Apocalypse Now: Our First Messianic War
Following the targeted killing of Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, the government has decided we are winning the war. But the more we are “winning”, the worse things get. Since our great victory over Nasrallah, ballistic missile attacks from Yemen and Iran are an almost daily event. Hizballah shoots hundreds of missiles every day at the North from Lebanon and Syria. Hamas continues its mortar fire. Attack drones come in from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Terror attacks from West Bank Palestinians are in great frequency. And our budget deficit, economic downturn, political and economic isolation are cataclysmic. The livable territory of Israel gets smaller every day. Yet, the government claims we are winning!
Now that we are winning, the government can take the effort to bring back our hostages off of the official agenda and turn instead to bringing back Hasidim from their sexual escapades in Uman. Now that we are winning the fight to return the displaced citizens of the North and South, the government need not give them an actual place to stay. Now that we are winning, government representatives can attack the courts as “leftists” who would set up a National Commission of Inquiry that would display failures in the face of our victories. Now that we are winning, we can encourage the youth to attack elderly protesters. Now that we are winning, we can remove the mourning from our national ceremonies and instead focus on celebration. The causes for celebration are greatest, indeed, for those who see current events as the lead-up to the coming of the Messiah.
Our current situation resonates eerily well with a passage from the final Mishnah of Sotah:
Eliezer the Great said: … In the footsteps of the Messiah, chutzpa (sic) will increase; the cost of living will skyrocket; the vine will give its fruit and wine at great expense; rulership will turn into sectarianism and will suffer no rebuke; the seat of the sages will turn to prostitution; the Galilee will be destroyed and the border region will be uninhabitable; the people of the borderlands will turn from town to town, but no one will show mercy; the wisdom of books will be considered contemptible; those who fear sin will be despised and the truth will be absent; the youth will humiliate the elders; elders will rise before the youth. (my translation)
This Mishnah depicts an apocalyptic, catastrophic messianic period. Such depictions of the days of the Messiah are commonplace in the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Jewish literature, but a far cry from the idealistic, utopian views of the messianic period we can find in many of the same sources. Some reconcile the two kinds of messianism by seeing the apocalypse as a kind of precursor to a later utopianism. According to this way of thinking, the worse things are, the closer we are to the end and so to Utopian Messianism. The closer the Messiah is to arriving, the worse things get; until one day they mystically become perfect.
In the midst of a list of catastrophic events hailed by the Messiah, the Talmudic sage Ulla is said to have remarked, “Let [the Messiah] come in such a way that I not see him” (B.T. Sanhedrin 98a). Moses Maimonides took a different approach, by taking the apocalyptic messianism out of the Mishneh Torah’s final book. In his view, the Messiah is a political champion, whose aim is to bring peace and security so that knowledge may grow.
Some scholars see Judaism as series of false messiahs, who engender cataclysmic expectations that lead repeatedly to disaster. Think of Bar Kohkba, Solomon Molcho, and Sabbetai Zvi (but see also this list). While such messiahs certainly have existed and the expectations of end of days apocalypses are certainly present, most of Jewish history is actually characterized by the rejection of these false messiahs and the move away from apocalyptic messianism. What so many Israelis now see as the beginning of the messianic apocalypse will appear in the not too distant future as foolhardiness. It is not too late, though, to change our ways and put a political sane realism first.