Abstract
Redemption is an umbrella construct for a variety of eschatological ideas in classical Jewish thought, incorporating: a messiah, descended from the House of David; the ingathering of the Jewish exiles in the Land of Israel; the reestablishment of the priestly cult in a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem; an era of peace and universal knowledge of the God of Israel; retribution against the enemies of Israel; and the resurrection of the dead. Although all these ideas did not necessarily coexist simultaneously in the thought of individual Jewish philosophers throughout the ages, each notion appears in various contexts in the traditional Jewish prayerbook.\r Modernity challenged each of these ideas in a variety of ways, and the responses to those challenges were expressed on the pages of Reform prayerbooks, first in Europe and then in America. While the development of Reform liturgy has been the subject of many studies, the theological underpinnings that have shaped contemporary prayerbooks have not been well analyzed. This thesis explores the treatment of three of those themes—the personal messiah, the ingathering of exiles, and the resurrection of the dead—as they appeared in Reform prayerbooks, culminating in Mishkan T’filah, the official liturgy for the American Reform Jewish community in the first part of the twenty-first century. The rationalist confidence of the nineteenth century gave way to doubt, a limited rediscovery of Jewish particularism, and a desire to welcome a plurality of theologies by the second half of the twentieth century. In Mishkan T’filah, we observe a modest recovery of some of these classical, non-rational modes of Jewish eschatology, filtered through the prism of all that came before it.