 The challenge of the survivors of the Shoah is thus not only never to forget but to create new life in the face of this past. The messianic is not a speculative end of history but the vantage point here and now that opens history up at any given point if we are prepared to reject the conceptual blinkers of theological and teleological thinking. This is what gives the messianic its empowering force. The argument here has a remarkable affinity with ideas articulated in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, a text which, though written in 1939/1940, reached its first readers initially hectographed in 1942 in a limited edition, and did not appear until 1950 in print in German.