L’IDEA MESSIANICA COME UNIONE DI ESILIO E UTOPIA IN GERSHOM SCHOLEM E WALTER BENJAMIN

Galut (exile) and redemption (utopia) in Gershom Scholems conception of the Lurian Cabbalà are not manifestations specific to Israel, but pertain rather to all being, and they also include the mystery of divinity. The Messiah becomes the entire people of Israel and is no longer an individual redeemer: the entire people corrects the original sin. The redemption of Israel as a secular, national fact remains, but expands and becomes the symbol of the redemption of the entire world, the “return of the universe to the state that should have come about when the Creator conceived Creation” (G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism, in Id., The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essais on Jewish Spirituality, Schocken, New York, with a new Foreword by Arthur Hertzberg, 19952 , first ed. 1971, p. 58). The Jews no longer see any contradiction between the rationalistic, secular aspect of redemption and its mystical, universalist aspect, because the first symbolizes the second. Anguish over exile was no less acute, but it came with the conviction that exile itself was rooted in Creation itself (God too shared in it!) and that the whole cosmos needed to be redeemed, an achievement requiring the work of man. It is my conviction that the vision of Walter Benjamin, so close to Scholem’s in centering on the idea of construction together with that of destruction, nevertheless stands apart in its rejection of an apocalyptic conception of redemption, in which there is no continuity between history and redemption. Benjamin’s conception is influenced by the secularized doctrine of Luria, which would fuel the progressive, rationalistic, and Enlightenment-oriented vision of the following centuries, up to the reform of Haskalah and beyond, even up to the messianic ideas of Marx himself. “The liberation of Israel,” Scholem wrote, “will proceed side by side with the liberation of the entire world.” (ivi, p. 48).