Israel in exile is in statu nascendi,[1] a situation which is parallel to their wanderings in the wilderness. The Exile is the wilderness of the nations, where there is no sense of being rooted to the land or any adherence to a state. [. . .] Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, is convinced that putting down roots in the state and in the earth was misguided. Therefore, he completely uproots the tree of the nation from the old earthly kingdom and — in a monstrous inversion of the laws of natural growth — replants it with roots pointing upward. [. . .]
But it is incorrect to rank the Jewish nation in Exile as an exception. It is true that the Jews in Exile are a nation without land, but — and this is the decisive factor — they are surrounded by nations in a similar position. Exile is not just the fate of the Jews but of the whole Aramaic world. [. . .] The Aramaic nations were unable to put down earthly roots, but had to anchor themselves spiritually. The Jewish synagogue is only one of the national churches in the Aramaic region which is a home for the nation. The church-based nations of the Aramaic world are united in their faith. God is no longer revered as the Baal of a particular place; rather, everywhere that believers assemble in “synagogues” is home. In the Aramaic region, the criterion for belonging to a particular homeland is one of faith. [. . .] Apocalypticism is a phenomenon of the people and becomes in many of its features the common spiritual heritage of the whole Aramaic Orient. Apocalyptic literature is written to awaken mind and spirit, regardless of divisions. While the canonical scriptures of individual church nations are national, the apocalyptic writings are literally international. They encapsulate everything which makes feelings run high
The above passage is from Occidental Eschatology.[2] That is the title of the English translation of Abendländische Eschatologie, the doctoral dissertation of Jacob Taubes (1923-1987). Taubes was born in Vienna to a Jewish rabbinical family, and was himself ordained a Jewish rabbi in 1943, when he was only twenty. Three years later, in 1946, he earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the full manuscript of his dissertation, a greatly shortened version of which was published in the original German version in 1947. The citation above comes from the English translation of that shortened text, which translation was published more than sixty years after the German original.
Taubes and his Jewish family themselves left Austria in 1937, in effect exiling themselves to Zurich in neighboring Switzerland, when Jacob’s father was appointed chief rabbi there. That was the year before the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Germany, and the Taubes’ move allowed them to survive the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.
Jacob himself was appointed a rabbi in 1943, four years before the original publication of his doctoral dissertation. A year after that publication, he moved to the United States to take up a position offered him at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He eventually also taught in Jerusalem, then back in the U.S. at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He died in Berlin, Germany, in 1987, at 64 years of age.
The story of his life is itself a story of being uprooted, but also sending his own roots upward, above earth and into heaven, to speak as the passage above says, and as Ezekiel also already said long ago.
Jacob Tauber
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What Taubes observes and also attributes to Ezekiel is that the members of the Jewish nation throughout their history — and, to give two other similar examples, the indigenous nations of North and South America sent into exile by the Europeans who invaded those continents, as well as all enslaved members of the diverse African nations and their descendants — have wandered together across countless lands, and precisely in such wandering have been heralds of a genuinely universal international community of all communities, as it were. Sent into the wilderness to wander their way in exile, such nations are already now the coming of that very “eschatological” community of us all: all us humans together, each for each and all for all.
That apocalyptic — which word in its own etymological roots just means “revelatory” — moment when the time of the clock itself ends and an altogether different time begins has already happened. Indeed, it has already happened, is still happening now, and will happen again, time after time forever more. It has happened, is now happening, and will happen again to us all, which demonstrates that, whether we know it ourselves yet or not, we human beings are all exiles.
By being uprooted and living one day at a time as uprooted and in our uprootedness, all of us exiles are wandering together in the wilderness. Let us all pray to be given eyes to see that in our universally shared exile we are all rooting ourselves no longer by sending our roots to entangle with one another below ground, but rather by sending those roots up above us, into heaven, to entangle us all with one another on earth, under heaven, and before the divine (to borrow a formulation from Heidegger).
What a deal for a bunch of “us”!
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As attentive readers of this blog will already have heard in attentively reading today’s post from its very beginning, the title of this post is ambiguous. Such attentive readers will already know very well how I like to make many of my titles ambiguous in just that way.
On the one hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean pulling up and out our very roots. On the other hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean rooting ourselves upward, ethereally, into heaven.
Those same attentive readers will understand, as well, why I followed up my preceding post entitled “Resurrection Now!” with this one, entitled “Uprooting Ourselves.” They will also understand why I have entitled my next post to come “Erotic Friendship.” Indeed, they will already understand how — and where — all three posts entwine their roots together.
[1] In statu nascendi means “in the state of being born.”
[2] Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated by David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 24-26.