The most interesting thing about the diary is its Jewish subtext. Benjamin notes that it’s Passover, and that the pension he’s staying in is owned by a Jewish man who “kept saying, ‘So, what do we make for Yontev?’ ” Benjamin parses the word in a way that suggests it is new to him: “One does not say ‘Good day’ but ‘Good Yontev.’ ”

Similarly, the proprietor subscribes to the Israelitisches Familienblatt (“Jewish Family Journal”), and Benjamin notes that the magazine contains advertisements for “dishes for the Seder.” It takes his traveling companion to explain to him what these Seder plates are: “The latter are used for the Passover feast and have different compartments for different foods. So says Steinfeld.” Later Benjamin complains, “with coffee there was matzoh, and that’s how it will be; for … we are in Pesach week.” But while the pension seems to keep kosher for Passover, there is no actual Seder, which seems to both relieve Benjamin and disappoint him: “Thank God they didn’t do Seder. It might well have been very interesting and might even have moved me, but it would have seemed to me like theater, nothing holy.”

Much can be gleaned about Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—more, ignorant of the basic details of Jewish practice—and he feels a nervous disinclination to be “claimed” in any way by Judaism; a 20th-century man, he could find “nothing holy” in organized religion. Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to notice that Benjamin is surrounded by Jewishness like a fish by water. His traveling companion is Jewish; the house he’s staying in is Jewish. As his friend Gershom Scholem, a product of a similar background, would note, it was quite normal for assimilated German Jews never to enter a Gentile home or invite a Gentile to theirs. Jewish identity was much more durable than Jewish belief.

This would be of merely sociological interest were it not for the complicated ways that Jewishness and Judaism informed Benjamin’s brilliant and vastly influential work. His best-known writings—on Proust and Kafka, 19th-century Paris, the movies, “the age of mechanical reproduction”—came after the period covered by Early Writings. But even in these seven years, from the ages of 18 to 25, it’s possible to see Benjamin develop from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker. The latest pieces in the book—in particular “The Life of Students,” “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” and “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”—lead directly to his most important insights into the nature of literature and history. In fact, the last of these, never published in Benjamin’s lifetime, can be seen as a kind of skeleton key to his mature work, full of overtly mystical beliefs that would go underground when Benjamin became a professed Communist.

Benjamin was not just young when he wrote the pieces in this book; as an activist in the German Youth Movement, he was, one might say, professionally young. The youth movement was a loosely organized phenomenon with many tendencies—its adherents were interested in curriculum reform, sexual liberation, and nationalist renewal, among other causes, and there is a definite flavor of the 1960s in its vague, tumultuous commitment to change. Benjamin was exposed to it starting at 13, when he began to attend the Free School Community—an experimental, progressive school founded by the prominent reformer Gustav Wyneken, who became his mentor. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin was active in youth organizations—he was president of the Berlin University chapter of the Independent Students’ Association, and several of the essays in the book first appeared in movement journals.

In these pieces, we sometimes find Benjamin writing as a muckraker, holding the German education system up to ridicule for its pedantry and mindless authoritarianism. In “Teaching and Valuation,” he complains of the “pious reiteration or regurgitation of unrelated or superficially related facts” and offers a “blacklist” of teacherly philistinism: “Apropos of Horace: ‘We have to read Horace in this class. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not; it’s on the syllabus.’ ” When Benjamin quotes a teacher at a classical Gymnasium telling a student, “Please don’t think that anyone believes this enthusiasm of yours for the ancient world,” it’s hard to avoid suspecting that he himself was the student.

In response, Benjamin calls, in fairly platitudinous terms, for “a classical secondary school we could love,” where teaching would be related “to living values of the present.” But at heart, he was much too utopian to be contented with any actually existing reform movement. The title of his dispatch from a major youth retreat in 1913 is “Youth Was Silent”: “Excursions, ceremonial attire, folk dances are nothing new and … still nothing spiritual … we will continue, in the name of youth, to weigh the Youth Congress against the demands of the spirit.” It didn’t help that German youth were just as prone to anti-Semitism as their parents: “When the prizes for sports were being awarded, the name Isaacsohn was announced. Laughter rang out from a minority,” Benjamin notes.

The further one reads, however, the clearer it becomes that what Benjamin was really seeking, in the guise of school reform, was spiritual and social rebirth. Thus, in an essay on “Moral Education,” he concludes that “all morality and religiosity originates in solitude with God”—a prescription that seems to leave little role for school reform, or for schools in general. The tension between Benjamin’s private and public agendas becomes even clearer in the unpublished pieces in Early Writings, the poems and stories and sketches he showed only to a few friends. There, the rhetoric of the youth-movement essays clouds over into the dense, tormented prose that would be so characteristic of the adult Benjamin.

In “The Metaphysics of Youth,” for instance, he writes: “Greatness is the eternal silence after conversation. It is to take the rhythm of one’s own words in the empty space.” There is also a good deal of unresolved sexual anguish at work; Benjamin writes portentously about “the prostitute,” as in, “The woman is the guardian of the conversations. She receives the silence, and the prostitute receives the creator of what has been.”

Benjamin’s disenchantment with the youth movement didn’t become official until the beginning of the First World War. He was disgusted by the way the allegedly progressive movement rallied around the kaiser. Personally, he wanted nothing to do with the war, and he went to great lengths to avoid the draft, finally moving to Switzerland. In terms of his intellectual development, however, this disillusionment was a blessing, allowing him to unyoke his true concerns from the official cause of “youth” (and by 1914, he wasn’t so young any more). “The Life of Students,” from 1915, shows Benjamin bidding farewell to the student movement, while drawing on his experiences to frame a new, radically utopian vision of progress:

History rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas. The historical task is to give shape to this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, make it visible and ascendant in the present.

Already in these lines, it’s possible to hear the messianic tones of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he would write in 1940, just before he committed suicide in the face of the Nazi onslaught:

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

When it came to his deepest political hopes, Benjamin seemed to fall instinctively into a Jewish vocabulary of messianism. So, too, with language and literature. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” has at its core a reading of Genesis and advances an idea of divine language that sounds amazingly like kabbalism: “Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. In God, name is creative because it is word, and God’s word is knowing because it is name.” One of the things that makes Benjamin so fascinating is the way he seems to translate Jewish ways of thinking into a post-Jewish intellectual culture. Early Writings shows that this fertile dualism was present from the very beginning.

Gathering Storm

It’s always been hard to pin Benjamin down. Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist, deconstructive spirit—he has been many things to many people. It is equally hard to describe what he did, in part because Americans don’t really make intellectuals like him. Benjamin, whose most important work was written in Berlin during the ’20s and then in Paris during the ’30s, wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one. To use a quaint expression, he was a man of letters. Even that does not do him justice.

Uwe Steiner’s new book on Benjamin—which attempts to put Benjamin in his historical place—doesn’t really do him justice either. Steiner traces Benjamin’s mature work to the thinker’s early days as a radical student before the First World War, when Nietzsche was all the rage. Fair enough. Steiner also has a larger goal: He wants us to stop trying to bend Benjamin to our intellectual will—be it Marxist, deconstructive, or religious. A laudable goal but also slightly perverse, because Benjamin had no trouble trying on others’ thoughts to see if they fit. Even worse, Steiner’s approach scants Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional allure.

Benjamin’s remarkable endurance derives as much from his style as from his ideas. Or rather, his brilliant, damnably esoteric critique of capitalist culture is one with the pathos and indirectness of his prose. His sentences suggest. They imply. At their best, they radiate. Hence the remarkable bursts of scholarship his work has seen over the last few decades. He reminds people of what they might think.

His most famous set piece comes from his last work, a series of aphorisms called “On the Concept of History.” Written in the short period before he killed himself while trying to flee from the Nazis, this paragraph gains some of its considerable melancholy from retrospect, from the fact that it has been taken as his last will and testament:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A beautiful piece of writing that gets an extra kick from its pessimistic counter-intuitive punch line. Progress doesn’t progress in the slightest. It is a steady march through disaster. And there is nothing, it seems, we can do about it.

Bleak stuff. But Benjamin’s ability to arrest you with the solidity of an abstraction can tempt you away from the thin thread of his argument. On its own, this paragraph presents us with a picture of fallen and unredeemable history. In the context of the other paragraphs of the essay in which it appears, we can see that the Angel of History does not have the last word. History, Benjamin maintains, is permanently, if elusively, susceptible to revolutionary change.

Benjamin claimed that his work was saturated with theology, even—or rather especially—when it appears to be at its most secular. In the piece that contains the Angel, the revolution fulfills a theological mandate by making “whole what has been smashed.” Benjamin imagines that it will enact tikkun olam in a very literal sense. Benjamin’s colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, once accused him of believing all too squarely in the Last Judgment. Though Benjamin tried to recast his thought into more acceptably materialist terms, Horkheimer had a point. Benjamin might have talked about redemption as the historical fulfillment of squandered hopes, but at heart he was always listening for the final trump. He was waiting for the glorious resurrection of the dead.

Benjamin’s thought was essentially religious. It clung to the twin promises of redemption and transcendence. The man worked from the clearly Jewish intuition that justice cannot be derived from the world as it is. Justice is precisely that small break from nature instituted by the Law. Our problem is not that nature is sinful. Our problem lies with the fact that on its own, nature just isn’t enough. It needs to be transcended, if only just a bit. As his friend T. W. Adorno was fond of reminding us, the Talmud says that the redeemed world will be like this one, but a little different. And that tiny shift means everything.

But what happens when we, as the children of modernity, have lost the Law? That is where Benjamin’s messianic politics slip in. Gershom Scholem, the magisterial historian of Kabbalah, always maintained that Benjamin was a Jewish thinker and not really a Marxist. For his part, Benjamin argued that he pursued a single goal—the radical transformation of the world, a utopian strike against suffering. His was not the tikkun olam of good deeds and incremental improvements, but of bold risks and decisive moves.

Sure, sure, there is a great deal of Romanticism in all this (as Steiner would be the first to point out) and a sentimentalizing anarchism that speaks of another era. Even so, Benjamin proposes a heresy we might want to consider: redemption without faith. He refuses to give up the rigors and promises of theology for a more amenable, even amiable ethical Judaism. He therefore cuts a different path for the post-religious. Just as Scholem, however unwittingly, presents us with a Kabbalah without halakhah, so Benjamin quite wittingly addresses a theology without God. An intractable contradiction? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is a historical conundrum that we have yet to overcome.

