Anon asked Staff ago Dear Daat Emet,
Before this Tu B’Shvat (5767) I had the chance to read a current events newsletter from Chabad, which included the following:
These days represent the final tossings of the ship of the Jewish nation, which is approaching the shores of redemption. The reality in which we live was precisely foreseen by the prophets and the sages of the Talmud. They described, in great detail, our era, an era of confusion and embarrassment, in which the vision of redemption would be realized. According to the signs, we are standing very close to the turning point. We are now experiencing the birth pangs of the approaching redemption. We have entered the final pangs, and as we have heard countless times from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the redemption is literally at our doorstep.
It is important to strengthen faith in the coming of the messiah (a belief which is one of the foundations of the Jewish faith) and to encourage a longing for redemption. We should learn about its essence, increase proper behavior, etc. in anticipation, and pray for its swift and pain-free arrival.
Is there indeed a natural and necessary connection between the ethical dilemma in the state today and the supposedly upcoming arrival of the messiah? Or is this a tendentious and artificial attempt to create a false connection to reap solely propagandistic benefit?
With blessings of reason,
Yichiav ben Aryoyah
jsadmin Staff answered 19 years ago
Dear Yichiav,
Messianism fills several emotional needs amongst the religious and gives their leaders authority and power. A person who awaits the messiah is like an infant who has never grown up and needs his parents and an imaginary teddy bear who can participate in his fantasies and crazes. These two needs are met by the leaders — the rabbis become their absolute parents and the teddy bear is provided in the form of the “messiah.” Since the destruction of the Second Temple the Jewish nation has lived between the past and the future, lacking a present, clinging to its past (“Renew our days as of yore”) and longing for the future (may the messiah come now, he’ll be knocking on the door any second now). This sad reality causes people who live the past and envision the future with great strength (as the religious do) to ignore the present. Therefore it is no wonder that the Jewish religion, over the ages, has neglected real life — ignored education, professional training to improve society, research and a love of nature, the desire to establish their own state. Thus the Jews survived as a group divorced from natural experience, and experienced the terrible reality of “In the morning they said ‘if only it were evening,’ and in the evening ‘if only it were morning’.” The present is always something bad, seen as a decree from heaven, and only the heavens can change that.
To illustrate this sad reality — that in each generation they rise against us to destroy us, and in each generation they await redemption — I will bring some of the messianic expectations from the destruction of the Second Temple to our times:
1. The generation after the destruction believed in practical messianism, real and actual. Rabbi Akiva (who was one of the leaders of the generation following the destruction) promoted false hope of an upcoming redemption and encouraged Bar Kockba’s messianism. It was Rabbi Akiva who, when he saw Bar Kockba, said, “This is the messianic king” (Palestinian Talmud, Taanit chapter 4). The messianic revolt against the might of imperial Rome caused the total destruction of the Jewish community in the land of Israel as a spiritual center.
2. Rabbi Chanina expected that the redemption would arrive in 470 CE, and therefore told his congregation of believers in Babylon that none should buy land in Babylon after that date, even at a bargain price, because in any case they would have to go to the land of Israel (Avodah Zarah 9b).
3. Rabbi Chanan bar Tachlifa supposed that the messiah would arrive in 531 CE. He met a man who held a letter in which it was written “In the year 4291 from Creation the world will be orphaned. The days following will be partly spent in the war of the great sea monsters, and some in the war of Gog and Magog, and the remaining [period] will be the Messianic era” (Sanhedrin 97b).
4. Rav Acha the son of Raba said the messiah would come in the year 1531. (He thought that the man’s letter read 5291 years from Creation). (Sanhedrin 87b).
5. Nachmanides (Genesis 2:3), who lived in Spain (d. 1270) and was led to continue the messianic line due to his experiences with a terrible reality, claimed that the messiah would come in the year 1357 CE.
6. Rabbi Shlomo Molcho (1500-1532) — a scion of a converso family from Portugal — and David HaReuveni believed that the year of redemption would be 1531 (based on a calculation from the Talmud, Sanhedrin; see points 3-4).
7. Rabbi Mordechai Datto (a student of the mystic Moshe Cordovero) was born in 1525 and excited the Jews about the coming of the messiah and the redemption, which would come in 1575. (Yeshaya Tishbi, Chekrei Kabbalah U’Shluchoteha pg. 139.)
8. The case of Shabbtai Tzvi, which breathed great hopes into the contemporary Jewish community, claiming that the messiah would arrive in 1667. After his death there were still those who believed he would reappear and who waited another 40 years before they were disappointed. (This is very reminiscent of the Chabad movement, which is waiting for the reappearance of their [dead] rabbi as the messiah.)
9. Rabbi Yitzchak Chaim HaCohen wrote a book, “Et Kaitz,” which was printed in 1710. He calculates the end of time and the arrival of the redemption as being 1740. What is amusing is that he bothers to explain why the calculations of his predecessors were erroneous (after all, they’d already been proven wrong). [Z.S. Shazar, Urei Dorot, pg. 127]
10. According to the Chatam Sofer in his responsa (part 6, section 61) the messiah will come in 1790. (It is interesting that he died in 1839, after having been proven wrong. It seems he himself treated his own words as “allegory.”)
Examples of messianism in times of trouble are as numerous as mushrooms.
Chabad, whose faith is based on the rabbi as messiah, continues to hold onto the “coattails of the messiah” to keep their believers under a single roof (the messiah). How would they be different from the other Chassidic courts and the rest of the Orthodox public if they gave up their powerful longing for the messiah?
But this is the way of the religious, whose fearful souls mislead them. They are prepared to take cover in the shade of imagination sooner than to take responsibility for their own lives. Go see how ridiculous the people of Chabad are: while “the Rebbe” was still alive they rejoiced in a quote from Maimonides which claimed that the messiah would be flesh and blood and did not have to give signs, that he was to be considered the messiah in any case. Now the “messiah who is to be considered the messiah” is no longer among the living, so the consideration is done with. This is what Maimonides wrote (upon which the Lubavitcher rely): “Since he [who was considered to be the messiah] was killed, it became known to them that he was not [the messiah]” (Maimonides, Laws of Kings 11:3).
This is one of the most fascinating and amazing behavior patterns: man invents some fiction and vision of the future. The future arrives and pops his messianic balloon, but he remains steadfast in his vision. This is the way of man; the harder he works, the more he invests and wearies himself, the more connected he is to his object, even if that object is naught but a misled fantasy. Chabad invests their energy, money, faith, and organizational ability…in the coming of the messiah, so even the death of the Rebbe did not manage to dull their expectation.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet