{"id":75348,"date":"2020-05-30T21:52:30","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T18:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=75348"},"modified":"2020-05-31T08:13:44","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T05:13:44","slug":"ezekiel-meet-walter-benjamin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/ezekiel-meet-walter-benjamin\/","title":{"rendered":"Ezekiel, Meet Walter Benjamin"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"75348","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":64460,"related_cahpter":"491","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"They share a cataclysmic view of historical redemption\r\n\r\n","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This chapter continues the apocalyptic vision of the war of Gog and Magog which precedes the redemption of Israel. The prophet is not sparing in his description of this awful conflict, writing that God \u201cwill assign to Gog a burial site there in Israel\u2014the Valley of the Travelers, east of the Sea. It shall block the path of travelers, for there Gog and all his multitude will be buried. It shall be called the Valley of Gog\u2019s Multitude. The House of Israel shall spend seven months burying them, in order to cleanse the land\u201d (33:11-12). Such is the scale of the destruction to be wrought in the war &#8211;\u00a0 due to the abundance of corpses, which produce the most serious kind of ritual impurity, dedicated burial teams will work non-stop until all can be interred. The scene calls to mind nothing so much as the aftermath of a nuclear accident, during which the land itself becomes imbued with the presence of death \u2014 redemption as catastrophe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Such a chilling scene in Ezekiel\u2019s vision of redemption is hardly congenial to our finer feelings. When imagining the perfected world of the messianic age, we are more easily drawn to the peaceful and bucolic images also offered by the prophets, as in Isaiah\u2019s statement that the wolf will lie down with the lamb that the lion will eat straw. This tendency is even more pronounced in those currents of culture which have officially forsworn the idea of a divine redemption but are still animated by the idea.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The western philosophical and political discourse on progress has very often been but a secularized theology of redemption, and these crypto-theologies have themselves tended to emphasize sweetness and light. Thus the liberalism common to much 19th-century politics and religion tended to imagine a long process of gradual improvement leading to the new Jerusalem. Even in the Marxist theory of progress, which admits that the perfected society might be ushered in by violence, the process itself was for the most part understood to be a necessary one in which one stage unfolds inexorably into the next; fundamentally the journey to redemption is one marked by continuity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The philosopher Walter Benjamin offered a critique of this view of history as a necessary series of events progressing towards a perfected world. History, he insisted, was a catastrophe, and redemption cannot be understood in terms of comfort and light; we experience redemption in the form of a traumatic rupture, much closer to Ezekiel\u2019s vision of Gog and Magog than to the secular visions of redemption through progress. He rejected the secular theories which, through viewing the journey towards redemption as a necessary and mechanical one turned \u201cthe future\u2026 into homogeneous, empty time.\u201d Benjamin asserted that the alternative view, according to which redemption comes through rupture and even catastrophe, awakens us to the particularity of each moment, and makes \u201cevery second of time [into] the strait gate through which Messiah might enter\u201d (Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, end).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Image: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920 \/ 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