The Jewish Power Blog: Though He Tarry

The Talmud relates that Rabbi Joshua ben Levi one day ran into Elijah (which he is said to have done occasionally), and asked him when the messiah would come. Elijah told him to go ask the messiah himself, and explained where to find him. R. Joshua indeed found him and greeted him: “When will you come?” he asked; “Today,” was his answer. R. Joshua returned to Elijah and said, “He spoke falsely to me, stating that he would come today, but has not.”  Elijah answered him: “Actually, he was quoting Psalm 95:7: ‘Today – if you will listen to His voice.’”  (Bab. Talmud Sanhedrin 97)

Rabbi Joshua wants concrete information, assuming that a date has been determined.  The messiah says no, there is no date you can know, because the redemption is conditional on the nation’s behavior, and there is no way to predict when we will deserve redemption.  This story illustrates the debate, appearing on the same page, between Rabbi Eliezer, who insists that redemption depends on repentance, and Rabbi Joshua (a different Rabbi Joshua) who argues that God has a plan, and it doesn’t depend on us.

And then, in the twelfth century, the Rambam lists belief in the messianic redemption as #12 in his thirteen principles of faith:

“…to believe with certainty that he will come, but not to try to calculate the time of his coming and not to imagine that he has been delayed from an appointed time, as the rabbis taught: ‘Blasted be the bones of those who calculate the end.’ (Sanhedrin 97 again)”

And the Rambam’s principle became a liturgical poem which in time became an informal anthem of faith after the Holocaust:

I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah;

And even though he tarry, despite everything,

I will wait for him, every day, until he shall come.

Throughout the years of exile, that patience was challenging to maintain, and the prohibition of calculating the end was hard to obey, and Jews around the world, in every century, looked for signs and made calculations and even identified the messiah among them… or so they thought.  Most such attempts were local, so their failure was of limited impact; but some were on a larger scale: the best known is the movement of Sabbetai Zevi, whose messianic claim  and failure in the 1660s affected communities across Europe and the Middle East and led to communal divisions that lasted for decades.

Orthodox opposition to Zionism, from the beginning, was based on seeing the attempt to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel as a forbidden attempt to “force the end,” to bring about the redemption not through repenting and behaving righteously but by political, military, and economic action.  Rabbi Abraham Kook broke this barrier to Orthodox participation in Zionism by proposing that we are actually living, now, in the time of “the first sprouting of our redemption;” that is, we are entering messianic times, and Zionism can be seen as part of God’s plan for redemption.

Rabbi David Cohen (1887-1972), known as “the Nazir,” was Rabbi Kook’s closest disciple.  He understood his teacher’s messianism as meaning that the state a-borning would provide an opportunity to actually build the ideal society envisioned by the Torah, a light unto the nations, and thus usher in an age of universal redemption.  Rabbi Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook (1891-1982), propounded a different interpretation, which became ascendant after the Six-Day War.  He taught that we can read the signs in historical events and understand that the redemption is at hand; we are on the final descent of the roller-coaster – and everybody else had better get out of our way.  Biblical visions of conquest and expulsion are being realized; the time has come to eliminate the Canaanites and study up on the rules of Temple sacrifice.  Our role is to help push this process forward; our wars are holy wars and victory is assured; and doubters reprise the role of the ten faithless spies (Num. 13-14).

In a world living on the edge of a return to chaos – by warming, by A.I., by the breakdown of traditional identities – the belief that redemption is at hand can be comforting, even if the process may be unpleasant, even bloody.  The messianic religious Zionism currently exerting such a powerful influence in Israeli politics can be seen as just a local manifestation of a mindset found among millions of evangelical Christians, not to mention Hamas and its Muslim ilk: any minute now the unbearable present will be swept away, to make room for a glorious future – for those of us chosen to be redeemed.  We just know it; all the signs align.

Expressing his doubts about the randomness implicit in quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein famously wrote “God does not play dice with the universe.”  Indeed, not dice.  But I suggest that God does play poker – never revealing the divine cards, always maintaining a perfect poker face, leaving us forever in the dark as to what is to come, wholly responsible, ourselves, for playing our own hand.