Hans Jonas began his 1961 Ingersoll Lecture by acknowledging the “undeniable fact” “that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.”Footnote ¹ Jonas nonetheless concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs and help the suffering immortal God.”Footnote ² While he may not have realized it, Jonas's words capture what I shall argue is the dominant view of immortality in modern Jewish thought. Underlying this view is an effort to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality.

Like Jonas, I am deliberately using the term immortality in a very general sense to refer to the idea that the meaning of human life transcends human finitude or mortality. This loose conception of immortality suggests that there is some dimension of an individual's life that endures after death, whether in the form of a soul or the remnants of the individual's deeds. Thinkers as philosophically and ideologically diverse as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the father of German-Jewish thought and a theorist of modern liberalism; Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), the intellectual father of modern Orthodoxy; Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), the neo-Kantian, liberal German-Jewish philosopher; Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), the existentialist Jewish philosopher; and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), the French phenomenologist often associated with postmodernism all affirm a minimal but assured position that the material world—whether defined by the laws of nature or by the facts of historical context—does not and cannot fully capture the meaning of our humanity.

My interest is less in the details of various modern Jewish thinkers' claims about immortality—though I will get into some of these details—than in the purpose that claims about or gestures toward immortality serve in modern Jewish thought. Insight into modern Jewish views of immortality comes not only from what modern Jewish thinkers say about immortality but also from what they do not say. As Jon Levenson has recently reminded us, in premodern (biblical, rabbinic, and medieval) Jewish thought, the idea of immortality went hand in hand with a belief in resurrection.Footnote ³ In contrast, modern Jewish thinkers reject, downplay, or make no mention of resurrection while nonetheless affirming a conception of immortality. The question I would like to explore is, why do modern Jewish thinkers retain a notion of immortality but not of resurrection?

The answer is not, in my judgment, that resurrection is more philosophically embarrassing than immortality. This may have been a consideration for eighteenth-century rationalists and late nineteenth-century neo-Kantians (although, as I will argue, the matter is far more complex in the cases of both Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen). In the context of modern philosophical schools such as existentialism and phenomenology, however, immortality would seem to be as problematic as resurrection. Yet modern Jewish support for immortality and rejection of resurrection is less surprising when considered in the context of the theological-political framework of modern Judaism, in which, like political modernity more broadly, religion is (at least in theory) divorced from politics. As modern Europeans debated whether to grant Jews rights of citizenship in the modern nation state, Jewish thinkers of a variety of ideological stripes were continually at pains to emphasize that the Jewish community did not and would not constitute a state within a state.Footnote ⁴ The Jewish religion, they argued, did not demand any sort of political loyalty that would be in tension with the loyalty required by the state. In making this argument, these diverse Jewish thinkers all equated politics with the modern nation state alone and all contended that Judaism was not political.Footnote ⁵

I would like to suggest that because resurrection is associated with collective identity in classical Jewish thought, many modern Jewish thinkers had trouble acknowledging the concept. The idea of immortality, in contrast, offers the possibility of affirming the enduring value and significance of the Jewish tradition while simultaneously confirming that there is no tension between being Jewish and being a citizen of the modern nation-state. The problem of resurrection is thus less a philosophical problem than a political one. We will see that Benedict de Spinoza's (1632–1677) criticism of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) on this topic, and Moses Mendelssohn's subsequent attempt to argue for Jewish emancipation in the context of Spinoza's critique of Maimonides, proved the turning points after which the terms of modern Jewish considerations of immortality were set. The downplaying of resurrection combined with the retention of immortality constitutes a movement away from traditional Judaism, with its dual theological and political dimensions, toward a Judaism that is what we today call a “religion.” In even more contemporary terms, this trend in Jewish thought marks a transition from “religion” to “spirituality.” As I will suggest in the conclusion of this paper, the downplaying of resurrection combined with the retention of immortality in modern Jewish thought raises questions not just about modern Judaism but also about the place and limits of religion in modern political orders.