In my sophomore year of college, my mother died. Her illness was long, breast cancer that played hide and seek. My grandmother, my co-parent since my parents divorced when I was 7, collapsed under the weight of her daughter’s death. With her went the ability to pay the mortgage on our house.

In the end, our house was foreclosed on. Weeks before, I was told to collect everything—furniture, papers, clothes—I wanted; everything else would be sold or thrown away. I took very little; I had no room for the rocking chair, the loveseat, the vases, the china. For the most part, I don’t regret the things left behind, but although I wasn’t there to see it, I’m haunted by the image of the contents of our home being thrown into a trash bin, leaving the green Victorian an empty coffin.

Walter Benjamin wrote, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” I visited my grandmother often in the nursing home where she lived before her death in 2007 at the age of 96. Our conversations during that time orbited around two things—how much she wanted to leave the nursing home, and the location of her antiques.

My grandmother began working at the age of 9, at a now-defunct department store in Springfield. She collected her antiques slowly, strategically, filling first her small apartment and then our large house. There were ornate sofas and chairs, curio cabinets, lamps, tea sets, jewelry, picture frames, dolls. This was meant to be our inheritance, my mother’s and mine, in a world where the order of death would be different. When my friends visited the house, they seemed convinced that behind this museum existed a profound aesthetic and enormous wealth, but it simply wasn’t true. For my mother, my grandmother’s collecting was a nuisance, a sign of an old woman’s decline, the misplaced locus of her love and affection.

During the last years of her life, my grandmother became excruciatingly paranoid. She was convinced that my aunt and uncle were pilfering her antiques, hoarding them for their own children, when in reality, they both used the term “crap” liberally to refer to her collections.

The foreclosure freed us from it all, but my grandmother, beset by grief from losing my mother and confused and hurt by no longer being able to care for herself independently, obsessed about her possessions every day, with no idea what had really happened to them. My aunt, uncle, and I resolved to never tell her, and so I lied, athletically. I told her the antiques decorated my dorm rooms and apartments, I pretended to know the exact locations of things, the story of their journey from our old house to my new life.

My mother and grandmother meant to leave me objects when they died, objects that would provide me with money, with safety, with the knowledge that someone had wanted me to be taken care of, to know that I was loved. What remains instead are notions about money that are twisted, yet enduring.

One: Not having money is shameful. My mother worked hard to create the illusion that we had money and to deflect the reality, even if it meant hiding it from me. She became a single mother when she was 40, after she and my father divorced. Her shame was always palpable; not having money meant that she was a failure, asking for help meant that she couldn’t take care of me, that she wasn’t responsible, that she had made bad choices. I see her situation as complicated by these factors and her illness, but I’ve still managed to replicate her emotions about money. I’m surrounded by people with money, and so I avoid open discussion of my own financial state, although I’m quick to point out the overwhelming classism in the Jewish community. I’ve been willfully financially ignorant, broke beyond comprehension, debt free, well appointed, and terrified, all in the 12 years since my mother died. Ironically, I’ve also only worked for nonprofits, and I’ve chosen to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, so maybe, ultimately, I don’t want to have money. It would mean breaking the cycle, becoming someone else.

Two: Home is fleeting, and money will never be able to buy it. I’ve avoided returning to the town where I grew up, and when that’s been impossible, I’ve been sure to avoid driving past our old house, convincing myself that it had been demolished. Last year, on a whim, I Google-mapped it, and there it was, painted a different color, obscured by overgrown grass in the front yard. I wonder who lives there, if there are any remains of my mother, my grandmother, or me.

The places I’ve lived since then have never felt real, or secure. Transience brings me a strange comfort, and I almost always live in small spaces that other people probably wouldn’t tolerate. I know home can disappear quickly, like everything else.

Three: Possessions are dangerous and meaningless. I think sometimes of my mother’s orange house sweater, which hung on the back of her chair at the kitchen table. As far as I know, it remained there until the house was cleaned of its contents. Out of everything left behind, it’s that sweater that I wish I had taken with me, even if years later, the smell of her would be gone. These days, I make it a point to not be trapped by things, to not be defined by the use or the accumulation of them.

Ideas about money are really just ideas about who you are and where you have been. One of the worst things about the cycle of financial need is the inability to conceive of another reality, the perpetual feeling of being at a dead end, the bald, quivering fear. There must be an opportunity for interception, reversal, potential.

There’s a Jewish saying about deriving benefits from the illumination of the Hanukkah menorah; you should not even use the light to count your money. I imagine the three of us hovering around the flickering, inconsistent light of the candles that burn out quickly, struggling to see ourselves and our lives clearly.

Chanel Dubofsky is a writer living in New York City.

All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don’t want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.

I want certainty, science: everything you are, do, think; think, do, are,
is precisely twenty-two percent Jewish. Or six-and-a-half. Some nice prime.
Your suffering is Jewish. Your resistant, resilient pleasure in living, too,

can be tracked to some Jew on some bridge on page something or other
in some city, some village, some shtetl, some festering shvitz of a slum …

This is vintage Williams: long lines kept afloat through the conversational speed of his diction. His fluency hides a problem, though. He’s not asking how Jewish he is. He’s asking how he is Jewish, what’s Jewish in him.

All right, then, can we cast Williams as a Jewish poet? If we are to judge by the evidence of Wait—and his 2006 Collected Poems—he doesn’t draw on many Jewish sources. The man is widely read, and many of his poems take as their occasion a famous book or a famous writer (“I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante”). While some of them are Jewish, their numbers are few. Wait cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ortega y Gasset, Goethe, and Zbigniew Herbert. Nary a Jew among them.

As Williams has gotten older, his poetry, which was once known for its unflinching dedication to the concrete, has become comfortably abstract, buoyed along by what he calls “spurts of cogitation, these suppositions strung/ like air on air.” The poet who can consider rats in the backyard (“devious, ruthless,/ rapacious, and every/ day I loathe/ them more.”) can also imagine “traversing the maze of my brain: corridors, corners, strange,/ narrow caverns, dead ends.” Those strings of suppositions are not particularly Jewish in their structure, their themes, or their inspiration. Williams has always expressed a strong desire for social justice and a liberal’s hatred of violence, especially the redemptive violence of the religious extremist or the millenarian revolutionary. Many Jews would agree with him, but that’s hardly conclusive. So would many non-Jews.

“Jew on Bridge” is not typical, then. In its associative leaps and bounds, it is thick with Jews. It begins with a tiny incident—hardly an incident—in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s hero Raskolnikov passes a Jew on a bridge. He concentrates all his prodigious anti-Semitism on this one lone, nameless soul. After pondering this unknown Jew on an unknown bridge over the Neva, Williams turns to another Jew on a bridge, this time in France. He thinks of the poet Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, in 1920. A Romanian fluent in Russian, possessed by German, and completely at home in French, Celan escaped from a Nazi labor camp and ended up in Paris, only to commit suicide there in 1970. In his brief, tormented transit, Celan wrote the most important German poetry of the second half of the 20th century, all of it shaped and deformed by the Shoah.

English and German fragments of Celan’s most famous poem, “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) appear and reappear in “Jew on Bridge”:

He stood on the bridge over the Seine, looked into the black milk of dying,
Jew on bridge, and hauled himself over the rail. Dein aschenes Haar…
Dostoevsky’s Jew, though, is still there. On page something or other.

The real Jew, tortured by the particular history of the European past, is dead. The literary Jew, a compass of all disgust, remains.

And Williams, standing somewhere between these Jews on their respective bridges, wants to know where he fits in. He is adamantly secular and uncomfortable around the religious. He might occasionally be “lonely for God,” but let’s be honest, only occasionally. As he presents it, he is perhaps too American—too far away from the European root—to count.

But Williams finds his way into the doleful history of European Jewry through an elegant sleight of hand. His father, like Celan, was named Paul. His grandfather was named Benjamin, which brings to Williams’ mind Walter Benjamin, the great German litterateur. Benjamin—the German, not the grandfather—killed himself in a Spanish hotel while trying to flee the Nazis.

Two suicides, two Jews, two relations. Williams brings Celan and Benjamin into the family through the accidental alchemy of their names. He brings himself into the circle through a profoundly melancholy sense—whose cynicism is only half a joke—of a common fate: “Aren’t we all in that same shitty hotel on the bridge in the shittiest world?” It is not clear whether that “we” is confined to Jews or extends, in a sweeping existential gesture, to the whole human race.

Most likely it is the latter. Williams locates his greatest affinity to Benjamin in the German’s exquisite ear for suffering, in what Williams describes as Benjamin’s shame at human brutality. Nevertheless, Williams is uneasy with the grand existential gesture. By killing himself, Benjamin has tried to overcome mankind’s shame by erasing “all the names that ever existed” including those that maintain the Jewish past. He has annihilated us all.

Where can Williams go from there? It must have been difficult to end this poem, one in which Williams—born in New Jersey in 1936—attempts to attach himself to the catastrophic fate of Mitteleuropa. Nothing could be less Jewish, less evocative, than his own name, and so he rolls others off his tongue, those names that have driven his meditation from the get-go:

Celan on his bridge. Raskolnikov muttering Dostoevsky under his breath.
Jew on bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath.
Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Haar. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath.

Ash and breath. Ash vs. breath. The poet will breathe and write in spite of the camps.

While there is something both stirring and pretentious in this—is suicide really the point?—we Jews do believe in survival through names, and Williams is nothing if not a poet of memory. Williams has always been strongest when elegiac. He has written many poems in which he meditates on lost friends, lost loves, or, as in this description of his old, now “inner-city” high school, lost possibilities:

Come dusk, the classrooms emptied,
the books shut tight, those forsaken treasures
of knowledge must batter the fading blackboards
and swarm the silent, sleeping halls,
like shades of lives never to be lived.

He is a skilled mourner, to be sure. His Jewishness lies in how he mourns.

