Martin Buber's Theopolitics

This Pathless Hour | 255

of [Rosenzweig’s] Star of Redemption). The significance of this connection for

every stratum of Jewish reality is incalculable, and I deem myself fortunate

to have found confirmation of your testimony of this in such a prominent

place.^26

Scholem directs us to his analysis of the Star of Redemption for an understand-
ing of his views on Buber’s presentation of theocracy and anarchy. This assess-
ment says that “few works have been as provocative since the appearance of the
Guide of the Perplexed or the Zohar... in the long run this work will need ever
increasing critical attention.”^27 He admits that the ten years since the first edition
is a short period in the life of such a work as the Star, which would only reveal
its full significance to a future generation. In his letter, however, Scholem refers
to a “critique” of Rosenzweig. There is only one point in the review that could be
called critical, and it does indeed involve the words “theocracy” and “anarchy.”
Scholem sees Rosenzweig’s project as an “attempt to deduce the two possi-
bilities for theocratic modes of life in Judaism and Christianity from the dialec-
tics of the concept of redemption.” Since Rosenzweig’s descriptions of religious
realities derive from liturgical calendars, Scholem’s “theocratic modes of life”
seem to refer to Jewish and Christian ritual, congregational lives. To call such
life, however devoted, “theocracy” suggests a radically different sense of the term
from the one in the sixth chapter of Buber’s Kingship of God. There Buber speaks
of “the kingship of God as such” as a historical tendency toward actualization
“which can be no other than a political one,” since YHVH “is not content to be
‘God’ in the religious sense... not constitution of cult and custom only, also of
economy and society.”^28 Scholem seems to acknowledge this when he speaks of
the “strangely church-like aspect which Judaism unexpectedly sometimes takes
on” in Rosenzweig’s work. However, a closer look reveals that it is by no means
an anarchic “constitution of economy and society” that Scholem finds lacking in
Rozenzweig’s conception of theocracy:

To be sure, by his use of the doctrine of the anticipation of redemption in Jew-

ish life... Rosenzweig took a decided and hostile stand against the one open

door in the otherwise very neatly ordered house of Judaism. He opposed the

theory of catastrophes contained in Messianic apocalypticism which might

be considered the point at which even today theocratic and bourgeois modes

of life stand irreconcilably opposed. The deep-seated tendency to remove the

apocalyptic thorn from the organism of Judaism makes Rosenzweig the last

and certainly one of the most vigorous exponents of a very old and very pow-

erful movement in Judaism, which crystallized in a variety of forms.... Apoc-

alypticism, as a doubtlessly anarchic element, provided some fresh air in the

house of Judaism; it provided a recognition of the catastrophic potential of all

historical order in an unredeemed world. Here, in a mode of thought deeply

concerned for order, it underwent metamorphosis. The power of redemption

seems to be built into the clockwork of life lived in the light of revelation,

though more as restlessness than as potential destructiveness.^29