On the Limits of Contemporary Jewish Theology: Response to Martin Kavka

I would like to begin by expressing my admiration for Professor Kavka's authoritative discussion of the place of radical theology in contemporary Judaism. In particular, his discussion of my thoughts in connection with death-of-God theology is largely well-informed and accurate.

I do, however, think it necessary to note some important elements of continuity between my thinking in 1965 and in 2011. In the preface to the first edition (1966) of After Auschwitz, I stated:

No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps. That is the question for Jewish theology in our times. Regrettably most attempts at formulating a Jewish theology since World War II seem to have been written as if the two decisive events of our time for Jews, the death camps and the birth of the State of Israel, had not taken place.

(Rubenstein 1992, xx)

Moreover, although my doctoral thesis, later published as The Religious Imagination (1968), was largely an exploration of classical rabbinic responses to the catastrophic defeats inflicted by Rome on the ancient Jewish world, it too was focused on the Holocaust. There were, of course, obvious differences between what I characterized as "the Holocaust of ancient times" and the Holocaust of the twentieth century (Rubenstein and Roth 2003, 37). The Romans were harsh conquerors, but unlike the Germans, their aims were not annihilationist. Caesar permitted the survival of Jewish religious institutions that adapted to conditions of Jewish powerlessness. Nevertheless, that same culture of defeat and powerlessness ultimately enabled a twentieth-century Caesar to exterminate Europe's Jews almost entirely free of cost. Insofar as contemporary Jewish theologies fail to confront the issues of power and powerlessness as they relate to Jews and Judaism, they have little interest for me.

Of critical importance was my understanding of the nature of post-Holocaust Jewish theology:

For the foreseeable future, theological response will be private and subjective. Contemporary theology reveals less about God than it does about the kind of men we are. It is largely an anthropological discipline.

(Rubenstein 1992, xx, emphasis added)

I note that Professor Kavka expresses surprise that the early writings of Norman Lamm, Arthur Hertzberg, and Eugene Borowitz make no mention of my work. Their response was characteristic of the Jewish mainstream. My work received considerable national media attention as a result of which I was regarded as a troublesome figure. It is not surprising that I chose employment at Florida State University in Tallahassee, hardly a center of Jewish life, where for twenty-five years I was free to carry on my research and writing. I remain grateful to Florida State to this day. Fortunately, I soon recognized that marginality was part of the price I had to pay for communicating a very private theological subjectivity. Had I been a philosopher, a historian, or a sociologist, I might have had a less troubled relation with my community, but I was then and still remain a rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary.

As Professor Kavka has observed, I understood early on that there were "decided affinities" between my work and that of contemporary Christian radical theologians. Nevertheless, in my first encounter with Professor Thomas J. J. Altizer at Emory University in November 1965, I said: "I suspect that we part company most radically over what I regard as the Christian radical theologian's inability to take seriously the tragic vision" (Rubenstein 1992, xx). Christian faith is grounded in the assurance that Calvary will be followed by Resurrection. Ultimately, Calvary can never be regarded as tragic.

I do, however, take issue with Professor Kavka's comment that the tone of my response to Altizer had "become somewhat more snide" when I characterized his apocalyptic focus as a "pathetic falsification of reality" or said that the dialogue between us had become "a trade in offense." I had actually written: "The myth that the death of the father is a prelude to liberation is one of the oldest of human dreams. Nevertheless, it is a pathetic falsification of reality" (Rubenstein 1970, 135). I see nothing snide in that observation. It was simply a statement of a deeply held belief, partly based on my conviction that the Freudian myth of a primal crime was psychologically if not historically valid.¹ Had my dialogue with Altizer descended to the level of insults, I would never have approved of the inclusion of his essay "God as Holy Nothingness" in my Festschrift (see Altizer 1995).

I also strongly disagreed with Altizer's radical apocalypticism. After the almost total destruction of Europe's Jews, I had little interest in the redemptive values of chaos.²

Clearly, Altizer and I were reflecting on many of the same issues, such as God as Holy Nothingness and the National Socialist Kingdom of Death, but coming to very different conclusions. Altizer understood the Holocaust dialectically as the indispensable precursor to a return to the Godhead, "a Godhead which is an ultimate and absolute death, for it is the death or final ending of both cosmos and history, and is so precisely as the absolute origin and end of everything" (1995, 353).

I agreed with him—up to a point. I wrote: "I have often expressed my deepest religious feelings by saying that omnipotent Nothingness is Lord of all creation" (Rubenstein 1992, 305). If one views the totality of existence as the consequence of the self-division and self-emptying of the original Primal Unity that is destined to culminate in a return to that same Primal Unity, which is both All-in-All and No Thing, then the Holocaust can be understood as a precursor to the ultimate return of all things to the No-thing-ness of the Urgrund. Nevertheless, only in the light of Judeo-Christian religio-cultural narcissism could the Holocaust have played a central role in that eschatological drama.

While the Holocaust is an event of overwhelming importance—for Jews and perhaps for some Christians—I take issue with Altizer's view that it is an event of cosmic significance. The fundamental flaw of Europe's Jews during World War II was neither a want of conformity with Jewish traditional belief nor a failure to accept Christ as their Savior. It was a deficit of population strength and weapons with which to defend themselves against the German onslaught. When once again the extermination of Jews was repeatedly promised, this time by Muslims, I included a chapter on Muslims and Jews in the second edition of After Auschwitz (Rubenstein 1992, 281-92). It was impossible to ignore Muslim threats to destroy Israel and its inhabitants in a book on Auschwitz and its aftermath.

