barbarians, to the torture chambers, to the funeral pile. However, rather than
renounce the love, exuberance, and praise of God, who will finally rescue the
just of all nations, they calculated their own dead, their own people, indi-
vidual as well as the collective, among those who had been punished justly.
The unperturbed by these difficulties were relieved, it seems to me, that in
Judaism the teaching of the individual soul did not develop the meaning that
it has in Christianity. When it states in the Psalm, “you make the Highest
your refuge. He has commanded his angel to protect you on all your ways,”
this concerns the protection of all as well as the individual. Throughout the
dispersion, the entire, united people had meaning through their praxis of the
divine Commandments, not just from time to time or as just a past histori-
cal moment, but as one people until the end of time. The idea of a life after
death means first of all not the hereafter but the bond with the nation, which
has its prehistory in the Bible, and which has crassly been distorted by mod-
ern nationalism. By conforming to the Torah, life is provided to the individ-
ual, who spends his days, months and years in obedience to the law. The
individual thereby becomes so united with the others in spite of differences,
that after his own death he continues to exist through their practice of tra-
dition, the love of family and of the faithful ancestry in the expectation that
it will once become good in the world. To bear witness to and stand up for
this is the meaning of belonging to the chosen people, which determines the
conviction of the martyrs. Not unlike the figure of Jesus in Christianity, so
Judaism is responsible for the redemption of the whole world. To combine
Judaism’s teaching of the Messianic kingdom with that of the gospels, of the
society in relation to the autonomous individual soul, so that the destiny of
the subject at the same time means the realization of righteousness on the
earth, seems to me to be the theology that the culture of the West today has
given up.
Like always, the historical verses to be explained are, for many, those they
have sung, those they proclaimed; a perception of history so contrary to rea-
son, whose existence runs so contrary to and is so far removed from illusion
and untruth, that it is just like science. Hegel called the Psalms “classical
examples of genuine sublimity set forth for all time as a pattern in which
what man has before himself in his religious idea of God is expressed bril-
liantly with the most powerful elevation of soul. Nothing in the world may
lay claim to independence, for everything is and subsists only by God’s might
and is only there in order, in praise of this might, to serve him and to express
118 • Max Horkheimer