The Trouble with Christian Time: Thinking in Jewish

The Maharal of Prague, a sixteenth-century sage, wrote about a particular kind of temporality associated with Creation and the Exodus. This chapter discusses that temporality, a version of Jewish time, and contrasts it to the progressivism often associated with modernity that can be understood as a version of Christian supersessionism. This kind of Jewish temporality is considered in light of more modern sages, including Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. The chapter suggests that expanding an understanding of this Jewish time beyond the two “events” that are “beyond time” helps make sense of human experience in the world. Departing from Simon Coleman’s work on Christian ways of “being in history,” the chapter moves beyond ethnographic presentism to consider “human ‘being’ in time.”