Waiting for the Messiah

...A homeland was necessary, so that Jews could reinvigorate their spiritual energies in a place where they would, at last, be the majority culture...

...The deepest undercurrent is the conviction that the Zionist state is the transforming event of Jewish history and that it is, at the very least, a preamble to the end of days, in this world...

...This assurance of a new heaven on earth enticed many Jews, because, as Marx himself had insisted in 1843 in an early essay "On the Jewish Question," anti-Semitism would disappear if its economic roots in class struggle were cut...

...he seemed to have imagined some version of Vienna or Paris, without anti-Semites to trouble the Jews...

...There was almost nothing in Herzl's original vision of restoring ancient Jewish glories in the Holy Land, for he was willing to consider a Jewish state in empty land in Argentina, if that were more easily available...

...The state of Israel did not arise according to Herzl's blueprint...

...I do not belong to the messianic believers...

...The Temple is about to be restored, and the Holy Land, in Jewish hands, will be the permanent spiritual center for all humanity...

...he was devising a new tool through which the Jewish people could maintain its morale, while continuing to make again the myriad of pragmatic accommodations through which the Jews had survived the centuries of their exile...

...I continue to ask the nagging question: if he did not appear at Auschwitz, why is he more likely to come to earth to save the West Bank for Jewish sovereignty...

...thus the situation of the Jewish people would be "normalized...

...One could explain away its continued virulence in benighted Tsarist Russia, but not the renewed strength of this disease in the 1890s in centers of advanced culture such as Vienna, where Wilhelm Man was elected mayor on an anti-Jewish platform...

...The specific woe of the Jews, their exile from the land that God gave them, will come to an end...

...Their hopes for the Zionist state have ranged from casting it as a place of refuge to hoping that it would be a model community for all the world, but all these thinkers, and many more besides, have agreed on a fundamental premise: to concentrate part of the Jewish people into a nation of its own is necessary, for Jews need some national power in their own hands, but achieving the Zionist state does not represent the ultimate redemption of the Jews...

...By creating a state, and making such choice possible, the "Jewish problem," the anomaly of Jewish existence everywhere as an embattled minority, would be brought to an end, once and for all...

...Many responded to this vision by being willing to assimilate, to abandon their Jewish separateness so that they might fit into a new society...

...In the name of this certainty, not one inch of the soil of the land of Israel can be surrendered, even if political reasons are advanced, for such action would betray God's will...

...He asserted that heaven on earth for Jews could be achieved, and was indeed inevitable, through political Zionism...

...A generation later, the socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon regarded Jews as the archcapitalists who needed to be destroyed...

...By the end of the nineteenth century many people, and especially Jews, found it harder to believe that the day of a just and peaceful society was near...

...This faith is the true utopian vision of the Jews...

...It cannot win a permanent victory unless the war of Gog and Magog soon commences, and the Messiah, 12: 8 May 1992 Commonweal with sword, subdues the Arabs...

...The Jewish state thinks of itself not just as a refuge for Jews in trouble, or as a place in which Judaism can define itself in a home of its own, but as the climactic achievement of Jewish history...

...They have worked for peace within the Jewish community...

...The rabbis have never abandoned the dream of the Messiah but, through the centuries, they have kept insisting the Jews dare not ever bet their lives, in war or politics, on the hope that he would appear, now, to save them...

...The moderates point out that ultranationalism has embittered the Arabs, but cannot cow them into submission...

...The unique power of Theodor Herzl's pamphlet, The Jewish State (1896), was not in any appeal to Jewish national emotions, for he himself was so totally estranged from the inherited practices of Jews that he did not even circumcise his children...

...Herzl's vision of the culture that would prevail in the future Jewish state was nebulous...

...The Jewish people cannot survive among the nations in an attitude of defiance...

...Even in his lifetime the Zionist movement refused to follow his detachment from Jewish culture...

...these believers have also broken the tissue of pragmatic accommodations among the factions within the Jewish community...

...The ultra-Orthodox regard other Jews as a disturbing periphery...

...Both secular and religious messianists have been self-centered...

...they are simply to be swept away...

...The "armed zealots" who revolted against Rome in the year 66 were certain that the "end of days" was near...

...they could not be transformed even by a new socialist society...

...As I have noted elsewhere, the certainty of progress was challenged among Jews by the persistence of anti-Semitism...

...What echoes within me is an attitude that was once defined in the Talmud: if you are planting a sapling and hear that the Messiah is coming, finish the planting before you leave to look for him...

...Some elements within the Orthodox community insist that the Messiah is near at hand...

...Herzl offered them something more than an imposing presence and a gift for staging diplomatic theater...