***

Two basic points made by Jon Levenson in Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel are essential for our discussion. First, as Levenson's title indicates, the notion of resurrection goes hand in hand with the restoration of Israel. To be sure, the history of Jewish thought, rabbinic and otherwise, does not present one systematic view of immortality or resurrection. However, it is helpful to recognize that from a classical rabbinic point of view resurrection is not individual but communal. An expansive dimension of resurrection is central to the Christian understanding of the concept as well. As Oscar Cullman stated in his 1955 Ingersoll Lecture, “The Christian hope relates not just to my individual fate, but to the entire creation.”Footnote ⁶ Second, as Levenson succinctly concludes, “To the rabbis, resurrection without the restoration of Israel, including its renewed adherence to Torah, was incomprehensible. And without the expectation of resurrection, the restoration of Israel would be something less than what the rabbis thought the Torah had always intended it to be—the ultimate victory of the God of life.”Footnote ⁷ Put another way, the theological and political dimensions of resurrection cannot be separated. From the perspective of classical Jewish thought, theology without politics—the miracle of resurrection without the restoration of the particular people who newly commit to the observance of God's law—is as problematic as politics without theology, or the restoration of Israel without the ultimate miracle of the God of life.

At stake in appreciating the interconnection between resurrection and the restoration of Israel in classical Jewish thought is the very question of Jewish election. The intimate interplay between resurrection and Israel's restoration suggests that resurrection—the ultimate redemption of history—cannot be detached from the particular fate of the people of Israel. To be sure, the eschatological redemption marked by resurrection is universal. But the path toward universality cannot be detached from Israel's particular destiny. In rabbinic Judaism, the status of resurrection and the relation between Jewish particularity and universality come together in a well-known discussion in the final chapter of tractate Sanhedrin in the Babylonian Talmud:

Clearly, from a rabbinic point of view, belief in resurrection of the dead is essential. All of Israel has a place in the world to come, but those who deny resurrection remove themselves from the community of Israel, thereby denying themselves a place among the newly born people.

But do others, that is, non-Jews, have a place in the world to come? Does not the God of life who restores the people of Israel restore all righteous people to life? The rabbis debated this question and offered a number of opinions, including Rabbi Joshua's, which suggested that those righteous Gentiles who followed the seven laws given to Noah after the flood also have a share in the world to come.Footnote ⁸ Maimonides' interpretation of Rabbi Joshua's opinion would be decisive for modern Jewish understandings of immortality and resurrection. Let us turn first to Maimonides' view of resurrection and then to modern Jewish interpretations of Maimonides' view.

Maimonides is well known not only for what he said about resurrection but also for what he did not say. In particular, Maimonides does not mention resurrection in his magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed, though he does affirm the immortality of the soul. This omission was not lost on Maimonides' critics and he was vehemently attacked for his apparent denial of the resurrection of the body.Footnote ⁹ Toward the end of his life, Maimonides responded to his critics with his Treatise on Resurrection, in which he explicitly embraced the doctrine of resurrection:

There is much to say, and indeed much has been said, about the relation between Maimonides' Treatise and his other works as well as about what his views really were.Footnote ¹¹ However, for our purposes, what matters is that Maimonides emphasizes the intimate and irreducible connection between theology and politics implied by the belief in resurrection. In the above quotation from the Treatise it might appear that resurrection is a purely theological matter, as denial of resurrection “leads to the denial of miracles,” which is “equivalent to denying the existence of God and the abandonment of our faith.” In the context of Maimonides' broader argument in the Guide, however, the denial of miracles—and what is resurrection but the greatest of miracles?—“destroys the Torah of our teacher Moses in its principle … and reduces to inanity all the hopes and threats that the Law of Moses has held out.”Footnote ¹²