“Jew on Bridge” tempts you to read Williams backwards, from Wait to his first book 40 years ago. If you do, you can see that he has always been sitting shiva for the whole 20th century. He has had a strong tendency to view its public disasters through the scrim of the Holocaust. The first poem in his first book was dedicated to Anne Frank. He has written poetry about Auschwitz and translated Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish writer once described as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” Although he can be quick to generalize from the particular experience of the Shoah to the plight of humanity in general, Williams is also capable of evoking that experience in its uncomfortable specificities:

You’re in a room. Dark. You’re naked. Crushed on all sides by others naked.
Flesh-knobs. Hairy or smooth. Sweating against you. Shvitzing against you.

Such writing requires empathy, and empathy is a product of the moral imagination, the ability to identify with another’s situation. Williams has both to spare, sometimes to a self-lacerating fault.

The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has suggested that the important thing is not a person’s identity but his or her identifications. Williams, like many of his generation and like many after, finds his secular Jewishness right in the heart of the Shoah. However limited that identification might be—it misses many aspects of Yiddishkeit—it is capable of producing deep commitments and memorable poetry. Whether it can continue to do so remains to be seen. Whether it should do so is another matter completely.

The most popular of these videos, however, and in a way the most extraordinary, are those that record the Rebbe’s farbrengens—the ceremonial gatherings in which his followers would eat, drink, and sing with him. What is striking about these scenes is their extreme ordinariness. Here is the Rebbe, an old, frail man, gingerly chewing pieces of bread and taking sips of wine. The setting, a large room in Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, is modest at best, wood-paneled like a basement rec room. There is none of the pomp with which religious leaders are ordinarily surrounded—no vestments, altars, or processions. Yet the way the Hasidim chant the niggun—“ve’samachta be’hagecha,” “you shall rejoice in your festival,” a line from the Book of Deuteronomy—and the way they are absorbed in the Rebbe’s every movement, leave no doubt that in this little corner of Crown Heights, if anywhere, holiness is taking place. For what else is holiness than the utter conviction that holiness exists?

To many Jews, this conviction is also the scandal of Lubavitch—or Chabad, as it is often called, using the Hebrew acronym for the school of Hasidic thought to which the sect belongs. To most people, Chabad means two things: its far-flung network of emissaries, or shluchim, greeting Jews in the most remote places and urging them to light holiday candles or wear tefillin; and its belief that Menahem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah. Both of these things give Chabad a prominence in the Jewish world far out of proportion to its actual membership. In The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton University Press), their much-debated new biography, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman estimate that the total number of Lubavitcher Hasidim is around 40,000—“about ten thousand in Crown Heights, five thousand in Kfar Chabad [the Lubavitch settlement in Israel], and perhaps another twenty-five thousand worldwide, including about three thousand shaliach families.”

In other words, Lubavitchers make up about one quarter of 1 percent of the world Jewish population. Yet it would be hard to find an engaged Jew, of any denomination or none, who does not have an opinion about Chabad, usually a strong one. Many admire Chabad for its institution-building, the devotion and selflessness of its emissaries, and its bold representation of Judaism in the public square—whenever a huge menorah is illuminated somewhere, from Washington to Moscow, it is usually a Lubavitcher who built it. That is why so many Jews who are not Orthodox, and sometimes not even particularly observant, praise Chabad and help to fund its activities.

Yet many of those same Jews are acutely embarrassed by the notion, which swept Lubavitch in the years before Schneerson’s death, that he was actually “Melech HaMoshiach,” King Messiah, sent by God to redeem the world and the Jewish people. Still more alien is the belief, clung to by a small but vocal minority of Lubavitchers to this day, that because the Rebbe was the Messiah, he could not actually die—that he is now simply hidden, waiting for the moment when he can return to earth. One of the illustrations in The Rebbe shows the wall of the synagogue adjacent to 770 Eastern Parkway, where a large cornerstone has been removed: It was defaced by Hasidim who objected to the inscription, which referred to the Rebbe as being “of blessed memory.”

You do not have to look very far, on websites and discussion boards, to find Lubavitchers who are sick of being associated with the delusions of the meshikhistn, as the Schneerson messianists are known. Yet it is impossible for Chabad to decisively repudiate them. The notion that the seventh Rebbe was the Messiah, or would be instrumental in bringing the Messiah, and that we are currently living in the period known as ikvot meshicha, “the footsteps of the Messiah”—that is, the end of days—is too deeply ingrained in Lubavitch thought and practice.

Messianism, of course, has always been one of the central concerns of Hasidism. In the 18th century, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, wrote that he had actually spoken with the Messiah face to face, during one his mystical ascents, and asked, “When will you come?” The answer, as the Besht recorded it, was that redemption would arrive “when your teachings are publicized and revealed to the world and your wellsprings will be spread to the outside.” But it was not until Lubavitch was transplanted to America, during the Second World War, that this metaphorical injunction became the basis for an extremely practical kind of Jewish missionizing.

Every time a Jew lit Shabbat candles or wrapped tefillin, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught, he was helping to spread the wellsprings, drawing closer to God and hastening the Redemption. It didn’t even matter if these symbolic Jewish acts sprang from, or led to, a deeper sense of commitment and observance, since the Rebbe’s “radical view,” as Heilman and Friedman write, was that “the deed itself is what counts not the motivation.” In this way, Lubavitch developed a uniquely American messianism, pragmatic and action-oriented, in which a secular Jew hurrying through Times Square could stop for a few moments at a Chabad “mitzvah tank” and make his contribution to the coming of the Messiah. “Getting Jews to perform these mitzvahs,” as Heilman and Friedman put it, “was a first step in cleansing the Jew of his non-Jewishness, releasing the spark of holiness from the captivity of impurity.”

As cloistered as Chabad seems to be, in its Crown Heights precincts, Heilman and Friedman argue that the movement, and the Rebbe in particular, had an acute sense of the needs and possibilities of American life for Judaism. The Rebbe was sending his shluchim to the most remote spots on earth, calling them to a life of service and sacrifice, at the same time that President Kennedy was launching the Peace Corps, in the early 1960s. Chabad focused its missionary activities on the universities just as the postwar baby boom brought millions of new students to campus and as the counterculture radically expanded the range of spiritual possibilities for young people. (It is no coincidence that charismatic, media-friendly Jewish figures like Shlomo Carlebach and Shmuley Boteach started out as Lubavitch emissaries to colleges.) And Chabad’s embrace of technology feels distinctively American, even when it uses high tech for surprisingly atavistic purposes. It is customary, for instance, for pilgrims to the grave of the Rebbe to leave written prayers, in the conviction that he can intercede with God to answer them; but if you can’t get to Queens, you can send your prayer by fax.

Lubavitch does not officially believe that the seventh Rebbe is still, somehow, alive; but 16 years after his death, there is still no eighth Rebbe. And Schneerson’s presence—on videos, in books, in the memories of his disciples—still dominates Lubavitch, both practically and theologically. Friedman and Heilman quote a Chabad video featuring a woman who had never met the Rebbe when he was alive, but saw footage of him after his death: “I was just at my first farbrengen,” she said, as though the Rebbe’s virtual presence was no different from his physical one.

The absolute centrality of Menachem Mendel Schneerson to Chabad helps to explain the hostility that Heilman and Friedman’s book has aroused among Lubavitchers. The latter half of The Rebbe is devoted mainly to the way Schneerson shaped Chabad’s public activities—the mitzvah campaigns, the high political profile (President Reagan once sent the Rebbe a birthday message), and of course the messianic activism. Starting in 1951, when he inherited his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe, Schneerson’s life was effectively dissolved in Chabad’s life. Childless, far from his few surviving relatives, surrounded by disciples who worshipped him, he had no one who could relate to him in an ordinary, personal way. The only exception was his wife, Chaya Moussia, the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe; but she was intensely private, and Heilman and Friedman give the sense that she more or less relinquished her husband to his followers.

The controversy comes mainly from the first half of the biography, where Heilman and Friedman suggest that, as a young man, Schneerson was tempted by the wider, secular world and resisted the call of Lubavitch. The evidence for this thesis is necessarily circumstantial. It took a surprisingly long time for Mendel, as the authors call him, to marry Yosef Yitzhak’s daughter, as if one or both of them were hesitant about the match. After the marriage, the couple did not live with the sixth Rebbe, in Latvia, but went to Berlin and then Paris, where Schneerson studied engineering. Heilman and Friedman make much of the idea that Schneerson’s short beard and (relatively) modern dress embarrassed his father-in-law, and imply that he lived too far from local synagogues in Berlin and Paris to pray regularly.

What emerges, not quite explicitly, from all these details is the portrait of a young man struggling against his destiny. Heilman and Friedman argue that not until Schneerson fled France for New York in 1941—rescued from the Nazis, along with most of the Lubavitcher elite, thanks to pressure put on the State Department by American Jewish leaders—did he finally give up his “dream” of living a less-cloistered life. It is this contention that many Lubavitchers have disputed, mainly on the grounds that throughout the 1930s, even as he lived away from the Lubavitch court, Schneerson was deeply immersed in Hasidic study. (See, for instance, the hostile but impressively knowledgeable critique by Chaim Rapoport, “The Afterlife of Scholarship.”)

There is a strong case to be made that, even when Schneerson was living farthest from the Lubavitcher world, his mental universe remained thoroughly Hasidic. What is undeniable is that as late as 1950, when Yosef Yitzhak died, Mendel seemed to resist becoming the next Rebbe. The sixth Rebbe’s other son-in-law, Shmaryahu Gourary, had been far more involved in the institutions of Chabad and looked like a more obvious successor. Not until Schneerson’s brilliance and charisma became undeniable did the Lubavitchers press him to become their leader.

Heilman and Friedman’s account of the day Schneerson finally agreed to become Rebbe is brilliantly dramatic. For a year after the sixth Rebbe’s death, quiet jockeying and lobbying among the Lubavitchers had pitted Schneerson against Gourary, with the former continually refusing to declare himself a candidate for the leadership. Finally, on the anniversary of Yosef Yitzhak’s death—the 10th of Shvat, on the Jewish calendar—Schneerson “arose to offer a Torah talk, sicha.” But a sicha was different from a ma’amar khsides, “a talk filled with Chabad philosophy and thought that is recited in a distinctive and unmistakable singsong … and which in Lubavitcher practice can only be offered by a rebbe.” Before the talk began, some Hasidim had privately asked Schneerson to give a ma’amar khsides, which would imply accepting the role of Rebbe, and he had refused, snapping, “stop this nonsense.” But as he spoke, “one of the oldest Hasidim present” called out “venimtso kheyn veseyhl tov, der rebe zol zogn khsides”: “may we find grace and good wisdom, and would the Rebbe offer khsides.”

