IN 1836 Kalischer could not have imagined that it would take almost forty years to buy a small plot of land in Palestine and achieve just a fraction of the goal he had outlined to Amschel Mayer Rothschild. How much easier it would have been had the messiah appeared without warning from heaven to blow the great shofar and gather the scattered of Israel! It was just this magical thinking, however, that he regarded as a distortion of God's teachings. According to him, the prophets, sages, Torah scholars, and philosophers knew better and presented a far more rational view of the progress of history. Jews were required to take responsibility for their past failings and for their future by taking the first steps towards the restoration of the land, the economy, the system of worship, and the kingdom that they were meant to have. The task was made easier because God had indicated his readiness to facilitate the process.

Kalischer came to his vision because of a convergence of factors. Immersed in rabbinic culture and imbued with the conviction that reason and faith could be reconciled, he articulated a religious ideology that legitimated activism, granted people a large measure of control over their fate, and favoured pragmatic tactics. It was both modern and pious, rooted in medieval Jewish philosophy and amenable to the optimism of the nineteenth century, and responsive to the needs of the moment. His facility with the Hebrew language enabled him to blend disparate and contradictory fragments of sacred literature into a rich and meaningful vision of present, past, and future. Living in the Posen region and West Prussia during a peaceful era under conservative rule, he could reasonably conclude that the persistence of religious social norms, Jewish civic emancipation, the rise of Jews to positions of power, and the burgeoning interest of European rulers in establishing an outpost in the Middle East were all evidence of God's unseen hand in advancing the Jews towards a better age.

The distinctly non-rational and non-modern belief in the power of sacrificial worship, however, held a intense allure for Kalischer. At the centre of his rationalistic, modern ideology was a markedly old-fashioned ritual that was a throwback to primitive religiosity.