| The contested trope of “hallowing daily life” sparks fresh readings of Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). This dissertation maintains that these preeminent thinkers sought, though failed, to prove that modern Jewish culture renders the ‘wholly other’ God as holiness within daily life here and now. Notably, the trope organizes and complicates these thinkers' writings and debates on individuality and community, ritual and language, metaphysics and ethics, epistemology and ontology, politics and theology. For both thinkers, modernization and secularization exacerbate a problem in Jewish thought: how to separate and relate God and the world. While God seems removed from ordinary affairs even for observant sectors of modern Jewry, still other, often more ‘profane’ thinkers allegedly find God in proximity, amidst the sensuous and the corporeal. Indeed the focus on “daily life,” so vital to Weimar German thought as (modest) consolation for intellectual crises and social dislocations, implies that conditional, limited realities affect, shape, realize or exhibit otherwise supreme ideals. Hence the “hallowing of daily life” suggests that the banal (trivial, taken-for-granted) is sublime (refined, exalted). But can and should reality properly guide or follow the ideal? Buber and Rosenzweig answer divergently, and tendentiously, that (a given, mutable) culture is either the fulcrum binding or the wedge dividing materiality and spirituality, finitude and infinity, temporality and eternity. I argue that the ambiguities of Jewry's involvement modernity, and of the self's engagement with others, enmesh these thinkers' positions in a tension. Cultural artifacts (history, performance, and text) equally align and fracture life's contents, erect and demolish life's boundaries. This evidences a double paradox: holiness is separate from and whole for, whereas everydayness is integral with and partial to life. I conclude that any attempt to portray concrete, mundane life as if it entails ultimate meaning and absolute value founders theologically even as it serves agendas politically. |