Why does the rejection of miracles destroy the Torah? For Maimonides, the possibility of miracles implies the possibility of God's creation of the world. Creation, in turn, implies divine providence, for if God created the world, then the world is the way it is for a reason (whatever that reason may be). If there is no possibility of providence, there is no possibility of revelation and no possibility of the Law.Footnote ¹³ For these reasons, denial of the hope for resurrection “destroys the Torah in its principle … and reduces to inanity all the hopes and threats that the Law of Moses has held out.” The destruction of the Torah in principle as well as all the hopes and threats that the Law has held out is thus not of merely theological import but of political significance as well. As Maimonides makes clear throughout his work, the Torah is fundamentally political in nature, and while politics is not the ultimate end of the Torah, the political order is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for any higher spiritual aspirations of the human being. As Maimonides puts it in the Guide: “The Torah of Moses our teacher as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body. As for the welfare of the soul, it consists in the multitude's acquiring correct opinions. … As for the welfare of the body, it comes about by the improvement of their ways of living with one another. … This cannot be achieved in any way by one isolated individual. For an individual can only attain all this through a political association, it being already known that man is political by nature.”Footnote ¹⁴ However one interprets Maimonides' claims about resurrection in relation to his larger corpus, it is clear that he follows the rabbinic tradition in positing an intimate connection between the theological hope for the miracle of resurrection and the political form this hope would take in restoring the people of Israel.

***

It is precisely the splitting of theology from politics that marks much of modern Jewish thought and particularly the claims of those Jewish thinkers who emphasize some conception of immortality while attempting to ignore resurrection. As with so many issues in modern Jewish thought, the famous Jewish heretic Benedict de Spinoza set the parameters for modern Jewish arguments about immortality. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza denies the possibility of miracles, claiming that belief in miracles is in fact a denial of God because the notion of a miracle implies that God's laws are not necessary.Footnote ¹⁵ Nevertheless, in the Ethics Spinoza seems to affirm some notion of immortality: “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body but something of it remains which is eternal.”Footnote ¹⁶ The meaning of Spinoza's claim about immortality remains as vexing for his interpreters as resurrection is for Maimonides' interpreters.Footnote ¹⁷

What concerns us here, however, is less the philosophical intricacies of Spinoza's position (obviously a subject far beyond the scope of this paper) than the political contention about Judaism that he makes in the Tractatus in connection with his declaration about immortality in the Ethics. Spinoza writes:

Spinoza refers here to Maimonides' commentary, in his Law of Kings, on the aforementioned talmudic discussion about who has a portion in the world to come. Maimonides writes:

According to Maimonides, in order to earn a place in the world to come, a non-Jew must not only accept and observe the seven commandments given to Noah but must do so “because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Law and made them known through Moses, our teacher.” On the one hand, acceptance of the source of the law is theological—the righteous gentile acknowledges that the law comes from God and not from his own reason. On the other hand, such acceptance is also political, for the law was given to Moses who gave it to the Jewish people. From Spinoza's perspective, Maimonides' view undermines the true meaning of the divine law, which Spinoza defines as “universal or common to all men. … [because] it does not depend on the truth of any historical narrative whatsoever.”Footnote ²⁰ For Maimonides, in contrast, there is no tension between the particular historical narrative of the divine law and its universal implications. In fact, the latter two require the former.

Needless to say, there are profound theological and philosophical differences between Maimonides and Spinoza. But on the questions of immortality and resurrection, that is, on the issue of who does and does not have a place in the world to come, their difference is perhaps most fundamentally political. As noted above, for Maimonides, “The Law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.” The political order aims at the welfare of the body, but for Maimonides the welfare of the body is not an end in itself. Rather, politics is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the ultimate goal of human life, which is contemplation of the divine (or the welfare of the soul). Spinoza follows Maimonides in viewing the goal of human life as contemplation of the divine, but Spinoza sees politics as an end in itself. For Spinoza, the aim of the state is “peace and security of life” (pax vitaeque securitas).Footnote ²¹ Religion, or theology, for Spinoza, is a means toward promoting political harmony. Maimonides' view that the righteous gentile not only exhibits certain behavior but also possesses certain beliefs is inherently problematic because it depends upon the truth of a particular historical narrative. For Spinoza, such a preference for one historical narrative undermines the goal of harmony on the basis of which all theological beliefs should be judged. This perspective came to define the political, philosophical, and theological framework in which modern Jewish thinkers found themselves. The questions of immortality and resurrection thus became as much modern political questions as they were metaphysical ones.

