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RETHINKING THE MESSIANIC IDEA IN JUDAISM
RETHINKING
THE MESSIANIC IDEA
IN JUDAISM
EDITED BY MICHAEL L. MORGAN AND STEVEN WEITZMAN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rethinking the messianic idea in Judaism / edited by
Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01469-6 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01474-0 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01477-1 1. Messianic era (Judaism) I. Morgan, Michael L., [date] editor. II. Weitzman, Steven, [date]
BM625.R48 2014
296.3 36-dc23
20140411
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
This book is dedicated to Janet Rabinowitch in gratitude for her leadership, commitment, and countless efforts on behalf of scholarship
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction \ Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman
Part I. Blurred Lines and Open Secrets in Early Jewish Messianism
1. Messianism between Judaism and Christianity \ Annette Yoshiko Reed
2. He That Cometh Out: On How to Disclose a Messianic Secret \ Steven Weitzman
Part II. Between Here and Eternity in Medieval Judaism
3. Maimonides and the Idea of a Deflationary Messiah \ Kenneth Seeskin
4. And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight : Twisted Messianic Visions, and a Maimonidean Corrective \ Menachem Kellner
5. Seeking the Symmetry of Time: The Messianic Age in Medieval Chronology \ Elisheva Carlebach
Part III. Messianism and Ethics in Modern Jewish Thought
6. Messianism and Ethics \ Matt Goldish
7. To Infinity and Beyond: Cohen and Rosenzweig on Comportment toward Redemption \ Benjamin Pollock
8. Levinas and Messianism \ Michael L. Morgan
Part IV. Politics and Anti-politics in Contemporary Jewish Messianism
9. What Zvi Yehudah Kook Wrought: The Theopolitical Radicalization of Religious Zionism \ Shai Held
10. Messianic Religious Zionism and the Reintroduction of Sacrifice: The Case of the Temple Institute \ Motti Inbari
11. The Muted Messiah: The Aversion to Messianic Forms of Zionism in Modern Orthodox Thought \ David Shatz
12. The Divine/Human Messiah and Religious Deviance: Rethinking Chabad Messianism \ Shaul Magid
Part V. Messianism between Religious and Secular Imagination
13. Isadore Isou s Messianism Awry \ Cosana Eram
14. Arthur A. Cohen s Messianic Fiction \ Emily Kopley
15. Reading Messianically with Gershom Scholem \ Martin Kavka
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book had its origin in a workshop on the topic of messianism organized by Michael L. Morgan and made possible by the support of the Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought at Princeton University. The workshop took place over the course of three meetings between 2009 and 2011, involving an ever-widening circle of scholars, and our impression is that all the participants found the exchange to be lively, convivial, stimulating, and illuminating. This book is our attempt to invite the reader into that discussion. We wish to express our gratitude for the generosity of the Tikvah Fund; for the hospitality and leadership of the director of the Tikvah Project at Princeton, Leora Batnitzky; and for the patient assistance of her staff. We are also extremely grateful to Dr. Emily Kopley, one of the contributors to this volume, who also doubled as a sharp-eyed and very helpful editorial assistant; to Dee Mortensen, our truly supportive sponsoring editor at Indiana University Press; to Nancy Lightfoot for her excellent, patient oversight as project editor; and to Debra Corman for her careful, conscientious work in copyediting the manuscript.
Finally, we wish to express our heartfelt thanks to Janet Rabinowitch, director of Indiana University Press from 2003 to 2013, and not just for her support of this volume. Ours was one of countless books in Jewish studies that Janet has helped to bring into being, along with books in East European studies, Holocaust studies, Middle Eastern studies, and African studies-more than seven hundred books over the course of her career at Indiana University Press. Though it hardly suffices to express our respect and gratitude, this book is dedicated to Janet both to acknowledge our personal indebtedness to her and also to express our admiration for her enduring contributions to the study of the Jews, their history, their culture, and their ideas.
RETHINKING THE MESSIANIC IDEA IN JUDAISM
INTRODUCTION
Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman
The messianic idea in Judaism has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively and irrevocably accomplished.
-Gershom Scholem, Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism
In 1959, the great scholar Gershom Scholem published an essay entitled Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism that in the space of less than forty pages manages to tell a story of messianic belief stretching from antiquity into the modern era. The English title of the essay- Toward an Understanding . . . -suggests a scholar approaching his subject, taking steps toward its analysis, but not yet achieving understanding itself. More than fifty years later, the field of Jewish studies is still moving toward that understanding, not yet exhausting what the sources can tell us about the subject or settling on an intellectual approach. The following volume, gathering together essays from historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, is an effort to continue the project that Scholem began. This is not a book about Scholem s essay, and Scholem himself will only make sporadic appearances throughout its pages. It is an attempt-from across a distance of fifty years and in the light of a now immense body of scholarship on the past and present of Jewish messianism-to keep moving toward the understanding Scholem was striving to achieve, to develop new angles on the issues that he broached, to bring new sources into the discussion, or to look at sources, ideas, people, and movements more carefully.
Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism is actually a late expression of Scholem s views on messianism, a theme that had occupied his thinking from the late 1910s and his first efforts at deciphering Kabbalah. As Scholem went on to study the Lurianic Kabbalah and especially its role in the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, he came increasingly to understand the messianic dimensions of the Kabbalah and of rabbinic Judaism as a central feature of a Jewish philosophy of history. On the one hand, messianism has erupted in Jewish history as a real, concrete expression of frustrations and hopes and has regularly had important political and social consequences. On the other hand, messianism is a cluster of beliefs that play a role in Judaism and are an index of what Judaism is and how it understands the Jewish enterprise ultimately. Scholem s paper is more about the second of these dimensions than it is about the first. In that paper, in addition to framing his influential distinction between restorative and utopian conceptions of messianism and the special role of apocalyptic thinking and catastrophe in such conceptions, Scholem also provides a classic interpretation of Maimonides s messianic thinking and of messianic interpretation in rabbinic and kabbalistic texts. At the same time, it is clear, especially from his concluding remarks, that all along he has on his mind the relationship between these ideas and Zionism. A conception of messianism expresses a certain attitude toward history and politics, and it also indicates how time and history are conceived. In general, that attitude is one of denial, dismissal, and deferral to a distant future, whereas the central thrust of Zionism is toward a Jewish return to history, to political self-determination, and to the present. Scholem s essay negotiates all of these themes and more, and it does so in ways that have become influential, if not determinative, concerning how the idea of messianism has been discussed during the past half century. It is an essay in intellectual history or the history of ideas of a classic kind; it is grand in scope and rich in the conceptual issues that it addresses.
But the times have changed. Understanding the messianic idea in Judaism today, after the passing of modernism and at a moment when ideas are studied as involved in concrete, often mundane affairs as much as they are in high culture and among intellectuals, we can learn a great deal from Scholem, but our thinking must also move into areas where he would rarely have been inclined to move. If Scholem was interested in how messianism expressed attitudes or beliefs about history, politics, hope, and time, we should be engaged with all of these matters but others as well. There are psychological dimensions of messianism that deserve attention, as well as social and political ones, and we ought to rethink the plausibility of messianic narratives and mythology both from prosaic and from theoretical, even philosophical perspectives. In short, while Scholem s essay is not an original resource for rethinking the tradition of the messianic idea i