At this cue, Schneerson paused, then resumed his talk “in the special singsong associated with such addresses,” Heilman and Friedman write, “at last offer[ing] the ma’amar khsides for which so many had been waiting and which he had undoubtedly prepared in advance. The drama of this vocal transition was unmistakable.” Indeed, the whole episode is like nothing so much as the moment in Julius Caesar when Caesar refuses the crown that the people keep begging him to accept. The comparison brings out the unselfconscious elevation and dignity of the scene at 770 Eastern Parkway. In the minds of those present, the selection of the new Rebbe was literally of cosmic importance, and it is nothing but this certainty of significance that makes history out of happenings. Without it, the grandest, most lavish spectacles—even coronations and inaugurations—feel self-conscious, stagy, insincere; with it, the affairs of a tiny sect in an old house in Brooklyn become the stuff of history.

***

One might say, then, that the Rebbe was always a virtual figure, just as much when he was physically present as now, when he can be seen only on a screen. Significance and holiness and power are, after all, virtual qualities: They cannot be touched or measured, but they can always be perceived by those who consent to their existence. The woman who spoke of viewing a video as being in the Rebbe’s presence was, perhaps, just speaking metaphorically. But the difficulty, when it comes to religion, has always been knowing when a metaphor stops being a metaphor.

Some people speak to the dead for guidance, even though they know they are really just speaking to themselves; others speak to the dead and believe the dead can hear, even if they can’t respond; some believe they are receiving messages from the dead, through signs or omens or the words of a medium. If you leave pidyones, written supplications, on the Rebbe’s grave, are you still acting metaphorically, or have you crossed the existential line that separates acting-as-if from genuine belief? Is it ever possible to cross that line, or does all belief carry with it suspicion of mere acting—and is that self-suspicion the reason why some people become fanatics, meshikhistn, to prove to themselves that they are finally, completely in earnest?

In this way, the scandal of messianism leads inexorably to the scandal of faith itself. If you believe in God—in an omnipotent and actual God, not the euphemistic God of rational and liberal theology—then you must believe that it is possible for God to speak to us, to intervene in our world, to change history. Indeed, if you are an Orthodox Jew or Christian or Muslim, you believe that God has already done these things, a long time ago, though he has inscrutably stopped speaking directly to mankind. It must therefore be possible, in principle, for God to redeem this world—to send the Messiah. And that means that it must be possible, in principle, for a man who claims to be the Messiah actually to be right—even though every previous Messiah, from Bar Kokhba to Jacob Frank, has turned out to be a false one.

To live messianically, then, is to live at a tremendously high tension, in the belief that the Eternal could always be just about to break into the temporal. In modern, secular Jewish literature, the great anatomists of this tension emerged in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—that is, at the historical moment when European Jewish life was at its breaking point, when it had to be either redeemed or destroyed. Out of this crisis came Franz Kafka, who wrote paradoxically that “the messiah will come on the day after he has arrived … not on the last day, but on the very last day”; and Walter Benjamin, who concluded his last essay, written shortly before his suicide in 1940, with the words: “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem became the greatest modern scholar of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism, including that of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi.

Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, was the philosopher-theologian of this crisis moment. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press), his densely brilliant new study of the Rebbe’s mystical thought, Elliot R. Wolfson aptly quotes Rosenzweig on the function of the false Messiah: “The false Messiah is as old as the hope of the genuine one. He is the changing form of the enduring hope. Every Jewish generation is divided by him into those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived. Those having faith are better, those having hope are stronger.” Those having faith are better: Rosenzweig outrages reason in that phrase, deliberately so. It takes strength to resist the temptation of believing in a false Messiah, but to risk belief, he suggests, takes something even rarer—the willingness to be wounded and disappointed, the willingness to be made a fool of. For if no one is willing to believe in this Messiah, false though he may be, how will anyone be found to believe in the Messiah, when he really comes? And “no one knows,” Rosenzweig writes, “whether this … will not happen even today.”

Menahem Mendel Schneerson grew up in a very different part of the Jewish world than Rosenzweig or Benjamin, but he was part of the same generation. Born in the Russian empire in 1902, to a family with an old Lubavitcher pedigree, he lived through the string of crises that devastated Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 20th century: Tsarist pogroms and persecutions, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and finally the Holocaust. If, as Gershom Scholem writes in “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” messianic predictions in Judaism are born in “an equal degree from revelation and from the suffering and desperation of those to whom they are addressed,” it is no wonder that the Jews of Schneerson’s generation should feel themselves to be living in “the footsteps of the Messiah”—a time, Scholem notes, in which “dread and peril of the End form an element of shock and of the shocking which induces extravagance.”

Given the magnitude of the catastrophe, in fact, one might wonder why Lubavitcher messianism—which was already taking shape, Heilman and Friedman show, in the 1920s, under the Sixth Rebbe—did not command a wider Jewish appeal. Why does the cult of Menahem Mendel Schneerson seem like a freak of Jewish history, when earlier messiahs, from Bar Kokhba to Shabbetai Zevi, convulsed the entire Jewish world? The answer, perhaps, is that by the time the “King Messiah” movement came into its own, in the early 1990s, Jewish messianic longings had long since been siphoned off into other channels. Communism, to which so many Jews looked for redemption in the early 20th century, had long since proved a dead end; but the creation of the State of Israel had given Jews, especially American Jews, a new focus for their love and longing.

No wonder, then, that Heilman and Friedman see the Rebbe’s relationship with the State of Israel as especially fraught and complex. On the one hand, Chabad built a large settlement in Israel—with the help of the state’s third president, Zalman Shazar, who had grown up in a Lubavitcher family—and Schneerson became an influential figure in Israeli politics (Rabin, Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu all made the pilgrimage to 770). He saw the reclamation of Eretz Yisrael—including the Occupied Territories—as a sign of divine providence and was dead-set against any move to give up land for peace (except for the Sinai desert, which had no covenantal significance).

Yet Heilman and Friedman also argue that Lubavitch was in competition with Zionism, which it saw as a “false Messiah [that] was going to steal the faith of the Jews that Lubavitchers had been worrking so hard to arouse.” In particular, they write, Schneerson envied the prestige of the Israeli army and used several rhetorical techniques to try to claim it. His “mitzvah tanks” were meant to be spiritual equivalents of the IDF’s conquering tanks, just as his mitzvah campaigns were versions of military campaigns. At times Lubavitch sought to missionize Israeli soldiers, promising that troops who wore tefillin would be divinely protected and strike terror into their enemies. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Heilman and Friedman write, Schneerson went so far as to advise Moshe Dayan to invade Syria and take Damascus, “based on mystical and Kabbalistic texts” that supported this step.

This kind of rivalrous grandiosity was a sign that, as Heilman and Friedman write, the Rebbe came to “see himself as controlling events not only in Israel but also in many other places in the world.” In 1990, the Rebbe’s followers claimed that he had predicted Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. He even advised Israeli Lubavitchers not to equip themselves with government-issued gas masks, since he was certain no Scud missile could harm them. The fall of Communism in 1989 was another vindication of the Rebbe, the destruction of Lubavitch’s oldest and bitterest enemy.

Such world-historical events served to raise the emotional temperature at 770, where the Rebbe was approaching his 90th birthday. In the natural order of things, he could not live much longer. Yet for almost half a century—since the very first talk he gave upon becoming Rebbe, in 1951—Schneerson had been insisting that the Messiah would come in his time. The theme of that inaugural speech had been the mystical power of sevens, a stock subject in Jewish mysticism. “All who are seventh are most beloved,” Schneerson quoted, and it was lost on no one that he himself was the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. Every year on the same date, the 10th of Shvat, he would repeat the talk, which Heilman and Friedman call “a key text in Lubavitcher mythology and messianic theology.” (You can hear a selection of it, with subtitles, here.)

How, then, could the blessed seventh generation possibly give way to an eighth? As Schneerson came closer to his end, his messianic proclamations took on a more urgent, even desperate tone. “Everything necessary for the redemption has been completed,” he said in August 1991. The Jewish year 5752, which began in 1992, was the year when “the world would become united under the flag of the Messiah.” His Hasidim took the cue, preparing the famous yellow flag with a crown that became the logo of the Moshiach movement. No one, perhaps, believed more trustingly than a man named David Nachshon, an Israeli Lubavitcher who visited 770 in 1991. As Heilman and Friedman describe the scene, on Shabbat, April 20, Nachshon held up a bottle of liquor “and, standing before the Rebbe, announced that with this drink they would all toast the Rebbe our righteous Messiah who would redeem them on the next Sabbath at the rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem.”

Here, if anywhere, was the man Rosenzweig described as having faith. Was he “better”? Should we not feel pity or contempt for him, imagining his plight on April 27, when the Temple was not restored and the Rebbe was not magically transported to Jerusalem? (A replica of 770 Eastern Parkway was built there, so that he would feel at home when the relocation happened.) Or should we, perhaps, feel anger at the Rebbe, the charismatic leader who encouraged his followers to believe of him what should never be believed of any human being? As the frenzy built among his Hasidim—as they displayed banners with his picture calling him Moshiach, and ran ads in the New York Times declaring “Moshiach Now,” and signed petitions begging him to declare himself the Messiah—Schneerson could have put a stop to it with a word. He never did.

But does this mean that the Rebbe actually believed he was the Messiah? On the evidence of his words and actions, as analyzed both by Heilman and Friedman and by Wolfson, it is hard to give a clear yes-or-no answer. It would be easier to understand Schneerson, and to judge him, if he were simply a pretender—if he told people he was the Messiah, knowing full well that he wasn’t—or simply deluded—if he straightforwardly knew that he was the Messiah, in the way that psychotics know they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. But he was too good and sincere to be the former and too realistic and intelligent to be the latter.

