
who maintain faith in Christ. Later church fathers lent a gnostic spin on this
burgeoning supersessionism, arguing that the Jews lost their right to God's
promises because of their worldliness; "election was reconfigured as a
spiritual matter concerned with knowledge and belief. . ."
(54).
However, by deJudaizing the doctrine of election, Bader-Saye argues that
the church left itself unable to account for the visibility of God's
redemption brought by Christ and, by extension, was "left with a
sociopolitical vacuum. . ." (57). Where was the redemption that
the revelation in Christ brought forth? Was it only an eschatological hope, or
a present invisible and spiritual reality? According to Bader-Saye, once
Constantine converted to Christianity, the church abandoned these earlier
speculations and "allowed itself to be grafted in to the history of
nation and empire" (57). The deJudaizing of the doctrine of election led
to the sins of the Constantinian Church. While the modern period marked an end
to strict Constantinianism, the church remains vexed by political
disorientation, now privatized by independent nations who see themselves as
heirs to God's election and ultimately demand the church's subservience and
allegiance. Now devoid of political influence, the church nonetheless
maintains its dangerous liaison with the secular powers.
Having diagnosed the church's political illness and identified the cause as
the church's deJudaization of the doctrine of election, Bader-Saye has laid
the necessary groundwork to argue in favor of a reJudaization of the church.
Chapter 4 shows similar efforts at a reJudaization of the church by
Calvin, Barth, and contemporary theologians such as Ruether, Soulen, and
O'Donovan. But all these efforts fail, he points out, on one of two grounds:
either they fail to overcome the doctrine of supersessionism (Calvin, Barth)
or they overcome the doctrine of supersessionism at the expense of maintaining
a properly trinitarian Christian theology (Ruether, Soulen, and O'Donovan).
A reJudaized trinitarian theology starts with a restoration of the concept
of the "new covenant." While this concept has often implied the
displacement of the Jews' own covenant, Bader-Saye wants to restore it in a
way that simultaneously acknowledges God's continued and eternal faithfulness
to the Jewish people, and emphasizes "the significance of Jesus Christ
for all people" (97). To this end, he reminds readers that when this
concept first appears in Jeremiah, it does suggest a qualitative change in the
Torah, but does not call into question God's eternal faithfulness to the
Jewish people. "Whatever the new covenant is, Scripture assures us it
will not mean the rejection of God's people Israel" (99).
But what does it mean? The answer, Bader-Saye believes, can be found in
reexamining Paul's view of the Jews in God's economy, as portrayed in Romans
9-11, where Paul presents God's revelation in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment
of the promises made to Abraham and his descendants. In Jesus Christ, God has
issued a new covenant, but this is none other than the fulfillment of the
promises made in the old covenant, no longer through obedience to the law or
the Torah but through "Torah obedience stamped by the cross of Christ,
which becomes the definitive paradigm of faithfulness" (107). God remains
faithful to the Jews by fulfilling their covenant through the revelation in
Jesus Christ, thereby inaugurating the time of redemption. Moreover, Paul's
God maintains faithfulness even to those Jews who refuse to believe.
Bader-Sayre quotes Paul: "Just as you were once disobedient to God but
have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been
disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive
mercy" (Romans 11:25-32).
From Bader-Saye's vantage point, Paul's Christianity is none other than the
fulfillment of what Novak calls a "maximalist" vision of Israel's
redemption. God maintains his faithfulness to Israel's election, but "the
Gentiles are called and grafted into Israel's covenant" (116) through the
revelation in Jesus Christ. The Torah is qualitatively reinterpreted by the
cruciform ethics of Christ's obedience; the Gentiles become participants in
God's material and political covenant with the Jews; and even those Jews
"disobedient" to the cruciform ethics will inherit God's mercy.
This restoration of new covenant language reJudaizes the church's own
doctrine of election and affords the church a new political direction. For
just as the revelation in Christ inaugurated the time of redemption, the work
of the Holy Spirit ensures that the church may embody the political life of
the redeemed community even before redemption is completed with the second
coming of Christ. For Bader-Saye, the essence of this political life is none
other than the same "glorification of God" that grounded Israel's
own politics of election, but now in the context of the time of redemption.
Consequently, the church is called to "live in peace and love of enemies,
to share the plenty of God's earth and to witness to the unity and
reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles made possible through Christ and the
Holy Spirit" (108).
Church liturgical life constitutes the essence of new covenantal political
life. Baptism enacts a Christian's entrance into the particular brand of
freedom through faithfulness afforded by the new covenant in Christ. The
practice of the Eucharist provides the means through which the church (with
the aid of the Holy Spirit) embodies the messianic peace fully realized with
the second coming, for in this practice the community comes together to share
in the flesh of "the one who embodies cruciform Torah obedience"
(140). Profoundly corporeal, the Eucharist enacts the engrafting of Christians
onto the corporeal election of Israel, now redeemed through the flesh of Jesus
Christ. Finally, rooted in the "peaceful sacrifice of the cross"
(142), the practice of the Eucharist provides the church with its ethical
criteria. Itself a sacrament of peace and plenty, the Eucharist offers a moral
compass against killing and poverty. "As such, to arise from the table
and do violence to one another is not only a self-destructive act; it is
destructive of Christ himself. It is to crucify Christ anew" (141).