***

Without appreciating the political background of modern Jewish thought, especially in the German-Jewish context, it would be easy to conclude that modern Jewish conceptions of immortality simply mirrored the philosophical fashions of the day. In his 1783 Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn argued that Judaism in no way contradicted enlightened reason but rather complemented it.Footnote ²² In his 1767 Phädon, Mendelssohn also offered a sustained Enlightenment argument for the immortality of the soul, making no mention of resurrection.Footnote ²³ However, Mendelssohn's claims about both Judaism and enlightened reason as well as about immortality are as political as they are metaphysical. Mendelssohn's conception of Judaism and his view of immortality conform as much to an idea of a universal enlightened reason as they do to the very modern notion that theological beliefs are to be judged on the basis of their ability to contribute to a harmonious political order.

As is well known, Mendelssohn published his Jerusalem as a response to the public challenge of a Swiss theologian, John Caspar Lavater, either to refute Christianity or to convert to Christianity. This was a twofold challenge because Mendelssohn had to defend the rationality of Judaism and hence Judaism's compatibility with the German Enlightenment without offending his Christian interlocutors. Mendelssohn responded with an eloquent plea for the separation of Church and State. The title of Mendelssohn's response, Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power in Judaism, captures the thrust of his argument. Mendelssohn argues that by definition the state concerns power and coercion while religion, properly understood, does not. This means that Judaism, or “Jerusalem,” is not concerned with power and therefore does not conflict with the possibility of the integration of Jews into the modern nation-state.

Mendelssohn created the very category of Jewish religion by separating Judaism from politics and the individual Jew from the corporate Jewish community. As he put it, the purpose of the Jewish community “is collective edification, participation in the effusion of the heart, through which we acknowledge our gratitude for God's benefactions …”Footnote ²⁴ As a political corollary to this philosophical point, Mendelssohn vehemently opposed the idea that the Jewish community should retain its autonomy in matters of civil law, stressing that Jews should receive civil rights as individuals and not as a corporate entity.Footnote ²⁵ Mendelssohn especially rejected the Jewish community's claim, still maintained in his day, to the right to excommunicate. As he put it, Judaism “as religion, knows of no punishment, no other penalty than the one the remorseful sinner voluntarily imposes on himself. It knows of no coercion, uses only the staff [called] gentleness, and affects only mind and heart.”Footnote ²⁶

For both theological and political reasons, Mendelssohn was deeply uncomfortable with Maimonides' conceptions of immortality and resurrection. Spinoza's philosophy was of course familiar to the German Enlightenment, as was Pierre Bayle's claim, derived from Spinoza's criticism of Maimonides, that Judaism was a fundamentally immoral religion.Footnote ²⁷ In Mendelssohn's own day, Voltaire had extended this claim in asserting that the Jewish religion was in fact unsurpassed in its moral depravity.Footnote ²⁸

Mendelssohn did not publicly disagree with Maimonides. In fact, he never mentioned resurrection in any of his work published in German, including in his Phädon, whose expressed purpose is a defense of immortality. However, in his private correspondence, not intended for publication, Mendelssohn expressed his profound discomfort with the political and theological implications of Maimonides' views: “These things are more difficult for me than flinty rock. Should all the dwellers on earth, from East to the West, other than ourselves descend into the pit of perdition and be an object of condemnation to all human beings if they do not believe in the Torah which was given as an inheritance only to the congregation of Jacob?”Footnote ²⁹ Clearly, Mendelssohn recognized that his conception of immortality did not conform to rabbinic doctrine, Maimonidean or otherwise, which, as we have seen, concerns the fate of the people of Israel. The fact that Mendelssohn refused, despite repeated requests, to have his Phädon translated into Hebrew seems only to confirm this conclusion.Footnote ³⁰

Perhaps with Spinoza's criticism of Maimonides in mind, Mendelssohn stresses in Phädon that immortality in no way concerns any national or particular group identity: “I am of the opinion also that in the very wise plan of creation, similar beings are to meet a similar destiny and consequently that the same fate awaits the whole human race.”Footnote ³¹ In the Phädon's final argument for immortality, Mendelssohn provides a direct political analog to his philosophical description of the egalitarian nature of immortality. Without immortality, Mendelssohn avers, it would be impossible to reconcile the state's right “to demand the sacrifice of the life of any citizen for the welfare of the whole” with the individual's competing right to the supreme good of life. Mendelssohn's political argument for immortality amounts to a reductio ad absurdum: the soul is necessarily immortal, Mendelssohn argues, because if it were not, we would be left in an absurd situation, “a general war of moral beings where everyone has right on his side.”Footnote ³²