The truth seems to be that, like his humblest followers, the Rebbe himself was waiting, in a state of intolerable expectation, for the Messiah to be revealed—and he was unable to rule out the possibility that the Messiah would turn out to be himself. The genuine bewilderment this caused comes across in the harangue he delivered a few days after Passover in 1991, when once again the Messiah had failed to come—despite the tradition that the final Redemption would take place in the same month, Nisan, as the redemption from bondage in Egypt. “How can it be,” he asked his followers, “that you have not yet succeeded in this time of grace to actualize the coming of the righteous Messiah? What else can I do so that the Children of Israel will cry out and demand the Messiah come, after all else that was done until now has not helped since we are obviously still in exile.” He concluded, “I have to hand over the task to you: Do all you can to bring the righteous Moshiach, mamesh.”

The last word, which Heilman and Friedman leave untranslated, is Hebrew for “in fact,” “really,” “actually.” It became part of Schneerson’s standard refrain in calling for the Messiah, as Elliot Wolfson shows in greater detail. (In general, Wolfson has much more to say about the content of Schneerson’s thought and writing, while Heilman and Friedman focus on the events of his life and the organizational growth of Chabad.) Let the Messiah come “tekhef u-mi-yad mammash,” Schneerson said again and again—“immediately and without delay in actuality,” as Wolfson translates.

The redundancy and insistence of the phrase speak very movingly of the urgency of Schneerson’s desire and capture the feeling that Walter Benjamin also communicated—that any single instant could be the gateway for the Messiah. Wolfson quotes Schneerson’s words from February 1990: “Let it be your will that by means of all these things we will merit in all of Israel, immediately and without delay in actuality, immediately without delay in actuality, immediately and without delay in actuality, the true and complete redemption.” With each repetition of tekhef u-mi-yad mammash, the moment is bid to hold still, the gate to swing open. One can imagine the same words coming from the pilgrim in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” who spends his entire life sitting in front of an open door, waiting for the doorkeeper’s permission to enter.

The Kafkaesque turn in that story comes at the moment of the man’s death, when he is told that “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.” But it is left deliberately unclear whether this means that he should have seized the opportunity that was destined for him—say, by forcing his way through, despite the doorkeeper’s warnings. For isn’t forcing redemption the great temptation and sin of those who can’t wait patiently for God? Wolfson quotes Rosenzweig’s indulgent view of those who believe in false messiahs but in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig is sterner about those he calls “Tyrants of the Kingdom of Heaven”: “The fanatic, the sectarian … far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it. … The ground prematurely cultivated by the fanatic yields no fruit. It does that only when its time has come. And its time, too, will come. But then all the work of cultivation will have to be undertaken afresh.”

Mamesh means “in fact”; but it is also made up of the letters mem, mem, shin, which are the initials of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. By so insistently linking this word to the coming of the Messiah, Schneerson seemed to be confirming that he himself was the one the Lubavitchers were waiting for. Once, Heilman and Friedman write, he added “that he meant mamesh ‘with all its interpretations’ ”—a typically elusive confirmation. So elusive, in fact, that Wolfson bases his book on the hypothesis that Schneerson not only didn’t think he was the Messiah, he didn’t even believe the Messiah was coming at all.

Without giving away too much of the new film’s plot, it’s safe to say that it explores the same major theme as before, namely the devastating moment in which a toy realizes its owner has matured and is no longer interested in child’s play. It’s a moment burdened with more than the cheap sentimentality of mass-produced pop culture; watching the toys have their moment of reckoning, we are forced to have one of our own.

Everything is at stake. One of the Toy Story franchise’s most profound achievements is its ability to remind us how pure our vision was when we were children, when the objects laid at our feet weren’t merely 5-inch figures of polyethylene and fabric but fearless cowboys and daring space rangers.

Had he been around to visit the local multiplex, Walter Benjamin would have likely enjoyed Pixar’s creation. In a short essay, unpublished in his lifetime, Benjamin discussed the difference between the adult’s vision and the child’s. “Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerted, [their sight] is something spiritual,” he wrote. “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see.” This, he argued, was the reason children’s drawings cancel out “the intellectual cross-references of the soul,” creating instead “a pure mood, without thereby sacrificing the world.”

Pure mood is what Toy Story 3 is all about. It’s also the theme of this week’s haftorah. Like Buzz and Woody, the prophet Micah strikes an existential tone. Like the animated toys, he, too, is distraught by the notion that one day the being in whose grace we all live might lose interest in us and move on.

But unlike Andy, the toys’ owner, God himself doesn’t merely mature and abandon his knickknacks of old. Instead, Micah informs us, the Creator pursues a grim course of action: First he empowers his people—“all your enemies shall be destroyed”—and then he punishes them. “I will destroy the cities of your land,” God promises Israel, “and I will break down all your fortresses.”

It’s a bleak sequence of events. First comes redemption, then destruction. Why not the other way around? Why not suffering followed by salvation? To answer the question, we need not a prophet but a puppet, a toy truck, or an action figure. We need to look at the objects we’ve abandoned and recall how they could once conjure entire worlds writhing with thrills and promises. We need to think of the carefree lives we’d had when we toddled and realize that with each skill we’ve acquired, with each spurt of growth and drizzle of maturity, we’ve lost the most magical of all human capacities, the gift of being able not to reflect but just to see.

Unlike many other Hollywood blockbusters, the Toy Story movies do not require us to suspend our disbelief, nor do they pretend that a return to innocence could ever be possible. Impermanence is their point of departure, acceptance their goal. But not in the Buddhist way, not by Nirvana, not through transcending suffering or outgrowing the boundaries of our own consciousness. Instead, Woody, Buzz, and their friends are, I believe, good, observant Jews. They know, like Rabbi Akiva, that all is foreseen and permission is granted. They have no doubt that they are destined for abandonment by their master, and yet, in their earthly toy world, they depend on each other and love one another and strive for a better life. They worry about fate, but not enough to stop playing.

We may never be able to again see the world with the child’s untainted gaze, but if we listen to Buzz and Woody we may still be able to go—say it with me now!—to infinity and beyond.

‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and the eating of challah is only the most obvious Jewish contribution to the science and history of Time. The division of primeval void into moons and then those moons into meaningful phases; the sectioning of the week to recapitulate the week of Creation; the days themselves maintained by rulings pertaining to work and play as much as by commandments to the performance of hours of prayer—such are just the beginnings of an immense, horizon-sized scroll that also introduced the world to concepts of eschatology and messianism. What follows is a brief, 12-part clocking of Jewish Time, focusing on theology but also widening to accommodate secular theories from the likes of Einstein, Marx, and Proust.

Extra Days in the Diaspora

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon. Once the moon was sighted—or, rather, as it was a new moon, once the moon was not sighted—the Sanhedrin’s rabbis would declare the beginning of the new month, and fires would be set outside the city’s walls to alert distant Jewish communities. Often, however, these fires were snuffed or obscured, or their message falsified by neighboring sects, and, since only the Sanhedrin could pronounce the new moon (though the sages were aware, of course, that the moon in their sky was the very same moon in every sky, Jewish Law required witnesses and consensus judgment), Diaspora communities were regularly confused as to when festivals and holidays would fall within the month. Though the Torah ordains single-day observances for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret, Diasporites began celebrating them for an extra day as a precautionary measure—in order to better ensure that, regardless of any miscommunication as to which was the first of the lunar month’s 29 days, the festivals would be celebrated for at least one correct day.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

Joshua at Gibeon

The Canaanite kings were warring against the Gibeonites, who appealed to Joshua ben Nun, successor to Moses, for help. We are told in Chapter 10 of the book that bears his name that Joshua led his army of Israelites to Gibeon to face the Amorites first and routed them. The four armies of four other kings followed, and Joshua’s Israelites fought every one. However the day of the battle was soon ending. Loath to let the day end without complete victory, Joshua asked God to still the sun above Gibeon and the moon above the valley of Ajalon—effectively extending the daylight of this decisive battle “until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Hebrew Clock, Jewish Town Hall, Prague

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right—as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. However, Prague’s Židovská radnice or Jewish Town Hall, seat of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, built in the 16th century and extensively renovated in the 18th in the rococo style, features on its cupola “a Hebrew clock,” whose numbers are represented by Hebrew letters, and whose gears turn the hands counterclockwise. The time of Jewish Prague, then, runs in reverse—into the past. Paul Celan refers to this timepiece in his poem “In Prague,” where he memorializes two lovers, two dreams “tolling / against time, in the squares.”

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, Jewish trickster, was perhaps a fictional or composite character associated with the court of Rabbi Baruch of Medzhybizh, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. It is said that one day, in need of meal money, he pawned his sole possession: a gold pocketwatch. Later that night the pawnbroker was awakened by a noise and went down to his shop to investigate. Hershele had broken in. “Thief!” the man shrieked. Hershele said, “I’m no thief, I just wanted to know what time it was.” “And for this you woke me up?” “I’m sorry,” Hershele said, “but I only trust my own watch.”

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), French-Jewish philosopher, believed that since time was always in motion, the single moment was unknowable. Just as one attempted to grasp an individual moment or thought, it would be gone—not necessarily replaced by another, but lost to the flow of all moments, all thoughts. While physicists of Bergson’s day, which saw the perfection of the microscope and the first experimentation with subatomic particles, observed objects and events in fixed, finite relationships, Bergson invoked a Zeno’s Paradox applied not to spatial or chronologic infinity, but to the mind itself. Bergsonian consciousness, forever eluding mensuration, would instead be characterized by what he called la durée, which has been translated as “Duration,” implying that ceaseless, Heraclitean flux of indivisible experience in which each instant becomes, instantaneously, the stuff of yesterdays, and every yesterday accrues to the account of oblivion. For Bergson it was Intuition (l’intuition), and not any intellection or formula, that would interpret the world, while such interpretation could only be expressed indirectly, symbolically—as memory, or through its practice: reminiscence, or reflection. Bergson’s vertiginous metaphysic, in which nothing is knowable, and in which consciousness can lead only to consciousness-of-consciousness, and so on in a regressus ad infinitum, brings us back to an original garden where memory frolics with fantasy, and where what we know of our pasts is forever being revised by the personalities we are always becoming.

