ABOUT THIS LECTURE: Martin Buber ended a 1909 lecture he gave in Prague with a parable suggesting that each of us is responsible for bringing the Messiah. Some years later, Franz Kafka – who may have been in Buber’s audience – wrote a famous story that echoes Buber’s parable in striking ways. A little later, Walter Benjamin wrote what looks like a riff on it. We’ll look at all three texts, plus the Talmudic passage on which Buber was drawing, and consider whether they give us a modern, existentialist way of making sense of Messianism.
LEARNING MATERIALS: bit.ly/2VCdqEm