Setting aside the question of the merits of this argument, the important point for us is that Mendelssohn wants to be very clear in affirming the right of the state to demand the sacrifice of the life of the citizen as well as the citizen's individual right to life. In the context in which he wrote, and especially in regard to questions about the relations between the Jewish community, the state, and the individual Jew, these rights were certainly not taken for granted. Indeed, one of the main objections to Jewish emancipation was that Jews constituted a state within a state and therefore could not be trusted to serve in the military. This was a position that Mendelssohn spent much of his intellectual life attempting to refute. We have seen that while he strongly rejects Spinoza's description of the Jewish view of immortality, Mendelssohn nonetheless adheres to Spinoza's framework in his conception of the relation between theology and politics. The theological notion of immortality is inherently egalitarian, Mendelssohn asserts, and thus does not undermine but rather supports an egalitarian body politic, just as Judaism, as a religion without dogma, does not undermine but rather supports enlightened reason.

***

When the liberal society that Mendelssohn had hoped for was, at least to some extent, finally actualized, modern Jewish thinkers continued to defend an idea of immortality similar to his. Strikingly, a number of rather diverse modern Jewish thinkers did occasionally mention resurrection, but only as a metaphor for immortality. For instance, Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth-century spiritual founding father of what is today called Orthodox Judaism, shares with Mendelssohn the tendency to avoid the subject of resurrection while retaining immortality. Hirsch did not remove the ubiquitous references to resurrection from the liturgy as his Reform counterparts did.Footnote ³³ But with remarkable consistency, Hirsch shifts discussion away from resurrection toward immortality and while doing so he interprets references to the community of Israel as references to individual Jews as well as to individual people in general.

That “all of Israel has a place in the world to come,” Hirsch writes, “denotes a two-fold future; one in the world to come, and one in this world. … Whatever good we achieve in loyal obedience to God here below becomes a spiritual accomplishment which will accompany us into the world to come and into the presence of our Father in Heaven.”Footnote ³⁴ In its universalist and theologically vague character, Hirsch's conception of immortality is quite similar to Mendelssohn's. In what is perhaps his most succinct statement on the subject, Hirsch asserts that “immortality and eternity belong to the essence of man as man, given to everyone as he enters this life, to enable him to walk in freedom in the land of transience, to lead him to return to eternity.”Footnote ³⁵

Perhaps more significant than this theological affinity between Hirsch and Mendelssohn is their political affinity, which may offer us deeper insight into modern Jewish conceptions of immortality. Although he wrote a century after Mendelssohn and as a critic of the liberal Judaism Mendelssohn had fathered, the following words of Hirsch's could just have easily been Mendelssohn's:

Note Hirsch's repeated use of the term “spiritual” to describe both immortality and the political status of the Jewish people. (Again, Hirsch describes immortality as a “spiritual accomplishment” and Israel's nationhood as “purely spiritual.”) The common ground between Mendelssohn and Hirsch is their shared assumption of the necessity of a boundary between Judaism, now defined as a religion, and politics, now defined only in terms of the egalitarian and individualistic commitments of the modern nation state.Footnote ³⁷ Resurrection crosses this boundary and is for this reason troublesome for each of these thinkers.