Marcel Proust

In the opening of his vast, sevenfold novel, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), or the narrator “Marcel Proust,” dips a madeleine into his tea, which parlor ritual was a Big Bang for both literature and mind. This dipped biscuit triggers a memory, which in turns triggers another memory, which in turn triggers yet another, until thousands of pages later we realize we have read not only one the great novels of the 20th century but also a grand dramatization of Bergsonian theory (Bergson was Proust’s cousin by marriage). À la Recherche du Temps Perdu explores the world—or merely the memories displaced by the dunking of that teatime treat—through a somnambulistic, or deathly, consciousness, both timeless and without space. One never knows who, where, or when “Marcel Proust” is, what he’s doing or what his life is like while he is telling his story. Childhood experiences are seen through childhood eyes and then, in another paragraph, as if through the eyes of an adult; love is experienced as a teenager experiences love, and then lust is philosophized about in a way befitting a man of experience and wisdom. The gaze of Proust’s masterwork is synoptic, even while the irreducible point at center—the force binding together the novel’s narrator in all his ages and selves, with the writer who, lying abed in Paris, narrates the narrator—remains an insufferable cipher. In Proust, memory becomes modernity’s ultimate and terminal dimension, while the remembrancer himself seems as absent, or as deceased, as God.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski

For centuries Galilean and Newtonian physics had proved that it was impossible for a body to measure its own motion. By the 19th century Newton’s theories had become Laws implying that no one thing could determine its own velocity or the velocity of another without reference to an exteriority, without comparison. In applying this idea to the entirety of the cosmos, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that a comparison of velocities could be made with the use of a universal constant, which he would discover in the speed of light, the c—for Latin’s celeritas: a hurtling at 299,792,458 meters per second—of his famous formula that related energy, E, to mass, m: E=mc². Einstein’s theorizing held that there was no one temporally or spatially stationary perspective in the universe by, or from, which all motion could be judged and that because the universe’s only constant seemed to be the speed of light, it could be theorized that space and time were experienced differently—relatively—by bodies in different states of motion. The very constancy of this lightspeed, when taken in the context of Einstein’s abstract conclusions, illuminated a wholly new field of being, an imperceptible alterity previously unexplored outside of esoteric religion or mysticism—a Fourth Dimension, first postulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), Einstein’s former mathematics instructor at the Zürich Polytechnic. Inextricably coiled within the three normative dimensions of space, which are length, width, and depth or height, was this new (or oldest) dimension of Time, or the superseding dimension of “Spacetime.” It was Minkowski who transmuted the two strands of Einsteinian thought, the physical and temporal, into a precious amalgam that provided the best setting for the jewel of Relativity.

Émile Durkheim

While the Hebrew root kdsh is traditionally translated as “holy,” it actually means something closer to “separate”—to remove something from the context of the everyday being to specialize it, to render sacred by means of occasion or locale. Wondering what it is that makes us conscious of time, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French Jew and the father of sociology, found himself attracted to the study of differentiation, in particular to the palpable differencing of the religious calendar, which serves to separate mundane time from religious occasion and so structures the unconscious life of the community by mediating between holiness observed privately or parochially and the public workaday. Durkheim, who more than any other thinker quested after the societal effects of time-marking and time-management, concluded that the recurrent calendar was the major force behind religion’s survival and that it was so by dint of being religion’s foremost socializer.

Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin

Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929) of Kassel, Germany, believed not in Jewish history but in Jewish ahistory. In Rosenzweig’s prescription, the ideal Jewish life must seem achronologic—as the religious calendar re-embodies Creation, each year can mark only a new cycle of the same rituals and laws in which progress does not, indeed must not, obtain. Rosenzweig understood that each generation of Jewry achieves its own balance of sacred (specific) and secular (universal) times and that, while creation and redemption are the only two fixed points of rupture along the timescale of any religion, revelation of God’s Law had been addressed to the Jews alone and so allowed Jewry to experience elements of creation and redemption in this world, the here and now. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) of Berlin was an atheist who, toward the end of his life, began experimenting with Jewish belief, perhaps informed as much by his early-century Zionism as by the perils of a war that eventually caused his suicide. One of his later, underdeveloped theories comprised a Marxist approach to Jewish Messianism, or Messianic Time. Benjamin was particularly exercised by memory and nostalgia and considered the past the essential purview of the Jew. Citing Biblical proscriptions against soothsaying, or divining the future, Benjamin instead proposed a sort of permissible foretelling: a before-telling; an inquisition of the past that deprived that hesternal sphere of its historicism, of its entropic sense of momentum and advancement, in favor of asserting time’s eternality and the enduring value of skepticism as a mechanism for redeeming the self. Because the future was so unknowable, or taboo, for the Jew, it acquired, in Benjamin’s thought, an auratic, fetishistic mystery, a fraught potentiality—at any moment the neat, orderly progress of our collective narratives might end, and what Benjamin called the Angel of History, a Messiah previously incapacitated by our political and technological ideas of progress, might finally be actualized, redeeming us from causality.

Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky

Karl Marx (1818-1883) regarded the regulation of time with ambivalence if not suspicion; a position best characterized by his insight that when time becomes decontextualized and so commodified as money, noncommodified time—what we might call personal-time, or family-time—becomes devalued. Marx envisioned a classless future, a mechanized utopia in which historical progress could be measured, and then nullified, only by human equality. The Revolution would come, and all men would be set free in his uniquely profane, but hopefully bloodless, eschatology. But Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) doubted the permanency of Revolution and instead called for “Permanent Revolution.” (Die Revolution in Permanenz was originally Marx’s formulation, though the idea is most closely associated with Trotsky.) Marx thought that a revolutionary class could achieve its emancipation by constantly pursuing its interests through ideological education and occasional resistance, whereas Trotsky believed that one-country socialism was impossible, and that the global proletariat had to seize power over and forcibly dismantle the bourgeoisie, imposing the communist agenda from above in a newer hegemony. Marx’s relationship to Time was traditionally Judeo-Christian: cyclical but redemptive, to be resolved in a future Messianic Era whose inherent egalitarianism would militate against the personality cult of any despotic Messiah; whereas Trotsky’s relationship was one of regular violent Apocalypse as necessary and even salutary.

Death, Afterlife, Messiah

When a person dies he or she is mourned for seven days at shiva (literally, “seven”), usually at the home of the principal mourner, in visits accompanied by food and prayer. For 30 days after the death, the mourner is prohibited from marrying, for 12 months the mourner is prohibited from enjoying public entertainment. Yahrzeit, Yiddish for “time of year,” is the word for an anniversary of a death. One year after burial a gravestone can be “unveiled,” but this is custom only and not a commandment. Jewish bodies must be buried as soon as possible. While the body is being prepared—washed, dried, and dressed—it may never be left unattended. Notions of the Jewish afterlife are disputed. Reincarnation seems a possibility to some, an apostasy to others. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer said the days of the Messiah will last 40 years, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said 70 years; Rabbi Hillel said there will be no Messiah, and Rabbi Joseph asked that Rabbi Hillel be forgiven. The prophet Zechariah—the name means “God has remembered”—speaks of two Messiahs.

West, not to be outdone, introduced himself as a “bluesman,” delivered his discussion of prophetic religion with the cadences of slam poetry, credited the Jews with the “breakthrough” philosophy that one should “treat the Other as thyself,” and alluded to Hillel: “The rest,” he said, “is just footnotes.”

Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere [Cooper Union]

No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, “ambitious young sympathizers with the New Left” in the academy turned en masse to the Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore “without having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political orientations.” It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States. The Institute for Social Research—the institutional home of the Frankfurt School thinkers—had to uproot itself from Germany in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power. After a brief period in Geneva, it relocated to Morningside Heights, where it formed an uneasy partnership with Columbia University.

From its headquarters at 428 West 117th Street, the Institute struggled with the intellectual and practical challenges involved in doing European-style Critical Theory in America. While the members of the Institute eventually scattered—Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los Angeles, joining the German émigré colony there, while after Pearl Harbor Marcuse and others went to Washington, applying their skills to the war effort—New York remained the Institute’s official home until 1949, when Horkheimer moved it back to the University of Frankfurt.

In his book, an unusually thorough blend of intellectual and institutional history, Wheatland sheds new light on this phase of the Frankfurt School’s existence. Wheatland is interested in the ideas of the School, but he is also interested in the ways that less intellectual factors—like money, personality clashes, and opportunism—shaped those ideas’ development and reception. In a sense, Wheatland has subjected the Frankfurt School to a genuinely Marxist analysis—he shows how the group’s economic substructure affected its ideological superstructure. In the process, he brings these often idolized figures back to human scale, and offers an object lesson in the unedifying ways that intellectual careers are made.

The Jewish dimension to this story is only occasionally Wheatland’s explicit subject, but it is absolutely central nonetheless. After all, the reason the Institute had to leave Frankfurt in the first place was that, in addition to being radicals and Marxists, the members of the group were almost all Jewish. The Institut für Sozialforschung was created by Herman Weil, a German Jew who had made a fortune importing grain from Argentina, and his son Felix, who like many young men was radicalized after Germany’s defeat in World War I. In 1923, still in the early days of the Weimar Republic, the Weils created the Institute as an independent think tank with a lavish endowment. Their plan was to bring together scholars from different fields, who would work together to develop comprehensive new theories about how modern society functioned and how it might be transformed.

Not coincidentally, as Wheatland shows, almost all the Institute’s hires were, like the Weils, highly assimilated Jews from bourgeois families. Max Horkheimer, the philosopher who became head of the Institute in 1931 and guided it for the next several decades, was the son of a textile manufacturer from Stuttgart; his relationship with his father was destroyed when the son married the father’s Christian secretary. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, the most brilliant thinker associated with the Institute, was the son of a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic woman from Corsica. (He eventually dropped the Jewish half of his last name and went simply by Adorno.) Erich Fromm, a sociologist turned psychoanalyst, was unusual in being raised in an Orthodox family; he “maintained a strong religious identity into adulthood,” Wheatland writes. Similar stories could be told of most of the scholars who came to work at Frankfurt.

