Thursday, January 29, 2009

Pondering Yemot Ha-Mashiah

Here's a question from Zahava Rothschild, an an attempt at one way of addressing it:

Nobody really knows what will be in the times of Mashiach, so people have all kinds of dreams of what life will be like when he comes. But if the Rambam is right, and the world stays as it is with just a general knowledge that Gd exists, then isn't that giving false hope to all those people that have incredible dreams of techiat hameitim and flying on eagles wings and gan eden life and everyone being healthy, etc.? It doesn't seem fair to give the Jews false hope after all that they've experienced!

This question is based on the very elemental problem that, at least as I understand our mesorah, it doesn't teach anything definitive - either descriptive, prescriptive, or proscriptive - about the future. Yes, we read the beautiful nevu'ot of Yishayahu etc., and we daven for the geulah, tehiat ha-meitim, shivat tzion, the re-building of the Beit Ha-Miikdash, and the re-institution of korbanot. But the nevu'ot and midrashim about the future, for all their glory, seem rather nebulous, and perhaps allegorical (for example, according to some interpretations of "al kanfei nesharim") -- and so they inspire hope, but they leave open the question of whether things in yemot ha-mashiah will be literally or figuratively according to their contents. Similarly, in our davening, we include bakashot based on the hopes that Tanakh and Hazal have given us, but since the sources are rather vague, so too are our bakashot open to individual interpretation. Finally, I do think it's relevant that, in a religion whose very foundation is a legal system that dictates our behavior in myriad ways, we do not have any halakhot about the undefined future - this, to my mind, underscores the unclear nature of it.

So, in our own lives, what we have to go on is hope, which is a very personal thing, and which is based not only on sources but also on one's theological/emotional bent. I imagine that for Rambam the rationalist, it made the most "sense", based on the sources available, to envision yemot ha-mashiah in natural - rather than supernatrual - terms, whereas the available sources seem to have led the parshanim with more emotive or Kabbalistic tendencies to the conclusion that there would, in fact, be other-worldly elements to yemot ha-mashiah. The reason all of this does not give me, personally, false hope, is twofold: (1) Since we cannot *know* about the future, my hopes, based on one or another interpretation, are valuable in and of themselves, and so they cannot be "false"; they give me inspiration, they remind me to be a better Jew, and there is nothing false about that; (2) Since, according to all understandings, yemot ha-mashiah will B"H be a wonderful time for the world and for Jews, if it turns out that my particular understanding of what it would look like was wrong, I don't think I will have lost anything by imagining it in my own version; it will, G-d willing, be wonderful regardless of the specifics. I know this answer is not satisfying on the level of what we can "know" - but I think that is precisely the point about this future period: we cannot know, and so we dream.

One final note: until very recently in historical terms, no one could have imagined the precise way in which Medinat Yisrael would be established and shivat Tzion, in its incipient form, would begin. People davened for it, probabaly had dreams about it, but surely no one predicted it to be exactly as it ended up occuring. And yet, despite the internal and external struggles in the State, it is a glorious thing, truly a nes galui be-yameinu. Did it happen through a man on a white horse, or literally on the wings of eagles? No, it happened through international negotiations, diplomacy, wars, sweat, and tears - but as religious Zionists, we believe that all that comprises our part, with Hashem's help, in bringing the geulah - and that, to my mind, is no less amazing than anything obviously supernatural that could have happened.

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