Act and Comprehend

By Ofir Haivry

Both Judaism and Zionism were predicated on the idea that human fulfillment can only come of correct action. Today’s confusion is the result of the exaltation of principle over deed.

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In this pronouncement, at first blush appearing to go only a step further than Hillel, and seeming so simple, Christianity deviates sharply from Judaism—since the identification of God with love turns love into the supreme, all-encompassing value, and one has then only to accept God’s love in order to be redeemed. In such a theory, there is no more real importance to truth, justice or morality, and certainly not to ritual, since whether or not one cleaves to these, the believing Christian and his soul will in the end be saved by God’s grace.

These consequences of taking the extra step beyond Hillel were inevitable, and they illustrate the danger to Judaism that lies in responding to the wish to identify oneself with a single, generalizing principle. For the identification of God with one supreme value such as “love” necessarily involves the nullification of all other values and principles. Even if the Galilean and his followers opined that they were not abrogating Judaism or its customs in their gospel but rather strengthening them (this is why in the beginning they were called “messianic Jews” at first), the truth is that from the moment they decided to forego the path, the means, what they preached was no longer Judaism but something completely different.¹⁹

This freeing of faith from the moorings of ritual, the magic of the pure generalization, surfaced again and again in the generations that followed, among those who wished to give one fundamental, direct and liberating explanation to the destiny of mankind. It is interesting to note how conspicuously so many of those who broke away from the Jewish community nevertheless retained that burning desire for the orchard—individuals such as Marx, Lombroso, Freud and Levi-Strauss. This ardent longing for the one, complete and terminal solution to all things is also known as “messianism,” the belief in “the messiah.” This idea has its origins in the ancient Hebrew concept of a mashiah (“annointed one”), but unfortunately, even among many of the Jewish people today this original concept has been displaced by that of “the Messiah.”

Mashiah is a biblical political-military-religious leader who, even if the source of his inspiration is divine, is entirely flesh and blood, and all of whose actions, powers, failures and triumphs are carried out within the course of history. The kings of Israel, such as Saul and David, were described by the Bible as mashiah; but so too was Cyrus, the non-Jewish king of Persia. Similarly, after the biblical period, the leader of the Jewish revolt of 132-135 C.E., Shimon Bar-Kosiba, known as “Bar-Kochva,” was referred to by many as mashiah. Yet almost at the same time, the idea of “the Messiah” began to take root, with the hoped-for leader now being an apocalyptic figure whose powers were beyond those of men, and whose coming would herald the end of days and the end of history.

This apocalyptic “Messiah” was, and is, an entirely un-Jewish idea, which has taken root within Judaism and constantly threatens to undermine it from within. The un-Jewishness of the figure of “the Messiah” springs from his superhuman traits—he is expected to be a kind of demigod whose very existence absolutely contradicts the unity and uniqueness of God—as well as from his being a figure who is expected, at one blow, to solve all problems, alter the laws of nature and abrogate all the importance of form in favor of the age of content. In other words, “the Messiah” is a shortcut, whereas Judaism is perfect faithfulness to the whole road, as it is.

Several of the sages of Israel—such as Maimonides, who very clearly speaks of a political-military-religious leader who acts entirely within history—tried to retain the original concept of a mashiah, but most traditional commentators preferred to stave off the danger of messianism by postponing the anticipated arrival of “the Messiah” to the end of days—i.e., to the farthest possible future. But despite these efforts, from time to time there would appear some who would decide that the end of days had arrived. Such was the case with Jesus’ followers (known as “messianic,” in Greek, christianos), who for many years awaited his imminent return and the end of days. Thus it was, too, in the case of Shabtai Tzvi, a Seventeenth-Century false messiah, whose followers believed that he would lead them on a cloud to the land of redemption. And such is the case in our own day, when the leadership of Israel is convinced and convinces others that the laws of nature have been corrected, that today the world has changed and the time has come for “the wolf to dwell with the lamb” because “this is the time for the great reckoning, in order to extract the Jewish people from its past, to give it a new future.”²⁰

To recognize the difference between mashiah and “the Messiah,” it suffices to recall the unmistakable tendency of messianic movements towards a sweeping cancellation of previously accepted identities, prohibitions and rules of behavior, on the grounds that the world has been transformed down to its very foundations, obviating the need for outworn modes of behavior and identities. Among the Christians, the laws of the Tora were abrogated because there was a “New Covenant.” Among the Sabbatians, everything from fast days to the prohibition against incest were nullified because the laws of nature had supposedly changed. And in our own time, messianism manifests itself in the belief that “the world has changed, and the historical process of change requires us to modify outworn perceptions and concepts in accordance with the new reality”; that “there will come a day when man’s personal consciousness, his personal identity, will be based on this new reality”; that the day is not far when Jewish identity will be abandoned in favor of “an ultranational personal identity”—in the words of Israel’s recent prime minister, Shimon Peres.²¹

How different from all these is a humble candidate for mashiah such as “Bar-Kochva,” Shimon Bar-Kosiba, who, around Sukkot of 134 C.E., while under Roman siege in Beitar and on the verge of annihilation, sends a letter to his men stationed near the Dead Sea. This letter, which was found in the caves of Judea, speaks entirely of his devotion to the Jewish laws of action, even on the edge of the abyss:

Shimon [Bar-Kochva] to Yehuda Bar-Menashe of Kiryat Arbiya; I have sent you two donkeys, in order for you to send with them two men to Yehonatan Ben-Ba’aya and to Masbala, in order for them to load and send to the camp palm fronds and citrons [ritual items required for the Sukkot holiday]. And send others to bring you myrtles and willows, and put them together and send them to the camp because the army are numerous. Peace be with you.²²

VIII. Jews and Hebrews

The danger posed to Judaism by generalization became much more serious in exile, where the distance from the land of Israel tempted (and tempts) some to try to shorten the road to the orchard. Against this desire for a shortcut—which found its extreme expression in the various messianic awakenings, but which remains a perpetual threat to the Jewish consciousness in the form of other less-pronounced, universalist, cosmopolitan tendencies—the sages of Israel toiled at all times to emphasize that “there is no Tora like that of the land of Israel.”²³

In other words, the centrality of the land of Israel in Judaism is such that the Tora has no real existence without the connection to the land. In order to maintain this connection even after the destruction of the Temple and the exile from the land, Jewish ritual was built around what one can view as a “virtual” land of Israel, in which the synagogues are a miniature reproduction of the Temple and face Jerusalem; in which holidays and festivals are determined by the calendar of the land of Israel; and in which there is a constant reemphasis that existence in the exile is merely temporary and of peripheral importance, and is to be countenanced only until the return to Zion. In this, Judaism left geography and history for the metageographical and metachronological plane which is found in the talmudic teaching. But amid this devotion to keeping the flame of Judaism alive, a different danger, which has manifested itself more than once, lay hidden: The danger that the “virtual” land of Israel would, for more than a few Jews, become the real object, so that they would cling to it even when there was an opportunity to return to the real Zion.

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