Among the tidal wave of academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, the members of the Institute were actually very lucky. Horkheimer, with a prescience all too rare among German Jews, had already shifted the Institute’s endowment out of German banks and shipped its library out of the country. The scholars reassembled in Geneva, but this could only be a temporary respite, since most of them could not get permanent Swiss visas. As Wheatland shows in the first of the book’s four sections, Horkheimer embarked on a well-thought-out campaign to find a new home for the Institute in the United States, sending out a pamphlet with testimonials to sociology departments at American universities.

Wheatland makes clear just why Columbia took the bait. Robert MacIver, the head of Columbia’s sociology department, was looking for a way to establish a social research bureau, which would provide quantitative data to support the work of theorists. In 1929, MacIver had applied to the university for $50,000 to create such a bureau, writing in his proposal that “the situation with reference to research through quantitative measurement may really be described as a crisis. If this crisis is not met in a large way, achievement on the part of universities cannot be expected.” But the Depression made such an expensive program impossible. When the Institute for Social Research came calling—with its private endowment, and its experience doing field research and surveys—it seemed like a perfect match for Columbia’s needs.

In fact, as Wheatland goes on to show, the fit was not ideal, and grew even less so over time. The Institute did design and fund several important research projects, including a study of the effect of unemployment on family life in Newark, New Jersey, and a study of adolescent attitudes toward authority. But these studies were not really what Horkheimer cared about. Rather, he was interested in developing a total theory of late-capitalist society, which would encompass politics, economics, culture, and society. This would eventually bear fruit in Horkheimer and Adorno’s magnum opus, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

To keep the Institute running, however, Horkheimer needed American allies and funders, who were mainly interested in empirical problem-solving. This dilemma became acute in the later 1930s, when a series of bad investment decisions cost the Institute a large chunk of its endowment, and forced Horkheimer to lay off a number of associates. As Wheatland shows, this process was handled badly, with Horkheimer antagonizing Erich Fromm, the most popular member of the Institute among its American patrons. (Fromm would eventually go on to write bestselling psychology books like The Art of Loving.) In fact, Horkheimer comes across in Wheatland’s account as a ruthless academic infighter, not afraid to use his money and power to punish his enemies. The contrast between the Frankfurt School’s dreams of social liberation and its actual dependence on such all-too-human motives is a melancholy and ironic one.

In subsequent sections of The Frankfurt School in Exile, Wheatland shows how the Institute came into contact with two important segments of the American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals, who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they might have—in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters’ policy of staying aloof from American politics—some relationships did form, and New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became aware of Critical Theory.

More unlikely, on its surface, was the bond the Institute formed with the establishment American Jewish Committee, which turned out to be the patron the struggling exiles badly needed. In 1943, the Committee gave the Institute a $10,000 grant to produce a report on the causes of anti-Semitism. This eventually grew into the landmark five-volume report Studies in Prejudice, published in 1950, which brought the Institute its first real mainstream recognition. Wheatland notes the irony that it should be a specifically, not to say parochially, Jewish project that made the Institute’s name in America.

After all, it is possible to see the whole endeavor of Critical Theory as being a way for these brilliant German Jews, assimilated to German culture yet rejected by Germany itself, to imagine a place for themselves outside of Jewishness and Germanness. Yet “the anti-Semitism project,” as Wheatland writes, “suggested an abandonment of revolutionary utopianism and the temporary adoption of American liberalism.” His important book ought to bring new attention to this highly suggestive part of the Frankfurt School’s story.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

In a real sense, then, the “Theses” are the work of a man who is on the brink of the abyss, and knows it. The ninth thesis, especially, has called out to later writers as an unforgettable emblem of a world that could not save itself. In it, Benjamin meditates on a Paul Klee painting he owned, Angelus Novus, which “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

It is not just poetic license that made Stephane Moses, the Franco-Israeli scholar who died in 2007, use the title “The Angel of History” for his study of Benjamin and his contemporaries, Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig. For in Benjamin’s little parable or midrash, we can find all the major themes that, Moses shows, obsessed these three German-Jewish thinkers. There is the savage rejection of progress, the old 19th-century liberal dream, which the First World War and its aftermath turned into a hideous joke. There is the sense that History, which German thinkers since Hegel had seen as the deliberate unfolding of Absolute Spirit, is actually a meaningless chaos. Above all, there is the inverted sense of the sacred, in which God and the angels still exist but no longer seem able to function or help humankind.

The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, which first appeared in France in 1992 but has just been published in English by Stanford University Press (in a translation by Barbara Harshav), is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the work of these three figures. They are writers who definitely need an introduction, because their originality, and their deep involvement in the tradition of German philosophy, make them very challenging to read. So, too, does their creative reinvention of Jewish traditions and concepts. All three are profoundly, unmistakably Jewish thinkers, yet none was raised with any knowledge of Judaism. Products of assimilated German-Jewish families, they had to struggle to reacquaint themselves with their Jewish origins; as a result, they thought about Judaism in ways that no traditional Jew ever would.

In fact, Moses writes, the rupture in the transmission of Judaism—in the chain of generations, “l’dor va’dor”—is at the heart of their work. In a chapter on “Kafka, Freud, and the Crisis of Tradition,” Moses uses Kafka’s Letter to His Father to illuminate the situation in which Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Scholem found themselves. One of the bitter complaints Kafka makes against his father is his failure to provide him with a living connection to Judaism: his father’s Jewishness was “a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke.” In his longing to assimilate into German culture and leave behind his shtetl origins, Kafka’s father reduced Jewishness to a few flimsy gestures,” absurd residues.” Yet, crucially, Kafka felt that this empty faith still had an iron grip on him, that he could not be free of a Judaism that had become meaningless.

To Scholem, who came from a similarly Germanized family, the only solution to this dilemma was to return wholeheartedly to Judaism, by becoming a Zionist. For this sin against assimilation, he was expelled from his family home. He moved to Palestine in the 1920s, and spent the rest of his long life trying to unearth the buried tradition of Jewish mysticism, writing about the Kabbalah and the radical heretic Sabbatai Zevi. Yet as Moses shows, he continued to view the Jewish past through the lens of Kafka: Scholem would tell his students that “to understand the Kabala today, we must read the works of Kafka, mainly The Trial.” That novel, in which Joseph K. is at the mercy of a law he cannot recognize or understand, seemed to Scholem a parable of the modern Jewish fate. As Scholem wrote in a long poem that Moses analyzes, Kafka captured a world where God is both present and absent:

Only so does revelation
Shine in the time that rejected you.
Only your nothingness is the experience
It is entitled to have of you.

Benjamin, who was Scholem’s closest friend, followed a different route to Judaism. Benjamin often mused about joining Scholem in Palestine, and repeatedly resolved to start learning Hebrew. But he was not truly interested in making the leap to a strictly Jewish vocation that Scholem had made. Instead, Moses shows in the densest and most interesting section of The Angel of History, Benjamin preserved his Jewish-theological ways of thinking even as he became a critic of secular German literature, and finally a Marxist revolutionary.

For Benjamin, a Jewish perspective on language and history meant challenging the prevailing scientific view of each. Language, according to linguists then and now, is a purely conventional system—words stand for objects arbitrarily, which is why French “pain” and German “Brot” can both mean the same thing as English “bread.” For Benjamin, however, language had to be envisioned mystically, as the decayed remnants of the divine language that God used to create the world, and that Adam used to name the animals. Literature, in this view, has a kind of sacred obligation of tikkun olam, repairing the world: as Moses writes, “The progress or decadence of humanity will no longer be measured by the distance separating it from an original Good but by its lapse from an original state of language.” In a similar way, Benjamin came to believe, the revolutionary should not try to abolish the past, but to redeem it—to recapture the lost potential for goodness that exists in every moment, even if it is mostly wasted and forgotten.

In this emphasis on redemption, Benjamin echoed Franz Rosenzweig, whose theological work The Star of Redemption both he and Scholem praised very highly. Rosenzweig, Moses explains, nearly converted to Christianity before deciding to reclaim his Jewishness, by redefining Judaism’s purpose on earth. “I as an individual,” he wrote, “take upon myself the metaphysical destiny, the ‘yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’ to which I have been called from my birth.”

A crucial stage on this journey, Moses shows, was the correspondence between Rosenzweig and his friend Eugen Rosenstock, a Protestant of Jewish origins who urged him to abandon Judaism altogether. In responding to this challenge, Rosenzweig began to understand Judaism as a religion in some sense outside of history. Where Christianity, and its secular philosophical heirs, believed that history was progressing to a utopian future, Judaism stands for a different kind of salvation—not progress but redemption, which interrupts history instead of completing it. The Jewish calendar, Rosenzweig believed, lifted the Jews outside of Christian time; cyclical rather than linear, it allowed the Jews to live symbolically in union with God. In this sense, Judaism has already achieved what Christianity still hopes for: the Jewish people, Rosenzweig wrote, “is separated from the march of those who draw near to it (redemption) in the course of centuries.”

As even a brief summary shows, The Angel of History offers an introduction to some of the most brilliant and influential Jewish thinkers of the last century. Anyone who is interested in how German Judaism responded, at the highest and most passionate levels, to its imminent destruction should start by reading Stephane Moses.

Each of these young men knew that Berlin would not be their home forever. They had their sights set on Palestine, where in fact they all ended up after the war. Yet none of these friends could have imagined that their future lives would demonstrate so vividly the dreamlike course of Jewish history in the twentieth century. In 1917, there was no Jewish state and barely any modern Hebrew literature, and the history of Jewish mysticism was a closed book. Yet Zalman Rubashov, under his new name of Zalman Shazar, would become the third president of the State of Israel; Shmuel Czaczkes, writing in Hebrew as S.Y. Agnon, would win the Nobel Prize for his fiction; and

Gerhard Scholem, after changing his first name to the Hebrew “Gershom,” would become famous as one of the greatest scholars of the century, thanks to his pioneering studies of Jewish mysticism.

Ordinarily, the fame of a scholar could not hope to rival that of a leading statesman or a great artist. Yet today it is Scholem, who spent his entire adult life on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who remains the most influential and fascinating of these three figures. That is because scholarship, in Scholem’s hands, was something more than abstract theorizing or dry research. In books like Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah, and in the essays he published in Hebrew, German, and English, Scholem resurrected a whole dimension of Jewish thought and history that had been lost in a secular, “enlightened” age.

