Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama

REDEMPTIVE HOPE

COMMONALITIES

Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

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First edition

To my wife and kids for being the source from which all my hopes spring

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   Redemptive Hope and the Cunning of History

2   Revival of Messianic Hope

3   The God of Exodus and the School of Hope

4   Richard Rorty’s Social Hope and Postmetaphysical Redemption

Conclusion: Between Pragmatic and Messianic Hopes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The gratitude I have for all those who have assisted me in exploring and developing the ideas in this book cannot be fully contained within these pages. These acknowledgments are but grains of sand in the vast beach of my true feelings of gratitude for all those who have contributed, directly and indirectly, to the creation of this manuscript.

The seeds of this book took root early in my academic life when, as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later Berkeley, I gained a greater appreciation for the competing redemptive narratives that have culminated in this book. As a history major, I was inspired by the writings on hope of first-century Jews, struggling with the culture of Hellenism and political subjugation under the Roman Empire. Then, in my graduate work at Stanford University, my interest in narratives of redemptive hope was further piqued as I struggled through the process of my own disenchantment and re-enchantment with religious thought. I must begin by expressing my profound gratitude to my principal adviser, Arnold Eisen, for encouraging me to think boldly and to not lose touch with the vocational spark that should be the driving force within all academic pursuits. I remain truly grateful that Eisen’s demand for rigorous critical thinking and writing was coupled with a willingness to break from the boundaries of the traditional Jewish Studies canon, encouraging me to continue a conversation I had begun with Richard Rorty over the nature of religion, pragmatism, and the enduring importance of hope for twenty-first-century intellectual life. In addition, I thank Tom Sheehan and Amir Eshel for the roles they played in shepherding my early scholarship. I am particularly grateful to Amir Eshel for his ongoing feedback as I further developed this manuscript.

Eisen sagely advised that one should have both living and dead conversation partners. This book is a direct outgrowth of my conversations with Richard Rorty during the last years of his life, conversations that fundamentally altered my worldview. Rorty’s passing at the end of my graduate career was a tremendous loss, but I am eternally grateful for the conversations we had, as well as the comments and support he gave my scholarship. Since his death, I also feel fortunate to continue those conversations, albeit in a different medium. Although Rorty was not a big fan of metaphysics, this book in many ways serves as a metaphysical tribute to the ongoing debates his ideas continue to inspire in me since his passing.

From my earlier years at Berkeley, and then later as a graduate student, I feel especially grateful to Martin Jay for his teachings and mentorship. Daniel Boyarin, Eric Gruen, Jonathan Beecher, Bruce Thompson, and David Biale were early teachers who set me on an intellectual path I continue to travel to this day. From my studies at Hebrew University, I thank Paul Mendes-Flohr for his advice and encouragement to keep the secular messianic Jewish voices of Bloch and Benjamin within my work.

I also thank the generosity and support of Stanford University’s program in Jewish Studies and particularly Steven Zipperstein for his leadership, as well as the efforts of Charlotta Fromrober and Vered Shemtov for their contributions to supporting Jewish Studies graduate work. I also thank Joshua Landy for his very thorough readings of my early scholarship and for modeling how to cut through metaphysical underbrush. As a friend, Josh has a wit and a shared love of working in San Francisco cafés that has carried me through many years of toiling within academia. Jean-Pierre Dupey brought me into the exciting world of French intellectual history and introduced me to the challenges of Girardian thought. I must also thank Mark Brilliant, not only for his generosity in providing close readings of my work but also for our discussions while riding through the hills of northern California on our mountain bikes. Rob Reich also provided valuable mentorship and feedback on my work. From my time at Stanford, I also thank Van Harvey, Lee Yearly, Hester Gelber, Brent Sockness, and Carl Bielefeldt. Significantly, Greg Kaplan’s ability to combine scholarly insight with practical advice on navigating the world of academia continues to be a welcome source of support.

During my postdoctoral period at Stanford, I was fortunate to teach in the IHUM (Introduction to the Humanities) Program and in the Religious Studies Department. In particular, I am thankful to Hester Gelber for providing the opportunity to teach a course developed with Mark Gonnerman entitled Hope and Prophetic Politics. Mark’s combination of Zen master–like humor and flashes of deep insight is coupled with genuine intellectual solidarity. The comradeship forged with Mark during this period remains a true gift.