Neither a ruling power over others, nor an ineffectual recreational
association, the church of the new covenant can and ought to "sing its
song of praise" and allow its own witness to be heard as "truly
public work" (146), while engaging in "ad hoc engagements with the
world's powers in order to achieve goods such as feeding the hungry, caring
for the orphan and welcoming the stranger" (146).
With this vision, Bader-Saye believes he has presented a vision of a
Christologically inspired, pneumatologically secured, political vision of the
church that simultaneously reflects God's faithfulness to Jewish election and
respects the "witness of Israel post Christum" (28). Has he?
Bader-Saye has offered a theologically and scripturally compelling argument
for a reJudaized Christian doctrine of election. Still, I see two fundamental
flaws with the model he presents. The first concerns his vision of the
church's role in the contemporary public square -- more specifically what he
calls "ad hoc engagements with secular powers" (146). The question
at hand is: How can the church secure itself against the temptation to ally
with worldly powers, or become a worldly power itself? Bader-Saye acknowledges
this problem but offers only one suggestion. Churches can keep a healthy
distance from state interests by refusing government financial assistance. But
this suggestion overlooks the real issue at hand -- namely, how can the church
remain ethical in the time before the return of Christ?
Bader-Saye's ethics is grounded in a "cruciform obedience," an
ethics of the cross. One should not act in ways that contradict the vision of
peace and plenty represented by Jesus' "peaceful sacrifice of the
cross" (148). In his famous Epistle to the Romans, second
edition, Karl Barth argues, " the Church does not wish to be a stranger
in the world. . . It cannot stay itself. . . in the
Passion of the rejected Christ. . . The Church is in great haste; it
is hungry and thirsty for the concrete joys of the marriage feast" (440).
Left to its own devices, the church will inevitably promote its own worldly
interests, looking to ally itself with the secular powers, or establish itself
as an earthly power. Like any human form of religious life, the church remains
burdened by sin. One does not have to accept the radical, krisis
ethics of Barth's Romans as a solution. Rather, like the Barth of the
Church Dogmatics, it is possible to find a midpoint between a
recognition of the church's sin and its ability to provide a visible
representation of the Kingdom of God on earth, prior to the second coming.
Like Bader-Saye, Barth recognizes that it is through the power of the Holy
Spirit that the church may be faithful to the redemption brought through
Christ. But unlike Bader-Saye, Barth believes that the possibility for human
ethical action derives from God's free act of love and grace (sustainable here
and now through the power of the Holy Spirit), an act we cannot control or
possess but can only respond to.(6)
Human ethical life derives from the power of the Word of God, and the church
must constantly test its own proper hearing of this Word. This is the role of
dogmatics. Barth recognizes the church's own fallibility and its need for a
mechanism of self-critique. Cruciform ethics alone do not guard against the
church's interest in power, for like all human life prior to the second
coming, the church remains burdened by its own sin. Bader-Saye wants to model
Christianity's political life from Judaism's material existence. But as Bader-Saye
acknowledges, because Judaism maintains that redemption is yet to come,
"Jewish social ethics, then, must always take into account the 'finitude,
mortality and fallibility' of human subjects. There is, thus a tentative
quality to all moral decisions" (49). But, of course, this is different
in the case of Christianity, which holds that redemption is inaugurated in the
revelation with Christ. If Christianity is to be openly material and
political, it must sustain a mechanism for self-criticism.
The second significant flaw in Bader-Saye's argument concerns his claim to
have overcome fully the church's doctrine of supersessionism, while offering a
new way to acknowledge "witness of Israel post-Christum." According
to Bader-Saye, the church's doctrine of supersessionism is overcome if the
church acknowledges God's continued faithfulness to the Jews. As we recall,
aided by Paul's account in Romans, Bader-Saye claims: (1) God remains
faithful to the Jews by issuing forth the redemption in Jesus Christ -- God's
promised redemption of the Jews is therein fulfilled; and (2) God remains
faithful even to those Jews who do not accept redemption in Christ, for though
"they have now been disobedient. . . they too may now receive
mercy."
This claim that God fulfills the Jewish redemption through Jesus Christ
rests on a particular reading of the Jewish understanding of redemption. As
mentioned above, even Bader-Saye acknowledges that the Jewish tradition holds
at least two different positions on what redemption will look like. Would Jews
who favor the minimalist view of redemption recognize God's faithfulness to
them in Jesus Christ? For those Jews, the God of the covenant promises a life
of unhindered Torah obedience in the land of Israel. If this is the vision of
many Jews, can one say that God fulfills the promises of the Jewish
redemption, if these are not the promises that many Jews identify with the
covenant? Interestingly enough, while Bader-Saye, turning to Wyschogrod's
analysis, wants to stress the "corporeality" of the Jewish people,
he does not acknowledge that Wyschogrod's analysis rests largely on the
portrait of the Jews found in the five books of Moses. However, the vision of
redemption offered in the five books of Moses does not confirm Bader-Saye's
vision of a "placeless people"; rather, it directly connects to
God's desire to deepen his embodiment in the Jewish people while in the land
of Israel itself. Bader-Saye picks and chooses his definition of the Jewish
people and their redemption to suit his picture of what he wants Christianity
to be.