Fighting against what he called the “censorship of the Jewish past,” Scholem demonstrated that the most questionable elements in Jewish mysticism—messianism, apocalypticism, antinomianism—could also be the most fruitful and creative. Even a traditionally execrated figure like Zevi, who in the seventeenth century managed to convince much of the Jewish world that he was the messiah, appeared to Scholem as the bearer of a crucial strain in Judaism, “the Messianic activism in which utopianism becomes the lever by which to establish the Messianic kingdom.” Scholem’s fascination with such subversive figures and ideas stemmed from his conviction that “the Jewish people as a whole was very much alive; it was more than some fixed structure, let alone something defined or definable by a theological formula.”

By this definition, everything produced by Jews is Judaism, including Scholem’s own scholarship. For more than a few nonobservant or nonbelieving Jews, reading Scholem offers a more authentic way of experiencing Judaism than going to synagogue. No wonder his influence can be seen everywhere in contemporary Jewish literature, to the point that golems and gematria have become standard props in Jewish American fiction.

Because Scholem’s writing, for all its objective rigor, feels so personally engaged, his life has always been a source of fascination. What enabled this product of a thoroughly assimilated German Jewish family to remake himself as a devoted Zionist? And what spiritual experiences lay behind his impassioned study of Jewish messianism? For there is clearly something more than detached analysis at work when Scholem defines the messianic urge as “transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.” Such poetic writing, in which it is never quite clear where metaphor ends and metaphysics begins, underlines Scholem’s deep intellectual affinity with the critic Walter Benjamin, his youthful mentor and his closest friend. Benjamin and Scholem each infused a secular genre of writing with obscurely religious passions. As a result, each of them seems to belong as much to the history of Judaism as to the history of literature.

Scholem told the story of his early life in his short memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem, and that of his relationship with Benjamin in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Yet these books, which shed so much light on Scholem’s intellectual development and his Zionist milieu, are at the same time unmistakably guarded. Written in a cool, concise style, deliberately antisentimental in their treatment of intimate relationships, Scholem’s memoirs are the products of a mind holding itself at a careful distance. Typically, when he writes about the way his father expelled him from the family, Scholem does not describe any feelings of anger, resentment, or betrayal. Instead, he dismisses the episode in one curt sentence: “There was a great uproar.”

That is why the publication of Scholem’s youthful diaries by Harvard University Press, under the apt title Lamentations of Youth, comes as such a revelation. These passionate, tumultuous, deeply moving journals document the most important phase of Scholem’s life—the years 1913 to 1919, as he grew from a fifteen-year-old boy into a twenty-one-year-old man. This was the period when Scholem first discovered the subjects and ideas that would consume his adult life; it is also when he first became acquainted with Benjamin, and established the cult of friendship that would last until his death. To look on as Scholem evolves his highly personal understanding of Judaism and Zionism is like watching a painter lay down the first tentative strokes of what will become a masterpiece.

Yet if that metaphor suggests a preternaturally confident young man, following a definite plan in life or thought, it is misleading. For the strongest impression left by Lamentations of Youth is of Scholem’s great confusion about the path he should follow, in life and in thought. His ultimate destination was never in doubt: By the time he started these journals, Scholem was already a committed Zionist, absolutely certain that his destiny lay in Palestine. This conviction came to him so early, and remained so unwavering, that it seems like a religious vocation. Already in November 1914, a month before his seventeenth birthday, we find Scholem issuing Zionist ultimatums to the world: “Give us the earth back, ye gods and men! You’ve taken it away from us long enough. We want our property back!”

The uncertainty lay, rather, in the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that lay between Scholem’s actual life and the authentically Jewish life he yearned for. Everything in his immediate environment was against him. He had virtually no Jewish education: The journals show him painstakingly teaching himself Hebrew, finding a rabbi to study the Talmud with, and finally combing libraries for books on Kabbalism. At home, of course, Scholem got no support for these efforts. On the contrary, his father looked on his Zionism as scarcely better than his brother Werner’s Communism. Writing to Gerhard in 1921, when his doctoral studies were already well advanced, Arthur Scholem sneered, “Three cheers for Hebraica and Jewish studies—but not as a career! Take my word for it: if you don’t change course you will experience a bitter shipwreck.”

Scholem returned this contempt with interest, and the journals are full of bitter attacks on his parents and relatives. “My parents’ way of life is unbearable,” he writes in 1918, “and there can be no return to living in their house.” We can hear in such passages a standard teenage rebellion, but with Scholem, this grew into something much more—a virtually ideological hatred of the German Jewish bourgeoisie and everything it stood for. “With irrevocable lucidity, truth, and clarity,” he writes at the age of eighteen, “I’ve gradually come to the realization that I don’t fit in with these people here, these German Jews. .&nbsp. . One mustn’t speak to the bourgeoisie about God. There shall be no peace with them, says the Lord.”

What made Scholem’s isolation even more extreme was that he was living in a Germany whose traditional chauvinism had just been sent into overdrive by the First World War. Scholem’s refusal to mention the war in these journals—his insistence that the cataclysm had nothing to do with his own life—is an indirect testament to its power. For most of the period documented in Lamentations of Youth, Scholem lived under the threat of conscription into the German army, where he would at least lose several years of study, and very possibly get killed. That was the fate of his close friend Edgar Blum, whose death in combat was a terrible blow to Scholem, not least because Blum was a fellow Zionist: “In him we had someone who carried around inside an inner formation of the strongest potential…I have no question in my mind that the source of his inner calm…was that he was a Zionist in the true sense of the word (to the extent that one can be in Zion before it’s built).”

The paradox hinted at in this entry—how to be a Zionist in a world where Zion remains, in the eyes of most people, a mere fantasy?—suggests the other, subtler challenge facing Scholem during wartime. All around him, German Jews were volunteering for army service as a way of proving their patriotism. To his profound disgust, even the Zionists succumbed to war fever: In 1915, the Judische Rundschau, a Zionist newspaper, declared, “We went off to war not in spite of being Jews, but because we were Zionists.” In such a climate, it took a rare kind of courage for Scholem to decide, as he put it, to “avoid suffering the fate of dying a hero’s death for the German fatherland.” When he was finally conscripted, in 1917, he decided to feign mental illness in order to win a discharge. It was an ordeal he hated to remember or write about: “I will not leave any written account of my time in the military,” he writes in his diary in August 1917. “This, the central test of my Zionism, has proven that Zion is stronger than violence.”

The psychological consequences of this episode were profound. At a time when almost every man his age was in the army, it was imperative for Scholem to prove, to himself and the world, that it was Zionism and not cowardice that led him to such apparently ignoble actions. This is one reason why, as the journals go on, Scholem’s conception of Zionism becomes ever more passionate and demanding, until it finally approaches the plane of mysticism. His Zionism was not just a political principle, and it was only incidentally related to the building of Palestine: “If I didn’t want to go to Zion,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t go to the land of Israel.” For Scholem, Zionism was a spiritual commitment to Jewish renewal, a totalizing ambition with decidedly messianic overtones: “because I know that Zion is the absolute truth. .&nbsp. . I measure all things against it. My credo is that Zion is the measure of all things.”

Lamentations of Youth is a record of what that credo cost Scholem. No one he knew could live up to the purity and intensity of his Zionism—“Only entirely pure people can develop this unity,” he wrote—and one by one he cast them out. His family was the first casualty, but even many of the friends he made through Jewish youth groups and Zionist organizations disappointed him: None of them loved Zion the way he did. By July 1919, near the end of the diaries, Scholem’s Zionism has become a monkish discipline, not a link to his fellow Jews but a wall shutting them out: “Thinking about it correctly, we Zionists live in a state of silent renunciation incapable of articulation… People become impure from living outside of this renunciation and not wanting to live within it. Our hearts are being ripped apart by our shameless epoch in which people throng around us, screaming out their mindless freedoms. We are victims, and a person is sadly misguided if he thinks he’s not.”

Yet if the Scholem of the diaries was a victim in many ways—lonely, painfully self-conscious, and afflicted with sexual neuroses of a kind scarcely imaginable in our more liberated age—he was also in training to be a victor. If he hadn’t passed through the emotional cauldron so vividly evoked in Lamentations of Youth, he could not have given Judaism and the Jews so much to sustain them through the ruptures of the twentieth century. “Jewish scholarship,” he writes in 1919, as though in prophecy of his own future career, “is in an especially paradoxical and indeed extremely enviable position. It is not that it invokes spirits that refuse to come. Quite the opposite: Jewish scholarship expends its full efforts at turning away the invoked spirits, just as it denies that they’re there. But the spirits come anyway. They are always there. Always. And they want to be redeemed through the work of insightful scholars.”

Benjamin was no stranger to the stage in his own time. In “A Berlin Chronicle,” he remembered his earliest trips the “monkey theater” before graduating to Carmen and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Years later, he championed his friend Bertolt Brecht in an essay on “Epic Theater.” Brecht’s ideal audience, wrote Benjamin, was thinking but relaxed, following “the action without strain”—and with “astonishment rather than empathy.”

There was no danger of identifying with anyone in Shadowtime. The opera, after all, is less concerned with the philosopher than his philosophy. In the visually stunning climax, Benjamin finds himself in a kind of post-suicidal purgatory, where everyone from Einstein and Marx to the Golem and the Baal Shem Tov shows up to question him about memory, the future, and God. Benjamin is haunted by life’s big questions—”Are you prepared to be the new Rashi?” Gershom Scholem asks him early on—but he never gets to give very coherent answers.

Moments later, the scene shifts inexplicably to Las Vegas, where a Liberace-like Lecturer issues odd aphorisms like “Around every corner is another corner. Around every corner is another coroner.” While no more comprehensible than the rest of the opera, the scene is captivating precisely because it remembers there’s an audience. Benjamin and Brecht expected a lot of their fans—I’ve read both to find myself equal parts frustrated and fascinated—but neither were difficult without a point. Shadowtime, for all the beauty of the music, often seems to strive for difficulty for its own sake, and doesn’t worry whether anyone can follow. Benjamin and Brecht sound like populists by comparison.