After Stanford, I was extraordinarily privileged to join the ranks of Santa Clara’s Religious Studies Department as an assistant professor. The welcome I have received at SCU has given me the feeling of arriving at a true academic home. My experience at Santa Clara has reinforced my appreciation for being in a department with people who are committed to modeling ethical relations, modeling intellectual inquiry, and supporting scholarship that places social justice concerns at the center of what it means to be a scholar-teacher. I want to thank my chair, Gary Macy, for his support and for allowing me to cluster classes so that I could carve out more time for finishing this book. I also thank Peter Minowitz for his insightful feedback and mentorship and David Pinault for his mentorship. Additionally, I am grateful to my department and the Dean’s Office, which graciously provided funding to help offset some of the costs involved with the publication of this book.

Through the evolution of writing this book, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to develop some of my ideas through publishing related scholarship. I thank Peter Orchs for inviting me to publish an article entitled The Dialectical Self: Between Liberal Autonomy and Religious Identity in The Journal of Textual Reasoning. I am thankful for Ken Koltun-Fromm’s informal mentorship over the years and for his organizing a symposium at Haverford University in 2011 on Jewish Thought and then editing my chapter titled Otherness and the Future of Democratic Solidarity: Buber, Kaplan, Levinas and Rorty’s Social Hope in a volume entitled Thinking Jewish Culture in America. I also thank Zachery Braiterman, Martin Kavka, and Ben Lazier for their feedback on early versions of my book proposal.

I particularly want to thank the staff at Fordham University Press for all their assistance in bringing my manuscript to print, especially when faced with the tragic and untimely loss of my initial editor, Helen Tartar. Helen was gracious and patient, and her willingness to support young scholars and encourage innovative paths within scholarship is a legacy that I hope this book lives up to. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Thomas Lay for honoring Helen’s legacy by committing himself to shepherding my book through the delicate period right after her death. I also thank Eric Newman for his careful and thoughtful editorial work and Michael Koch for his very thorough and expeditious copy editing. Additionally, I am deeply grateful to the anonymous readers for the Press for their insightful comments and support. Their thorough readings and demanding questions contributed to the sharpening of each chapter. I also thank Erin Hyman for her early editorial work on my manuscript. Her untimely passing is a terrible loss, but her editorial insights are preserved in the pages of this book.

This book also reflects the love and support of a remarkable circle of family and friends who have helped provide the fortitude required to make it up the academic mountain. Although I cannot include the names of my entire Bay Area–based tribe, I must mention Nathaniel Deutsch for being a true friend in times of need, for his tough-love readings of my work, and for conversations that have shaped my thinking over the years. My debt to his editorial insights and friendship is everlasting. I must also mention Elliot Neaman for being like an older brother to me, for years of mentorship, for bike rides at Mt. Tam, and for invaluable readings of my work. Starting from our early years together at Berkeley in the ’90s, Elliot has been an amazing friend at every step along my scholarly journey; Ari Kelman for his loyal friendship and late night intellectual conversations since childhood; and my friends Aaron Tapper, Ben Hurlbut, and Marc Gidal for years of solidarity, great discussions, and laughter.

I thank my father, Michael Lerner, for a lifetime of Sabbath dinners over which we’ve challenged each other’s worldviews and wrestled over life’s big questions. I owe much of my understanding of Judaism to his teachings. I also thank him for his editorial insights on earlier iterations of my manuscript. To my mother, Theirrie Cook, and her partner Jerry Horovitz, I owe a debt of gratitude for their loving support, countless hours of babysitting, and early editorial suggestions. I have also been blessed with extraordinary in-laws, Jean and George Rosenfeld, whose boundless love and support of me, my wife, and our children have been essential for making it through the long haul of becoming a professor. I also thank my uncle (in-law) David Aaronson for his sage advice in navigating both life and academia.

I thank my children, Ellie and Jeremiah, for allowing me to experience what unconditional love is all about and for allowing me to become the dad I’ve always wanted to be. In one form or another I have been working toward completing this book their entire lives, and they know only too well the sacrifices that were required. They are the light of my life and my hope on the horizon. I especially want to thank the love of my life, my wife, Sunny Lerner, who is the greatest companion I could ever imagine, for teaching me that all redemptive hope begins in those quiet, intimate moments when the armor of the ego dissolves. Her unyielding love and support of me have not only allowed me to face life’s challenges but have taught me that in the darkest of moments the love a life-partner provides is the best form of hope we can experience in this life. My gratitude to her is never-ending.

REDEMPTIVE HOPE

INTRODUCTION

Blessed are those … whose hope is in the LORD their God.

