Redemption, says W. when I return from the bar. That's what the new atheists refuse to grasp.
The peculiarity of the Jewish religion (and by this he means the religion of Cohen and Rosenzweig), W. says, is that it is immediately and directly ethical and political. The idea of God is not first of all metaphysical, from which an ethics or a politics can be deduced. Its only meaning is ethical and political, from which the shortcomings of metaphysics can be deduced.
What the new atheists entirely miss, W. says, is that religion is not a metaphysical affair. It's about ethics!, says W. Politics!
The highest expression of Judaism lies in the Messianic Idea, where social justice comes to the world as a whole. The idea of the Messiah in Judaism is always a social and political vision of the world, as opposed to the personal and individual viewpoint of the idea of the Messiah in Christianity, W. says.
It is the hope that the past and the present might be redeemed in the future, that world history will not be merely the repetition of the same violence and injustice against the weak and oppressed, W. says. It's the hope that the present, and the conditions that hold sway over the present, will not be endlessly repeated.
The future might irrupt at any moment; the present might be broken from the past of which it appears to be an indefinite continuation: that's what redemption means, says W. That's what religion means, he says.
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