 The messianic idea of world peace, this great vision of the prophets, hints at the way religious thought informs the very core of modernity’s aspirations without rendering that core a mere theological affair. The messianic vision of a united and peaceful humanity situated in a pure futurity at the end of time may seem unreasonable and ungrounded, but that is Susman’s point: “The messianic hope is hope without a foundation” (“Die Messianische Idee als Friedensidee”, GF 59). Susman suggests that, rather than being exclusively reason-based, the Messianic idea of peace presents a genuinely universal form of thinking because it takes its cue from a paradoxical structure that envisions the universal as reflecting its own particularity in a way that mirrors the paradox of human existence on Earth (GF 60): “the overpowering law of God and the ultimate depths of the human heart are nothing that is separated” (“Judentum als Weltreligion”, GF 121 [RPE 87]). While resonating with a Kierkegaardian sense of paradox, Susman is here signaling closer affiliation with the Jewish strand of dialogical thinking of Buber and Rosenzweig. When universal thinking launches off from this starting point, the impossible can become its liberating force. Working in a different register, Susman conveys this thought of the impossible in the following way: