The Apocalyptic Visions of Jacob Taubes and Meir Kahane

Liberals tend to assume that the course of human events follows a trajectory of incremental progress. Human character and institutions are imperfect, but over time they get better, as experience shows us our flaws. The process allows us to judge our predecessors reliably even as we recognize that we ourselves shall be judged—and found wanting. The arc of history is long, as Barack Obama famously paraphrased Martin Luther King, who was himself adapting a remark by the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker. But it bends ultimately toward justice.

Jews should know better. Rather than consistent improvement, however halting, the Jewish experience is laden with reversal and catastrophe, with long periods of apparent stability disrupted by unforeseen threats—which are in turn sometimes redeemed by unanticipated benefits. The liberal conception of history allows for the consistent but impersonal guidance of general providence. The Jewish conception of history seems to reflect the presence of a transcendent yet unpredictable God—a God who can disrupt, meting out havoc and blessings alike.

Meir Kahane and Jacob Taubes were theorists, and, in a sense, prophets of that latter, unsettling vision. Cast by fate into a placid midcentury America, each tried to recapture what he regarded as the fundamental tension between biblical religion and the moral presuppositions of liberalism. As that order threatened to unravel in the late 1960s and 1970s, Kahane and Taubes demanded confrontation with a radical alternative: the disruptive God of the Hebrew Bible. In doing so, they revealed permanent tensions in liberalism—and also dangers lurking in its modern alternatives.