In the early twentieth century, the great neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen similarly reduced resurrection to immortality. Like Mendelssohn, Cohen was deeply disturbed by Spinoza's portrayal of Maimonides.Footnote ³⁸ Unlike Mendelssohn, however, Cohen sought to correct not Maimonides but Spinoza, claiming that Spinoza had maliciously misread Maimonides (a view that most scholars reject).Footnote ³⁹ Cohen offers a rereading of Maimonides:

For Cohen, “messianic mankind” implies not an eschatological endpoint but the worldly pursuit of what he calls “ethical socialism,” in which “material and economic conditions should never become a hindrance to the realization of the moral and spiritual culture of all men without any distinction.”Footnote ⁴¹ While resurrection would seem to be an instance of God's miraculous suspension of the laws of creaturely existence, Cohen maintains that the concept of “resurrection became a lever for the formulation of [the concept of] immortality. … the history of the people and the history of the messianic people of mankind endure forever.” Again, for Cohen, the messianic people “stands … for the concept of man in general.”Footnote ⁴² According to Cohen, immortality means that the human being's moral task endures forever and the concept of resurrection is but an historical vestige of this eternal truth.

***

We may wonder why Cohen mentions resurrection at all. Would it not have been easier simply to ignore resurrection, as Mendelssohn did? Here again we see philosophy, theology, and politics meeting. Mendelssohn wrote at a time when the Jewish community was still defined as a political entity. For this reason, Mendelssohn was highly sensitive to any theological notion that had political implications. As we briefly discussed, in order to argue for the full inclusion of Jews in modern political life, Mendelssohn invented the idea that Judaism is a religion. By Cohen's time, approximately a century and a half later, this idea had been fully internalized by Jewish thinkers. (Note the title of Cohen's book, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism; the book was intended as a complement and corrective to Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.) Resurrection, like all Jewish theological concepts, had been divorced from politics. Resurrection could now serve as an indistinct placeholder for immortality which, we have briefly seen in Cohen's case, already served as a placeholder for the eternal truth of morality.

The affirmation of immortality on the one hand and the separation of theology and politics on the other is perhaps most revealing in the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig begins his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption: “From death, from the fear of death, there commences all knowledge of the All. To cast off the fear of the earthly, to take from death its poisonous sting, in this philosophy deceives itself.”Footnote ⁴³ Rejecting the old philosophy for what he calls the “new thinking,” Rosenzweig would seem to base his thought on the fundamental and inescapable fact of human mortality. Yet the Star goes on to declare that “man's eternity is implanted in the soil of creation.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Understandably, from the first published reviews of the Star to this very day, the central task for students of Rosenzweig has been, in one way or another, to resolve the tension between existence and eternity in his thought.Footnote ⁴⁵

While the Star refers repeatedly to eternity and at times to immortality, resurrection is mentioned only three times and then only in passing. Two of these references occur in the context of Rosenzweig's discussion of Christianity. The third is seemingly generic and especially obscure:

Space does not permit a full discussion of this admittedly complex quotation, but for our purposes we need but note one point. Rosenzweig associates resurrection with death, time, worldliness, history, state, science, and “all that is visible,” while he links eternity with transcendence, speech, and silence. Later in the Star he characterizes Judaism as eternal and the Jewish people's communal life as silence.Footnote ⁴⁷ In contrast, he depicts Christianity and Christians as intrinsically temporal and tied to history, the state, and art.Footnote ⁴⁸ These portrayals imply that the Jewish people are already beyond resurrection because they are eternal. It is Christians and not Jews who await resurrection. Rosenzweig's association of eternity and resurrection with Judaism and Christianity respectively is part and parcel of his inversion of Christian supersessionism. For Rosenzweig, it is not that Judaism needs to catch up to Christian revelation, as Christians had held for centuries. Rather, as Rosenzweig puts it, “to the church we can only say: we have already arrived at the destination, you are still en route.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Rosenzweig's refusal to associate resurrection with Judaism is remarkable since, more than any other German-Jewish thinker, he tried to move beyond the framework erected by Mendelssohn. But while Rosenzweig emphatically rejected the idea that Judaism is a religion, he nevertheless insisted far more than his predecessors had that Judaism was completely separate from politics. As Rosenzweig put it to his friend Eugen Rosenstock: “Is not part of the price that the Synagogue must pay for the blessing … of being already in the Father's presence, that she must wear the bandages of unconsciousness over her eyes)?”Footnote ⁵⁰ In part three of the Star, he argues at length that the bandages of unconsciousness blind the Jew and Judaism particularly to politics. Rosenzweig, then, like Hirsch and Cohen, can only view Judaism through the lens of an absolute separation between theology and politics. Judaism, for Rosenzweig, has no political dimension but only a theological one. Resurrection is thus irrelevant to Judaism.Footnote ⁵¹