By contrast, the Holocaust is a supreme cosmic event for Altizer. He writes in his contribution to my Festschrift:

All too clearly, Rubenstein's Pauline-Freudian conception of [God as] the Divine Infanticide is a naming of that God who is present in the Holocaust, that God who submitted His Chosen People to the most horrible death in history, and did so precisely as an expression of His love, for God slays those to whom he gives life.

(1995, 353)

I saw the classical Jewish religious narrative as falsified, not validated, by the Holocaust. Not so for Altizer, who saw it as a felix culpa. He could not divorce the death of God from the Christian religious narrative that he saw as cosmically actualized in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I see Altizer as one of my most sophisticated critics. For example, Altizer understood, as did few others, that "Rubenstein's book on Paul is yet another way of theologically confronting the Holocaust" (1995, 353).

Professor Kavka cites the crucial role of Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption (1971) in opposing the Hegelian claim that Judaism has no independent role to play in world history. There is, however, an aspect of Rosenzweig's thought that he does not mention. Rosenzweig did not see the forced departure of the Jews from their ancestral homeland in ancient times as a catastrophe that compelled his people to adopt an estranged existence more stressful than that endured by perhaps any other European people. As Altizer saw one Jewish catastrophe as a felix culpa, Rosenzweig saw an earlier Jewish catastrophe as the fortunate fall with which the true history of the Eternal People began. According to Rosenzweig, the biblical period was at best a preparation. As long as the Jews had a land and a language of their own, they were compelled to face the normal challenges of any people with a territory and a way of life that must be defended, often violently. Only after Jews ceased to have any power over their own destiny did their redemptive existence with God truly begin. Rosenzweig holds that unlike the Christian who is born a pagan and must become a Christian through baptism, the Jew needs no second birth. He is already at home with the Father as a member of the Eternal People. Nevertheless, the price the Jew must pay for having become an eternal people "already in the Father's presence" is withdrawal from the concerns of power and "the course of world history" (Rosenzweig 1971, 304-5). A non-Zionist, Rosenzweig had little enthusiasm for political Zionism, although that movement provided the only available refuge for thousands of Rosenzweig's fellow German Jews a few years after his death.³

I first grasped something of the full horror of the Holocaust while serving as a student rabbi during the 1944 High Holy Days in Tupelo, Mississippi. While there, I learned that advancing Russian armies had captured the Polish town of Madjanek and discovered a vast German extermination camp with six hundred thousand pairs of ownerless shoes. As I recalled years later:

The absence of the owners was a haunting presence. I could not obliterate them from my mind. In a small Mississippi town thousands of miles from the camps, I could no longer offer the gathering congregation the age-old assurance that all was well, nor could I celebrate the triumph of order over disorder, rule over misrule, nomos over chaos.

(Rubenstein 1974, 65)

From that time on, the subject of the Holocaust became an overwhelming personal concern. I realized that had my great-grandfather and his sons not left Vilna, Lithuania, sometime in the 1880s, either the Germans or their very willing Lithuanian allies would have killed me. I came to realize that my lifelong vocation was to attempt to understand what had happened to Europe's Jews and what would have happened to me had my family not emigrated. In my quest for understanding, I became an accidental theologian. Nevertheless, I developed a certain impatience with some of the twentieth century's greatest Jewish thinkers because of their inability to deal with Jewish powerlessness. This was true not only of Rosenzweig but also of Martin Buber and others (see Rubenstein 1972b; 1979).

Although I had read Buber as a student, my real encounter with his thinking came when I was invited to speak at the 1978 Buber Centenary Conference held in Wurzburg, Bavaria, chaired by Walter Scheel, then President of the Federal Republic of Germany. The more I read of Buber for the conference the more disenchanted I became. My undiplomatic conclusion was: " Er hat keine Relevanz für seine eigene Zeit und keine Relevanz für unsere Zeit " ("He has no relevance for his own time and no relevance for our time"). My reasons were summed up in the following observation:

I find no consideration of the relationship between power and dignity in Buber's discussion of the dynamics of interpersonal encounter in I and Thou, in spite of the fact that no people was ever compelled to endure a more total assault on its very being than the community of which he was so important a figure.

(1979, 396, translated from German)

Buber's inability to deal responsibly with the issue of power was nowhere more evident than in his advocacy of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. His stand was noted by his admirer Paul Tillich, who observed that, in his distrust of politics, Buber affirmed the Zionist movement as a messianic attempt to create a Gemeinschaft while negating it "as a political attempt to create a state." Tillich maintained that Buber was profoundly mistaken, "for history . . . seems to show that without the shell of a state, a community cannot exist" (1948, 521).

I concurred with Tillich's judgment and came to regard insights from disciplines such as history, sociology, demography, economics, and political theory as far more helpful than most, but by no means all, contemporary Jewish religious thought (see, e.g., Rubenstein 1975; 1983). Moreover, in the last twelve or thirteen years, I have been far more interested in studying Islam than in reading Jewish theology. I take with the utmost seriousness radical Muslim threats to destroy Israel and its people. Having been born in 1924, I find an element of déja vu in my current concerns. I have dealt with aspects of Islam in my most recent books, one of which deals largely with the impact of Muslim mass immigration into Europe (Rubenstein 2005); the subject matter of the other is obvious from its title, Jihad and Genocide (2010).