End of Days

End of Days is a recurring theological concept in E. L. Doctorow's City of God, denoting the anticipated time when the soul is reunited with the resurrected body. It appears in the Evolutionary Judaism synagogue's discussions, in Pem's crisis of faith, and in his final wedding prayer, where it is set against the genocidal horrors of the twentieth century.

The Concept in the Evolutionary Judaism Synagogue

The concept of the End of Days is introduced during a Friday night service at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, where the discussion turns to the survival of the soul. An elderly man, whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs for the services and retrieves him at the end, raises the subject. Rabbi Sarah Blumenthal comes over to where he sits, takes his palsied hand in her two hands, and explains the Orthodox belief: that there is a soul which transcends death, and that there will be a time, "the end of days," when it will be reunited with the resurrected body. She looks into his eyes and smiles as he nods solemnly, then rises and returns to the front of the room. She reflects that "the word soul is a beautiful word, isn't it?" carrying so much, expressing "longing for union with God, for the final resolution of all our questioning, the arrival, the profound blessed peace of the radiant answer." When someone asks "Is it only a word?" the question hangs in the air, unresolved.

The Questioning of Faith and the Burden of Miracles

The End of Days is also central to Pem's crisis of faith, which he articulates in his remarks to the Bishop's examiners. He asks whether faith must be blind, and whether it comes of people's need to believe. He observes that "we are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity or any other claim of God's authority for that matter," and that "God's authority reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly submission." He questions whether God is a story, and whether one can believe "in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him." He confesses that "all these miracles we affirm are a burden to me," yet he still thinks of himself as a good Christian. This tension between the burden of affirmed miracles and the longing for the radiant answer of the End of Days defines his theological struggle.

The Wedding Prayer and the Denial of Resurrection

In his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest, Pem delivers a wedding prayer that directly confronts the concept of the End of Days. He addresses God in "one of our intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills," and speaks of the "monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity" responsible for the enslavement and horrible death of many tens of millions of human beings. He declares that "an exponential murder of souls has gone on, a torture and agony of demolishment, in wars, in genocides, with the masses of the violently dead in our century consigned by their very numbers to the lists of anonymous oblivion." Crucially, he states that "they are not resurrectable, they cannot and will not resurrect even in the imagination of your Christian faithful." This is a direct repudiation of the End of Days as traditionally conceived. He goes on to say that the genocidal cruelties of the age have brought God "into disrepute," and that even among those clinging to a love of God, there is "a risen suspicion, that You are part of the problem." The prayer thus transforms the End of Days from a promise of reunion into an impossibility, a casualty of the century's horrors.

The Midrash Jazz Quartet and the Standards as Commentary

The concept of the End of Days is also refracted through the novel's recurring "The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards" sections, which reinterpret popular songs as theological meditations. The titles of these standards—"Me and My Shadow," "Stardust," "Good Night Sweetheart," and "Dancing in the Dark"—evoke themes of longing, separation, and the search for resolution that parallel the theological discussions. The quartet's midrashic method treats secular lyrics as sacred texts, finding in them the same yearning for union and final resolution that Sarah Blumenthal describes. The juxtaposition of these standards with the novel's theological debates suggests that the longing for the End of Days is not confined to religious tradition but pervades even the most secular expressions of human feeling.

The End of Days as a Measure of the Century

The End of Days ultimately functions as a measure of the twentieth century's capacity for evil. The novel's engagement with the Holocaust, through the Kovno Ghetto narrative and the fate of figures like Srebnitsky, provides the historical ground against which the theological concept is tested. Pem's wedding prayer insists that the violently dead "cannot and will not resurrect," making the End of Days a standard by which the century's genocides are judged. The concept thus becomes not a source of comfort but a site of accusation, a way of naming what has been lost and what can never be restored. In this sense, the End of Days is less a promise of future reunion than a measure of present desolation, a theological idea that the novel holds up to the light of history and finds wanting.