  For Scholem, the one case where tradition may not have been able to recover is modernity. For him modernity, and the secular, undermines the central pillar of tradition, its belief in the divine nature of Scripture. Once this goes, he posits, in some way the dialectic is broken in that mysticism needs tradition as its foil in order to survive. The shattered ideational foundation of Jewish identity in modernity can only be replaced with something that is heretical, messianic, and secular: that is, Zionism. One scholar refers to this as Scholem's “creative anarchy.” In his famous last comments on the last page of Major Trends Scholem acknowledges that modernity destroyed the conditions for mysticism as we knew it historically but he acknowledges it could indeed rise in a different guise in the future. This all seems to embody Scholem's own identification as a “religious anarchist.” He may mean numerous things by this enigmatic assertion. He may mean that he believes, as mentioned above, that Judaism has no essence but is only a series of connected yet not always coherent textual traditions and sets of ideas. He may also mean that he believes controlled anarchy as the demise of any heteronomous authority sets the proper conditions for the discovery of suppressed esoteric trends in a society. As he believes these trends are crucial to understanding any culture, he supports religious anarchy to the extent that it enables “the professor” of Jewish mysticism to do his (or her) work. In this second case, anarchy appears synonymous with secularity.