...Their senses of hurt, if such there be, are irrelevant to those who regard themselves as the true bearers of Judaism...

...it cuts across the secular ideologies that many Jews have adopted in recent times...

...Most of the rabbis of that day were opposed to revolt...

...Human life will henceforth be lived in bliss in the sight of the Lord...

...pretending to know the date of the coming of the Messiah was a dangerous, and even heretical, exercise...

...The ultranationalists, whether secular or religious, look at the world of the non-Jews as a source of help to be used, or of obstruction to be removed...

...This Orthodox religious messianism has gone to war not only over "foreign policy...

...But even within Zionism itself, a countertradition has existed...

...On the contrary, the state of Israel is profoundly important because it has added contemporary energy to the Jewishness of all Jews, wherever they might continue to live...

...But Herzl's Zionist vision has remained dominant, to this day...

...We are commanded to cultivate decency in a world that only God can redeem, in his own time...

...The moderates have opposed such self-centeredness in all its forms...

...At this bleak moment Theodor Herzl reinvented Zionism as utopia, as a messianic movement...

...More painful than these theories was the continuing reality of anti-Semitism...

...Nonetheless, this Jewish "goy" almost instantly became the leader of the Zionists, most of whom were deeply rooted in Jewish culture and history...

...Even if the non-Jewish majorities were to sort out their problems and move into a golden dawn, some feared that the Jews were likely to be left behind...

...The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century offered the dream of a heaven on earth, if only men and women would free themselves of the chains of the existing society...

...Several central figures of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, had regarded the Jews as very nearly hopeless, as incapable of "regeneration...

...They did not believe that anyone could know the will of God...

...A fundamental, and continuing, tension exists in Jewish history between those who pant for the Messiah and plunge into danger to "force him to appear," and those who wait and act in this world with tact and pragmatism...

...During the French Revolution, some Jacobin radicals wanted to exclude Jews from the new order of equality...

...In this attitude Ahad Ha'am was followed by Martin Buber and Judah Leon Magnes and, more recently, by Gershom Scholem and Isaiah Leibovits...

...The arrangements that make it possible for these disparate groups to exist together as Jews are not to be fostered, repaired, or renegotiated...

...The greatest danger of all has been to imagine, in critical times, that messianic days are at hand, and that men can therefore act as if they know what time it is on God's clock...

...The leaders of Israel, almost without exception, from right to left, have no doubt that Israel's purposes must predominate in setting the agenda in the Jewish world, and not simply because the state is embattled...

...The problems of the Jewish people would remain, for no resolution of the tensions between Jews and the world could be found through progress, or socialism, or nationalism...

...Ahad Ha'am, the central figure of cultural Zionism, did not believe that the Messiah, in either secular or religious garb, was around the corner...

...This tension exists not only within the religious tradition...

...The moderates remain convinced that ethnocentrism and self-righteousness are self-defeating...

...They are sure that, though ultraOrthodoxy has recently been creating turmoil within the Jewish community, it cannot win unless the Messiah really appears on the side of these believers...

...Karl Marx translated the dream of the Enlightenment into economic terms: a society of equal individuals could be created, but only in a world order that had abolished class distinctions...

...All the hatreds that came from economic inequities would be gone...

...The business of the Jewish people as a whole, and especially of that part that has settled in the state, is to be conducted prudently, and without grandiose pretensions...

...I am even less persuaded that the Messiah of religious belief will soon appear...

...And I continue to remember a more pointed remark by one of the rabbis in the Talmud: if the Messiah will appear only amidst suffering and injustice, let him come but I will not receive him...

...The Zionist movement continues to insist, in its official platform, that Jews who dwell outside the state of Israel are in a "state of sin," because they are obstructing the normalization of the Jewish people...

...In the modern era, the most contemporary minds among Jews in the nineteenth century were eager believers in the inevitability of progress...

...All wrongs will be righted...

...they have insisted on justice and equality in the behavior of Jews toward Arabs...

...The very idea that Jews have become a plural people which harbors many versions of belief, or disbelief, has been dismissed as concession to heresy...

...He suggested a solution to the "Jewish problem": Jews should choose between living in a state of their own or total assimilation everywhere else...

...Messianic believers and pragmatists have also been quarreling about religion...

...Through the centuries this dream has provided hope, but it has also been the source of disaster...

...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 11 and in Paris, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was judged to be a traitor on fabricated evidence because he was a Jew...

...I do not believe that the Jews will soon become a "normal people" by being gathered into Zion...

...Ahad Ha' am's Zionism was thus a holding operation...

...Marx was certain that a classless society was inevitable, for the dialectic of history would produce it...