—PSALM 146:5

This is a book about our need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The story of the rise of secular redemptive hope narratives from the age of Enlightenment to the early part of the twenty-first century has been a story of the struggle between heightened expectations and postutopian despair.¹ The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Obama in 2008—followed by the diminution of these expectations—was a stark reminder that redemptive hope is seldom satisfactorily fulfilled. Although what led to the dashing of these expectations is still in dispute, Naomi Klein used the term hopeover to describe the cynicism that many progressives felt because of Obama’s reluctance to implement his vision of hope and change.² The ironic suggestion that this cynicism is similar to a hangover is incisive since it alludes to the intoxication that accompanies any historical moment when individuals collectively embrace redemptive hopes. This despair provoked a great deal of theorizing about whether the United States can regain a sense of direction while adjusting to the uncertainties of environmental and geopolitical challenges.³

The reelection of President Obama in 2012 was arguably a reaffirmation for his support of the redemptive potential unleashed by citizens facing the challenges of the future together. Nevertheless, something had profoundly changed in how Americans related to phrases like the audacity of hope. Although the debate over the significance of Obama’s legacy is still on-going, the redemptive narratives surrounding his elections are a reminder that we are still wrestling with what the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty considered to be one of the central intellectual challenges of our postmodern age: Can solidarity with other people serve as a sufficient foundation for our social hopes, or do we need a transcendental force—like God—in order to maintain a grander vision of redemptive hope?

In the decade before Obama’s election Rorty made what many of his peers considered to be a controversial proposal—that solidarity is enough of a basis for maintaining social hope. In doing so, Rorty challenged his fellow intellectuals to move away from the metaphysical grounding in transcendental powers that has defined all Western redemptive hope narratives since the story of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. To view social hope as a substitute for metaphysical grounding, according to Rorty, is to base the future of hope for liberal democracy on our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.⁴ Solidarity based on liberal democratic dialogue can provide an alternative foundation for our hopes to create a better future.

However, can we ground a sense of redemptive hope purely on our solidarity with other people or do we still need a sense of transcendence in order to maintain such hopes?⁵ Are other people enough, as Rorty proposes, or are we always destined to gaze into the starry skies above, as Immanuel Kant put it, in search of a transcendent foundation for our hopes? In this book I engage this dilemma by bringing together Rorty’s neopragmatic version of social hope with the work of modern Jewish intellectuals, particularly that of the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber.⁶

Part of what made Rorty’s proposal so controversial is that historically most religious and philosophical thinkers have shared the conviction that linking one’s hope to a transcendental source—God or the eternal realm of ideas—was necessary. In the Christian social philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s words: The only genuine hope is one directed toward something that does not depend on us.⁷ From this more conventional perspective, a sense of transcendence—that is, the sense that the possible can overcome the given—is necessary in order to guard against debilitating depression and even nihilism if one’s hopes are dashed. According to Martin Luther King Jr., confronting one’s shattered dreams and transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope always depends on one’s ability to affirm a sense of cosmic companionship.⁸ Finding the strength to hew out a stone of hope from a mountain of despair almost always requires reliance on some transcendental foundations. Only God can provide the support necessary for overcoming despair and taking what Kierkegaard suggested is the leap of faith toward the possible.

Rorty countered that Western civilization has matured to the point where we no longer need to rely on the transcendental hopes of our ancestors. Instead, we are mature enough to embrace a criterionless hope that looks merely to the foundations we create through our solidarity with others.⁹ Rather than concern ourselves with the epistemological quest for establishing what counts as real knowledge, Rorty maintains: What matters is your ability to talk to other people about what seems to you true, not what is in fact true. If we take care of freedom, truth can take care of itself.¹⁰ If we could only give up our pretensions to truth and certainty, he argued, we could gain a stronger sense of public solidarity, coupled with the freedom to create what we want to become rather than discover some timeless essence of what we are supposed to be.

Rorty’s appeal to solidarity as an alternative grounding for social hope was particularly intended to challenge traditional hope narratives that either relied on transcendental appeals to God (as in religion) or an idealized notion of subjectivity (as with the Enlightenment and romanticism). Yet, Rorty’s turn to solidarity as an alternative foundation for his neopragmatic social hope, I propose, contains its own redemptive narrative, sharing important links with earlier mid–twentieth-century religious thinkers similarly interested in reinvigorating hope narratives without relying on the same metaphysical foundations. In this book I explore these connections, for example, by bringing together thinkers like Buber and his existential philosophy of I-Thou relations for the first time in scholarship with Rorty on the question of solidarity as an alternative grounding for redemptive hope.

