Prophets Must Arise: A New Mantle in the work of Hermann Cohen

By Rabbi-Cantor Michael McCloskey

The Myth of the Broken Mantle: Questioning the End of Prophecy

There is a pervasive idea within Judaism that the era of the prophets and prophecy in general ended with the destruction of the second temple and that the last prophets were those who “took up their mantles” during the early part of the Second Commonwealth: Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.  In fact, the Talmudic sages assert in the Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Bava Batra that:

מִיּוֹם שֶׁחָרַב בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ, נִיטְּלָה נְבוּאָה מִן הַנְּבִיאִים וְנִיתְּנָה לַשּׁוֹטִים וְלַתִּינוֹקוֹת.

From the day that the [second] temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given over to fools and school-children.

No religion, people, culture (and Judaism entails all of these) is monolithic, and throughout history, there have been figures and personalities who have challenged this notion, including Moses Maimonides, who intimates in his philosophical work of genius, Guide for the Perplexed, that prophecy is a natural phenomenon.  Though he speaks with great subtlety, a close reader can discern that Maimonides asserts that the philosophers are prophets. Their intellectual and moral training and their highly developed imaginative faculty parallel that of the Israelite seers.  Not only that, but he intimates that he himself has the intellectual and moral perfection requisite for the mantle of prophecy.  

Approximately seven-hundred years later, another ethical rationalist philosopher, Hermann Cohen, paved a pathway for a revival of prophecy.  Cohen, himself an admirer of the Maimonidean path, and the leader of the Neo-kantian school of philosophy in Marburg, Germany, studied the Guide for the Perplexed with his father, Cantor Gerson Cohen, as a youth and teenager before enrolling in the rabbinical seminary in Breslau, headed by Zecharias Frankel, the founder of Positive-Historical Judaism (which became what we know as Conservative-Masorti Judaism). 

In 1861, Cohen decided to leave the seminary for a career as a professor and thought leader in the university wherein he became an devotee, interpreter, interlocutor of the work of Immanuel Kant, whose essential idea is that human reason shapes our experience of the world and sets the rules for moral behavior.  Cohen’s appointment to full professor in 1876 paved the way for the Neo-Kantian school in Marburg, His students in Marburg included, among others, noted Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, noted philosopher Ernst Cassirer (known for his work on symbolic forms), the famous Spanish philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset, Hans Georg-Gadamer, the founder of modern philosophical hermeneutics,  and Russian novelist Boris Pasternak. The work of Cohen and the Neo-kantians of Marburg also influenced political philosopher and historian of philosophy Leo Strauss and Martin Buber.

While at Marburg, Cohen was involved in the defense of Judaism as the dream of German unification, which happened in 1871, actually led to rounding up of refugees, socialists, dissidents, immigrants, state-sponsored anti-Catholic action sponsored by Chancellor Bismarck, and the rise of Anti-semitism.  These apologetics took the form of writings and a very public trial. However, they also galvanized him to write some of his most important Jewish philosophical works, synthesizing the best thinking in the German tradition of Goethe and Schiller with that of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings. 

Vis a vis a revival of modern prophetism, Hermann Cohen brings an important and highly relevant voice to bear, less known and celebrated than Abraham Joshua Heschel, and yet equally important for the ethically courageous and humanely compassionate.  In fact, in a fellowship under the auspices of the New Jewish Academy and sponsored by the Goethe Institut, Boston, Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, and CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, I, along with eleven other rabbis, graduate students, and professors, explored this very question.

For five days, we, along with Dr. Avi Bernstein-Nahar, leader of the New Jewish Academy and formerly of Brandeis University and Professor Robert Schine, a scholar and translator of Cohen’s Neo-Kantian and Jewish works, engaged with Cohen’s last work Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism in conversation with poetry, song, other philosophers, doing a close reading of the text in English and sometimes in the original German as well.  In addition to our grappling with the text and its contextual meaning and meaningfulness (its relevance to the challenges of our time), we shared meals together and attended two public lectures, one by founder Bernstein-Nahar on the origins of the English translation of Religion of Reason and the connection both to the the Marburg Neo-Kantian school and St. John’s University and one called “American Jews at a Moral Impasse: What German Judaism Can Teach Us” with Professor Micah Gottlieb of NYU with Robert Schine as a respondent.  As the culmination of our learning, we were asked to give a talk.  Avi, Robert, and the board of the Academy, composed of a cadre of professors and scholars, adjudicated, and awarded the most compelling talk a prize.

I was honored with this prize, and will share the case I made for a revival of the prophetic voice in our time, based upon Cohen’s magnum opus.  My talk was called Aufgabe: The Task, the Vocation.   

 The Vocation: “Would that All God’s People Were Prophets” [Numbers 11:29]

Attunement to a prophetic frequency begins, for Cohen, with creation, but not creation as we know or imagine it. According to Cohen,........

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