Haaretz
Israel’s national missions minister isn’t alone in thinking that we are living in a ‘miraculous time’.
Increasing numbers within right-wing circles have lately joined Orit Strock in identifying the war in the Gaza Strip with the War of Gog and Magog, and the ongoing disaster of October 7 with the birth pangs of the Messiah and the advent of redemption. Some, like Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, from the Bnei David yeshiva in the Eli settlement in the West Bank, draw on the words of the founder of religious Zionism, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who said, ‘When there is a great war in the world, the power of the Messiah awakens.’ War has a purifying power, Rabbi Kook maintains, because it arouses the divine in humanity and helps overcome the selfish instinct. ‘The greater the destruction and the more that systems fall apart… the greater the anticipation of the Messiah’s footsteps.’
Social media is flooded with clips of rabbis calculating the end times and intoxicated with salvation as they declare that we are poised at the onset of the flowering of our redemption.
Rabbi Naftali Nissim, a YouTube star in-the-making, waxed poetic: ‘There has never been a beautiful period like this… What happened on Simhat Torah [October 7] is a prelude to redemption.’ Rabbi Yaakov Maor explained that ‘Rafah [in Gaza] refers to ‘288 sparks’ [the numerological value of the word ‘RFH,’ and a concept in kabbalistic literature]. The redemption is near!’ And Rabbi Eliezer Berland, head of the Shuvu Banim group in the Breslav Hasidic sect, promised: ‘This is the last war before the Messiah. After this war, Messiah Son of David will come.’
But such talk is not confined only to the yeshivas and the kollels (yeshivas for married men), it’s even voiced on commercial television. Dana Varon, a presenter and commentator on the right-wing Channel 14, stated, ‘It’s written in the Mishna: The Galilee will be destroyed and the Golan shall be emptied, and the people of the border shall wander from city to city, that’s the Mishna coming to realization within us literally, I’m happy about this.’
Her colleague Yinon Magal went even farther in a radio broadcast. ‘The feeling is that we are approaching great days. We are in a redemptive process, and prophecies are happening.’ And on another occasion: ‘Only the Messiah [can] supplant Bibi.’
Magal is a demagogue and the embodiment of narcissism, but his remarks reflect a prevailing sentiment among broad circles of the settler and Hardali (nationalist ultra-Orthodox) right, and one that has also been adopted by broad segments of the ruling party.
The sentiment itself is not new. Since the advent of religious Zionism, it has greased the movement’s ideological wheels and has been the driving force of the settlement project and the vision of Greater Israel.
What is new is the popularity these ideas enjoy in the present-day political and public discourse, and how they have traveled from the margins of right-wing politics into the Likud center. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is captive by choice of power-hungry Kahanists and other extremists, is dragging Israel into the grip of an apocalyptic ecstasy that is deepening the existing crisis and creating new conditions for realizing the messianic fantasy of conquering all the territories of the Land of Israel, replacing Israeli democracy with the kingdom of the House of David and building the Third Temple.
This accounts for the enthusiastic spirit that has gripped the messianic camp since October 7, as well as the repeated provocations on the part of individuals and groups in an attempt to ignite a conflagration in the West Bank and pull the Arabs in Israel into the blaze.
The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of ‘pangs of the Messiah,’ characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments.
This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythical light and as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality. According to this approach, the birth of Israel and the Zionist enterprise, particularly since the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, are manifestations of an emerging redemptive reality. This reading of events is based in part on tractate Berakhot in the Talmud, according to which between this world and the time of the Messiah there is only ‘servitude to the [foreign] kingdoms.’
Indeed, the power of this redemptive mysticism derives from the fact that it does not talk about far-reaching cosmic transformations in the order of creation, as predicted by the Prophets. It refers rather to messianic fulfillment within the realm of historical, concrete time, and as such it is tightly linked to human deeds. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the dean of Ateret Yerushalayim Yeshiva and the former rabbi of the settlement of Beit El, put it succinctly: ‘We assert the absolute certainty of the appearance of our redemption now. There is no barrier here secret and hidden.’
The same applies to the present war; it needs to be seen within the context of its biblical dimension and perceived through a messianic prism.
In this sense, the history of our generation is not much different from the chronicles of the Exodus from Egypt and the conquests of Joshua. At that time, too, the events occurred by natural means and the military victories opened the age of redemption.
The Gaza war therefore, from this perspective, is bringing closer the Jewish people’s collective redemption. Light and dark are intertwined here, destruction and revival are interlocked. Accordingly, the greater the dimensions of the destruction and the devastation, so too will the spiritual transformation brought by the campaign in its wake be augmented. The war is the purgatory that will steel the spirit of the Jewish people, which is already at the stage of incipient redemption. Anyone seeking a foundation for this idea will find it in the thought of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (the son of Abraham Isaac Kook): ‘What is the reason for the War of Gog and Magog? Following the establishment of Israel’s sovereignty, war can possess only one purpose: the purification, refining and galvanizing of Knesset Israel [the Jewish people].’
