[A]lthough Gershom Scholem felt no sympathy for Rosenzweig’s project, it was nonetheless him who spotted the crucial role of the Rosenzweigian concept of the Law as a defensive mechanism – a sort of stopping device designed to interrupt, arrest and attenuate the apocalyptic fire, to prevent both the subject and the world from instantaneous annihilation. To explain the functioning of this defence, Scholem introduced two useful metaphors. One, the traditional metaphor of lightning, symbolizes the vertiginous moment of revelation as an antagonistic flash of the transcendent in the immanent: an infectious fire that, when unstopped, burns down the soul to cinders (which is precisely what happens in Lévinas for whom the traumatism of revelation necessarily leads to the sacrificial death in the act of substitution). The second metaphor, of his own making, is that of a ‘lightning rod’: the device that both uses and tames the divine energy, by directing it towards the ground of the creaturely condition, and thus makes it separate, ‘no longer in heaven’ (lo beshamaiim). Between revelation itself and the religious ethics of the Law, which, in fact, is nothing else but the other name of the ‘lightning rod’, there appears a moment of non-identity – a very Derridean différance indeed, in terms both of ‘difference’ and ‘deferrment’: Here, in a mode of thought deeply concerned for order, it (the anarchic element) underwent metamorphosis. The power of redemption seems to be built into the clockwork of life lived in the light of revelation, though more as restlessness than as potential destructiveness. For a thinker of Rosenzweig’s rank could never remain oblivious to the truth that redemption possesses not only a liberating but also a destructive force – a truth which only too many Jewish theologians are loath to consider and which a whole literature takes pains to avoid. Rosenzweig sought at least to neutralize it in a higher order of truth. If it be true that the lightning of redemption directs the universe of Judaism, then in Rosenzweig’s work the life of the Jew must be seen as the lightning rod whose task it is to render harmless its destructive power.

Scholem himself, personally more prone to apocalyptic solutions, feels somewhat ambiguous toward Rosenzweig’s wary and considerate ways; he praises Rosenzweig for noticing at all the apocalyptic breeze that ‘provides some fresh air in the house of Judaism’, yet criticizes him for his general intention to appease ‘the anarchic element.’ This assessment, as I have tried to demonstrate here, is neither completely true nor fair: the lightning rod of rituals and halachic orders does not serve to render the destructive power of apocalypse-revelation ‘harmless,’ but to make it operative and effective; it is not to manifest itself in futile ‘restlessness,’ but in concrete mitzvot, aiming at the ‘singularization’ of all possible ‘neighbours’ – eventually, everything that exists. 

[…] Revelation is no longer the strong light that destroys but an energy harnessed to the redemptive works, in which the subject passes this energy from one neighbouring thing to another, thus aiming at the redemptive/singularizing transformation of the whole world. This careful channelling, which does not allow the catastrophic repetition of the ‘breaking of the vessels’, is absolutely necessary if the hand of the world-clock is to move from the stage of passive revelation to the stage of active redemption: ‘The love for God is to express itself in love for one’s neighbour’. The vessel of the Law keeps a steady flame of an ‘effective’ neighbourly love, constantly fuelled by the apocalyptic lightning. 

[…]

I have tried to facilitate this problematic access and show that, by inventing the defensive mechanism of the ‘lightning rod’, Rosenzweig makes the Law function within the antinomian logic of redemption – as a mediator or an ‘endurable portion’ of the original, violent ‘flame of love’, given with revelation. The Law emerges here as a delayed destruction of the world, where it is not beings but being as such, not creaturely things but their immanentist ‘ontologism’, that becomes the proper target of the transforming work. And it is precisely this delay and partial neutralization that allows the apocalyptic energy, contained within the Law, to be more precise in the act of targeting its enemy; instead of exploding the whole of creaturely reality, deemed to be fallen in its entirety and unworthy of any ‘spiritual investment’, it provides a more subtle missile which destroys only those aspects of ‘beingness’ or‘ontologism’ that directly oppose the redemptive progress. Rosenzweig, therefore, manages to achieve a more wary, truly man-made form of messianism that does not pretend to imitate or follow God directly, but adds a characteristically human, covenantal contribution to the process of redemption.

Positing itself between two lordly powers – creation and destruction – it offers modest ‘works of the Slave’ that do what nonetheless only humans can do: meticulously mend, fix and repair, and thus constantly lift the world from the lowest realms of creaturely condition. Such an approach complicates the simplistic opposition of ‘retainer’ and ‘apocalypticist’ that has been bequeathed to us by Taubes. The Rosenzweigian ‘lightning rod’ works neither as a simple Aufhalter, who treats apocalypse as his adversary – nor as a ‘hastener’, pushing towards the eschatological state of exception. 

The Rosenzweigian ‘lightning rod’ works neither as a simple Aufhalter, who treats apocalypse as his adversary – nor as a ‘hastener’, pushing towards the eschatological state of exception. The Law itself, when seen through this metaphor, becomes a form of messianic energy (a structure that brings down the lightning to the ground) – and more than that: it becomes the only form this originally anarchic and anomic energy can acquire to become effective in the world of creation and manifest itself in concrete works. And as a form – i.e., never a direct negation – of the apocalyptic fire, the Law is also in its own dialectical way antinomian, that is, antithetical to the rules of creaturely life which it slowly transforms, patiently anticipating the advent of the messianic ‘otherwise than being’. In his Jewish clinamen from Hegel’s dialectics, Rosenzweig offers thus one of the more convincing solutions to the problem which could not be resolved either by Taubes or Lévinas: the problem of operative antinomianism.

Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity