Spurious - Lars Iyer [39]
But what could it mean to think of a Messiah so stupid that he is occulted from himself? Of a Messiah who does not have the intelligence to know he is the Messiah? There’s a tradition, of course, that the Messiah would be the one who broke the law rather than simply fulfilling it. Whence the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, whose followers likewise committed apostasy, it being a sign for them of the kind of test the Messiah would ask them to undergo.
Would the stupid Messiah have stupid followers?, W. wonders. Followers so stupid they wouldn’t know who they were following, or what it meant to follow? Mystery upon mystery, says W. But at least it goes some way to explaining my significance vis-à-vis messianism. Because I’m attracted to it, aren’t I, in my own stupid way? Even I have a sense of the importance of the messianic idea as I circle around it in my stupidity.
W. is a little less unwitting than I, he says, a little less stupid. And perhaps that means I’m a truer follower of the stupid Messiah, he says, he’s not certain.
Are we religious?, we wonder. I’m never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that’s already something. There’s an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that’s certain. But are we religious, I mean really religious?
Wasn’t it pathos that nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig?, we wonder. Wasn’t it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one conversation in particular—that of the night of June 7th, 1913—which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.
He had confronted the Nothing, he said later. He’d come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn’t what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed—when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him—Rosenstock had said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.
Kneel and try to pray: that’s what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naïf or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig’s crisis, W. says. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.
Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he converted back to Judaism. If he was to become Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, W. says, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.
But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one’s relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you’ll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig’s account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It’s all about pathos.
Of course, there’s pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig’s despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the Nothing might mean?
Hadn’t our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn’t we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naivety or romanticism? But we were plunged into no crisis. We didn’t contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn’t translate into action.
Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the Nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W.,