What is the conclusion? The more that suffering increases, the more good there will be; and ‘the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out’ (Exodus 2:12). They will multiply and burst forth, for like the measure of justice, so too is the measure of mercy. And as Dana Varon noted in replying to her critics, ‘It’s a good sign. Because if all the bad and the wicked materialize, that is a sign that the good is also guaranteed and is arriving.’
Sanctified victims
The designation of catastrophe as a condition for salvation is not new in human history. History demonstrates how apocalyptic interpretations can be created from the experience of an existential crisis, which brings to a head the everlasting tension between deficiency and the striving for fulfillment – a tension that characterizes the human condition in general. Since the start of recorded history, periods that were marked by political crises, plagues, social anxieties and collective despair have been accompanied by the rise of apocalyptic interpretations that have vested history with a new and sanctified significance and have charged the events of the hour with redemptive meaning.
As the British historian Norman Cohn showed, marking a low point as a formative moment of spiritual renaissance that leads to redemption is part of a recurring pattern that appears in all apocalyptic interpretations of events throughout Western history. Cosmic disorder is a precursory and necessary stage for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
Herein lies the danger in striving for a politics of ‘total solutions,’ whether on the right or on the left. That form of politics entrenches a false picture of reality and paves the way for demagogues and populist false messiahs who are adept at exploiting social distress and anxiety by appealing to the urge for redemption and the human need for absoluteness.
Not only does political messianism cast on its leaders a sanctity of religious mission that is insusceptible to doubt, it also requires the marking of enemies (or political rivals) as foes that are delaying redemption, in the spirit of the Latin phrase, ‘Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor’ (No devil, no redeemer).
In this sense, the more powerful the messianic idea is, the greater the violence and the destruction it sows when the demand for absoluteness shatters on the rocks of reality; the height of the sublimity toward which it thrusts is matched only by the depth of the abyss into which it is liable to slide. For the more that reality declines to acquiesce to the absolutist demands of the advocates of political messianism, the greater the strength they wield to shape it in the image of their utopian visions; and the more untenable this becomes, the more they attribute their failure to an internal enemy and to the power of abstract conspiracies.
Between the absurd and the meaningful
It’s only natural for people to seek to inform their lives with meaning that transcends their temporary, ephemeral existence. It’s also natural that in periods of mourning and distress they should wish to console themselves and imbue their sacrifice and loss with cosmic meaning. Crisis and catastrophe can indeed serve as an opportunity for renewal, and there is also nothing intrinsically wrong with the longing for redemption or for the absolute that is innate in the human psyche. The danger lies in the attempt to transform redemption into a political program, and the ambition to bring the heavenly kingdom into being in this world. The demand for absolute justice always ends in injustice. Moreover, a cause that relies on unjust means can never be a just cause.
In a meeting with intellectuals and writers in October 1949, David Ben-Gurion said, ‘The Messiah has not yet come, and I do not long for the Messiah to come. The moment the Messiah comes, he will cease to be the Messiah. When you find the Messiah’s address in the phone book, he is no longer the Messiah. The greatness of the Messiah is that his address is unknown and it is impossible to get to him and we don’t know what kind of car he drives and whether he drives a car at all, or rides a donkey or flies on eagles’ wings. But the Messiah is needed – so that he will not come, because the days of the Messiah are more important than the Messiah himself, and because the Jewish people are living in the days of the Messiah and expect the days of the Messiah, and that is one of the cardinal reasons for the existence of the Jewish people.’
Those remarks can be taken at face value, but it’s desirable to understand them as a message that encapsulates universal human requirements: People need belief, vision and a guiding ideal, but as is the way with ideals, it’s certain that this too will never materialize but will remain on the utopian horizon toward which one must strive, but to which one will never arrive. Humanity, thus, is fated to exist in the constant tension between want and fulfillment, between the absurdity and futility of life and our need for meaning, purpose and significance. That tension can be a millstone around our necks and enhance the attraction of political messianism in its diverse forms.
Accordingly, it’s a mistake to assume that the allure of messianism can be fought only with rational tools. Myth cannot be suppressed by reason, and the yearning for the absolute cannot be moderated by means of learned, logical arguments.
The formulators of state-oriented Zionism, headed by Ben-Gurion, understood this well. They sought to harness the religious impulse to nation-building and to the formation of a new Hebrew (Jewish) identity that draws on the messianic sources but does not attach itself to their religious content and instead secularizes it. In this way the messianic tension served Ben-Gurion to forge an ideal vision of a Jewish state that would be a moral paragon and a light unto the nations.
Is a return to the fold of Ben-Gurion-style Zionism the answer? Probably not. One thing, however, is certain: besides the urgent need to separate religion and state, and to anchor Israel’s secular-liberal character in a constitution, a deep transformation is also necessary in secular culture, in education, in artistic creation and in the intellectual-spiritual life. Because in order to do battle against the messianic myth, a counter-myth is needed, one that does not lie within the realms of religion and meta-earthly redemption, but in the imperfect world of humankind. It alone is capable of providing a substitute for the temptations of the diverse types of political messianism and of providing human beings with a horizon free of all supernatural, theistic, utopian or redemptive qualities.
A Messiah is needed – so that he will not come.