Second, Bader-Saye cannot substantiate his claim that his Christianity
compels Christians to acknowledge the "witness of Jews post-Christum."
If we recall, Bader-Saye (aided by Paul) argues that God remains faithful to
all Jews, both Jews who have adopted Christianity as well as Jews who have
rejected it -- i.e., the "disobedient." But what reason would
Christians have to acknowledge the validity of the Jewish political witness
if, from their future vantage point, Jews must either become Christian or be
deemed "disobedient"? The fact that God remains faithful to them in
either scenario does little to provide an incentive for Christians to
appreciate the Jewish halakhic path as a valid approach to God's redemption if
its validity is contingent upon either its transformation into cruciform
ethics or strictly by virtue of God's outstanding mercy.
Bader-Saye's effort at overcoming the church's doctrine of supersessionism
is a step in the right direction. What his project needs is a more active
infusion of Jewish voices. Jews should read his book as an invitation to
present a more complex and living picture of Judaism. Just as Mendes-Flohr's
book reminds contemporary Jews that engagement with one's surrounding culture
need not end in the renunciation of the Jewish tradition, but may incite an
ever more conscious and glorified return to it, Scott Bader-Saye's effort to
establish a new conversation with Jews can awaken Jews to the fact that one of
the greatest opportunities for conversation with others in our pluralistic
society is with Christian communities now inviting Jews to a new table of
discourse. Bader-Saye's book may help Jews gain further awareness of this
invitation and should inspire them to engagement, not only for the sake of the
dialogue itself, but also for the opportunity to examine their own Judaism and
what it means.
Notes
1. [Back to text] The question
as to whether or not this dialectic is endemic to the halakhic process itself
is a deeper theological question that would require more space than here
allotted. For suggestions on this matter see Martin Kavka's piece in this
issue entitled, "Recollection, Zakhor, Anamnesis: On Ira Stone's Reading
Levinas /Reading Talmud."
2. [Back to text] Mendes-Flohr
identifies Gershom Scholem as one of the main proponents of this view.
"It would be mistaken. . . to conclude that a studied optimism
distorted the vision of German Jews, blinding them to the dangers lurking in
the dark. . . Gershom Scholem implies this in his condemnation of
what he regards as the delusive fantasy of a German-Jewish
dialogue. . ." (90).
3. [Back to text] For Mendes-Flohr,
Hermann Cohen, the great Jewish-Kantian of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries is perhaps the most poignant example of the Literatenjuden
and their struggle to negotiate a vision of Deutschum-Judentum. While Hermann
Cohen's vision of an ideal partnership between the two great cultures of
Judentum and Deutschum has suffered the charge of tragic naivete, Mendes-Flohr
offers an insightful and refreshing rereading of Cohen in light of Cohen's own
Kantianism as well as in the context of the Jews' own particular commitment to
German Bildung over and above any particular German historical reality.
Consequently, Mendes-Flohr allows one to appreciate that Cohen sought an ideal
relation between Jewish monotheism and German humanism and not an actual
wedding between the Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and German
citizens, particularly the nationalists. He says, "Cohen was hardly
naïve. . . What Cohen proffered is, accordingly, an ideal construct
meant to disclose the shortcomings of the present reality. Holding up the
ideal as a mirror, he sought ever so gently to rebuke contemporary Germans and
prod them to heed their humanistic heritage" (61).
4. [Back to text] There are
many works that situate Rosenzweig's thought in the context of philosophical
history. See Robert Gibbs' Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas
(Princeton University Press, 1992), particularly chapter 1, devoted to
Rosenzweig's inheritance from Schelling and Cohen. Also noteworthy is David
Novak's Election of Israel. The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge
University Press, 1995) which frames Rosenzweig's thought within the context
of modern Jewish philosophy.
5. [Back to text] Bader-Saye
specifically points to the Vatican's recently issued Nostra Aetate,
which says for example that "It is true that the Church is the new people
of God, yet the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if
this followed from Holy Scripture. . ." (2) -- as well as to
the Presbyterian' Church's 1987 statement that "the church, elected in
Jesus Christ, has been engrafted into the people of God established by the
covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore, Christians have not
replaced Jews" (2).
6. [Back to text] "The
one Word of God is both Gospel and Law. . . That is, it is a prior
decision concerning man's self-determination" (Church Dogmatics,
II. II, p. 23). For more on Barth's understanding of divine command
ethics, see his Church Dogmatics, II. II, ed., G. W. Bromiley
and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994).
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Cross Currents, Winter 1999/2000, Vol. 49 Issue 4.