***

That the problem of resurrection for modern Jewish thinkers is a political one is confirmed by the fact that cultural Zionists are perhaps the only modern Jewish thinkers for whom resurrection is supremely important. The central figure of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) explicitly rejected the modern idea that Judaism is a religion. He did so because he believed that Jews had attempted to eliminate their communal identity—what I have been calling the political dimension of Judaism—for the false promise of the modern liberal state. Writing in Eastern Europe, where Jews had not yet received the rights of citizenship, Ahad Ha'am made this point most clearly in a well-known and aptly titled essay, “Slavery in Freedom”:

Ahad Ha'am strove to acknowledge both the political and theological dimensions of Judaism, but he sought to subordinate theology to a new kind of national identity: Zionism. Reformulating the twin theological and political dimensions of Judaism, he famously maintained that “one can say without any exaggeration that more than the Jewish people has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept [the Jewish people].”Footnote ⁵³

Perhaps the most basic concept that Ahad Ha'am attempted to transform was the very idea of resurrection. He explicitly suggested that political redemption for the Jews, i.e., Zionism, was an “appendage” (tiflah) to thiyat ha-metim (resurrection of the dead). Cultural Zionism, he maintained, would lead to the “resurrection of the hearts” (thiyat ha-levavot) of the Jewish people.Footnote ⁵⁴ Martin Buber (1878–1965), a great admirer of Ahad Ha'am's cultural Zionism, also described the reawakening of Jewish peoplehood in terms of resurrection: “The word resurrection comes to mind: a reawakening that is a miracle.” Buber's use of the term resurrection is particularly telling because he goes on to state that “history knows no miracles. It does, however, know streams of national life that seem to cease, but actually continue underground. … The Jewish people can look forward to a resurrection from half a life to a full one.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The cultural Zionist reformulation of resurrection raises the question of whether the modern era demands that Jews make an “either/or” choice between religion and politics. As such, the relationship between the rejection of resurrection in modern Jewish avowals of immortality and the revival of the concept of resurrection by cultural Zionists points to the most basic questions of modern Jewish thought as well as of political modernity.

***

In this paper, I have tried to show that a commitment to immortality is central to modern Jewish thought and that modern Jewish thinkers affirm immortality while rejecting or downplaying resurrection. I have suggested that this movement from resurrection to immortality in modern Jewish thought ought to be understood within the theological-political framework of modernity, in which Judaism is considered a religion separate from politics. By way of conclusion, I would like to refer briefly to an interesting column of May 2008 entitled “The Neural Buddhists” by New York Times columnist David Brooks, which, I suggest, bears upon the meaning of modern Jewish affirmations of immortality and disavowals of resurrection. Brooks notes that despite the loud voices of a new group of assertive atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, “momentum [amongst scientists] has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer.” Brooks argues that this means that debates between atheists and believers “about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it … is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God [or immortality], it's going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” The real challenge to religious believers will “come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”Footnote ⁵⁶

I began this paper with reference to Hans Jonas's 1961 Ingersoll Lecture. Again, Jonas concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs …” Jonas surely would have been happy to see that, as Brooks puts it, some “scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. … The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.” But Jonas himself recognized that his very limited conception of immortality was a break not only with the Bible but also with the history of Jewish (and Christian) thought. Jonas believed there was no other option than to acknowledge this break and then to create new myths for ourselves with the full knowledge that these could only be myths.Footnote ⁵⁷ My interest has been in exploring the related political dimension of this move, which concerns nothing less than the status of modern liberalism. Our consideration of modern Jewish views of immortality raises the question of whether liberalism demands that all “particular religions” must become “just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human” truths. As all students of modern religion surely know, this remains the basic question of all modern religious thought, Jewish or otherwise. Modern Jewish reflections on immortality and resurrection do not provide an answer to this question, but they surely do provide yet another reason to continue thinking about it.