The comparisons and conversations between religious and liberal redemptive hope narratives I weave throughout this book, however, avoid a facile reconciliation of religion’s emphasis on grounding individual hopes in a transcendental source that dissolves individual boundaries and liberalism’s emphasis on maintaining the boundaries of civil rights. For example, Buber’s interest in the transcendental illumination of a person’s whole being may not be reconcilable with Rorty’s postmetaphysical vision for social hope, yet both provide compelling narratives for imagining solidarity within a vibrant liberal democratic society. More important than the moments of convergence, Rorty and the modern Jewish thinkers covered here provide a new approach for appreciating the kinds of conversations redemptive narratives inspire.

REDEMPTIVE HOPE

This is a book about hope narratives that offer a form of redemption. This is also a book about despair and disenchantment, especially with regard to the failure and potential danger of redemptive narratives. As Hegel taught, the force of desire often defines our hopes, and we despair because desire is rarely fully satisfied. One of the greatest strategies we have developed for overcoming despair has been to create narratives of redemptive hope that promise an eventual triumph over alienation and the attainment of harmony. Redemptive hope springs from the desire for a holistic transformation of the world so as to reconcile creation with the divine, or in accordance with a greater good. As individuals, we may hope for a variety of personal goals. However, when we start to link these hopes to a broader universal vision for how society or the world might someday come to reflect the divine in theological terms, or the supreme good (summum bonum), then individual hopes become part of a larger redemptive narrative. The specifics of these ideals have changed throughout the history of the West, yet the constant is that redemptive hope has been transmitted through narratives that inspire individuals to believe in the possible transcendence of what is for a higher vision of how things ought to be. This is perhaps what Emmanuel Levinas meant when he stated that the true object of hope is the Messiah, or salvation.¹¹ When we embrace redemptive narratives, we are hoping for the possibility of achieving a higher good.

In order to reach this ultimate good, most redemptive hope narratives have depended upon a grand teleological model promising that all the struggles within history will be brought to a conclusion at the end of days when, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, the whole earth is at rest (Is 14:7). Isaiah’s vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb (Is 11:6) suggests a fundamental overcoming of power relations toward new possibilities of a new order based on love. The promise for an end to history when the earth is full of knowledge of the Lord (Is 11:9) is related to the hope that either harmony between nature and providence will be restored (as it was in days of old in the Garden of Eden), or a new creation will come into existence (when God’s future kingdom is established here on earth).¹² The origins of time (Urzeit) provides the foundations for peace and hope for the eventual overcoming of alienation at the end of time (Endzeit). In Hegel’s more modern philosophical terminology, a day will come when all the tensions and struggles that fuel the dialectical process will culminate in a new political order based on social harmony and solidarity. Drawing on the vision of universal solidarity developed first among the Hebrew prophets, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan later summed up that the purpose of all religious redemptive traditions is to provide a sense of existential meaning by linking the individual to grander hopes for one day achieving universal solidarity with all peoples.¹³

Various definitions of hope are interwoven into each chapter of this book. I focus mainly on redemptive hope because I am interested in the political and religious narratives that inspire individuals to link their personal hopes to a larger vision of universal redemption. Redemptive hopes, according to my definition, involve the relationship between the individual and what Peter Berger referred to as the broader cosmic order within which individuals are located.¹⁴ Redemptive hopes are never exclusively personal, nor purely communal, but always entail a convergence of both realms. For example, one of the greatest redemptive hopes offered by most religions is the ideal that it is possible to love the stranger as a neighbor, or even as a sister or brother.

Hope, as a phenomenon for intellectual reflection, is an extremely amorphous concept—hard to define without either indulging in gross generalizations or lapsing into fragmented minutiae. A famous rabbinic midrash states that six hundred thousand Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai each understood revelation in six hundred thousand different ways.¹⁵ This midrashic insight into the variety of ways for experiencing and interpreting revelation may also apply to how each individual experiences hope.

Hope is comprised of both affective and cognitive dimensions: the mental image of what we hope for is often accompanied by a sense of anticipation or even an experience of elation.¹⁶ Consequently, hope is always contextually related to particular experiences of hopefulness, that is, a phenomenology of hope.¹⁷ Defining the nature of hope and experience, however, raises epistemological challenges. In reflecting on these challenges, Martin Jay in Songs of Experience suggested that the nature of experience is best captured through the particular songs that bring experiences about, not through stripping away its subjective context in order to lay bare a single, transhistorical core meaning.¹⁸ Following Jay’s nuanced approach to the topic of experience, I present various songs