Religions and History

This is a fascinating video, because it takes the paradox of religions and historicism you talk about even further. Here the Jewish side is orthodoxly ahistoric and the Christian is flirting with Hegelianism, while it is the Jews, of all religions, wh would be most naturally inclined to weave history into their national and religious narrative. After all, one of the most bascic features that distinguishes Jewish religious imagination from the the Christian one, is the hitorical context,what J.B. Soloveitchik elegantly called, “a kesher mitn groysn ovar”, a very real sense of the past defining the present. Yet the whenever the Talmud speaks about historical events, it intentionally shifts the focus from their broader impact onto moral lessons an individual could learn from them. It is always concerned with the particular, it is always a moral virtue or failure of an individual that is the real subtext of grand historical events. This tendecy wins even within the circle of Kabbalah, the style of thinking the most sussceptible to messianic historicism, instead it always stirs towards the individual.
Paradoxically, the modern Christians are, perhaps unconsciusly, enthusiastic Hegelians. When confronted with the question of meaning in history, they adopt a language alien to religious thinking, the language of historical dialectic. This tendency is counterintuitive, because the fundamental image that Christianity draws to distinguish itself from Judaism, is that of an individual standing before God outside of of any social context. Good versus evil, reason versus nature, these are the points of tension in classical Christian theology.
Of course there is the need to explain the suffering of the innocent and here Marxism dressed up as theodicy serves the purpose perfectly. But why were the Jews reluctant or perhaps unable to adopt Hegelianism, when seemingly it could have been so theologically useful? I can offer two suggestions. One, it is theologically inconsistent with the notion of free will and personal responsiblity , it assumes that, as Simone Weil said “by walking straight ahead one would rise into thin air”. Second, Hegelian dialectic demands that there is a response to historical past, and that response is generated by some cooperation between man and the world. This implies progresss, readiness to depart from the past and leap into the future. Judaism is interested in preserving their “kesher mitn greysn ovar” and keeping it as static as possible. Like Chaim Grade said in an interview, when asked to characterize the Jewish religious mindset versus the secular: “leyt di frume, zayt maymed har sinai, iz der velt geblibn shteyn”.

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