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(soothing music)
- We are very pleased, along
with the Graduate Council,
to present Leon Wieseltier,
this year's speaker
in the lecture series.
Leon Wieseltier, as you'll soon
hear, was born in Brooklyn.
He attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush
and later Columbia University
and Oxford and Harvard
and is currently a member of the
editorial board of the
Jewish Review of Books.
Leon is an acclaimed
writer, critic, historian,
longstanding literary
editor of the New Republic.
And since beginning the
beginning of his tenure there
in 1983, he's published
many influential articles
in the New Republic and
of course elsewhere.
And for many years,
he's written the weekly
and very widely read Washington Diarist
and is author of several
critically acclaimed volumes,
including Nuclear War, Nuclear
Peace, Against Identity,
and of course his deeply
learned, deeply moving
and deeply lyrical work Kaddish,
a meditation on the Jewish
prayer for the dead.
Leon Wieseltier has also
published a number of translations
of the works of Yehuda Amichai
and other modern Hebrew
poets in the New Republic,
the New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Most recently he edited and
introduced a volume of Lionel
Trilling's works titled The
Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.
Most importantly, I think,
Leon also appeared in The Sopranos.
(audience laughs)
It doesn't require any
further explication.
You may see why he was cast
in one of these roles shortly.
All of his works are imbued
with a deep intelligence
and rapier like wit, so much
so that in the New York Times
feature article about Leon,
Sam Tanenhaus described him
as part Maimonides, part Oscar Wilde.
Now I'm not sure exactly
how accurate that is,
but it is a wonderful way to be spoken of.
This afternoon's talk is
entitled A Passion for Waiting,
Messianism, History, and the Jews.
After Amichai passed away in 2000, Leon,
together with Amichai's widow, Chana,
went through a treasure
trove of the poet's unpublished writings.
In a fragment that Leon translated,
Amichai wrote the following,
and here is Leon's translation.
"As in the story of the
Jew who keeps the Sabbath
"and finds a gold coin on the Sabbath
"and does not wish to
touch it and stands over it
"until the three stars that
announce the end of the
"Sabbath have appeared in the sky.
"I stand and I stand.
"Oh, the pain in my legs.
"I stand and I stand,
but where are my stars."
Maybe the stars represent
the awaited Messiah.
I'm not sure.
At any rate, this is how the
great modern Hebrew poets
so poignantly describe the
Jewish passion for waiting.
Now it's time for us
to hear Leon Wieseltier
on that very subject.
So please join me in welcoming
to UC Berkeley Leon Wieseltier.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, I'm very
honored to be giving the
Foerster Lecture on Human Immortality,
and I hope my words lift
you to a higher realm.
It is one of the commonplaces
about Judaism, historical
and spiritual, that it was responsible
for the idea of the messiah.
That messianism was Judaism's innovation
or Judaism's gift, a gift
that backfired on the giver
when it was acted upon by
those Jews who precisely
because they acted upon it
became known as Christians.
But Jewish messianism, as many historians
and theologians have observed,
was in significant ways
divided against itself.
In a people so given
over to messianic theory,
the scarcity of messianic
practice is striking.
From the very beginning, there appeared
to be a contradiction between
the intensity of the Jewish
traditions interest in
the idea of the messiah
and the coolness of the
Jewish tradition toward
the prospect of the Messiah.
This contradiction might be
formulated a little more sharply.
For the Jews, the history
of messianism has been
the history of false messianism.
It is a fact of singular
importance that the people
who invented the messiah has
never accepted a messiah.
So the Jewish gift, if a
gift it was, was not merely
the idea of the messiah.
It was the idea of the
messiah and the simultaneous
refusal to accept one, the
reluctance to be redeemed.
This eschatological
skepticism, as I will argue,
was not merely a matter of
historical circumstance.
Indeed, Jewish circumstance
might seem to have mandated
the opposite desire, the hunger
for a swift historical release.
But the culture of a
minority, any minority,
or of an oppressed people,
any oppressed people,
cannot be adequately explained solely
by reference to its minoritarian status
or its experience of oppression.
Even in adversity, people may
inwardly determine themselves.
So I do not believe that the
messianic ideas of the Jews
can be reduced to the
circumstances of the Jews.
Instead, I wish to show
that the hesitation
about the messiah was internal
to the messianic idea itself.
In the Jewish tradition,
the longing for redemption
is regularly accompanied by a
suspicion of such a longing.
More often than not, the
longing for redemption is
to be mastered rather than fulfilled.
As the Israeli poet, Yehuda
Amichai once wrote in a poem
in the 1970s, (speaking foreign language).
"I seek new beginnings
and find only changes."
For a believer of course, all
this is not really a problem.
A believer would explain
that the distinction
between the idea of the
Messiah and the reality of the
Messiah is not really
a contradiction at all.
The redeemers whom the Jews
have rejected were turned
away simply because they
were not the true redeemers,
since they did not meet the
strict and clear requirements
that the rabbis devised
for the evaluation of any
such eschatological claim.
The intellectual consistency of this
rabbinical stubbornness was very powerful.
Consider this passage from an
epistle by Jacob Sasportas,
the 17th century jurist
and polemicist who was
the great adversary of Sabbatai Zevi,
and one of the most unfairly maligned
figures in Jewish history.
In 1666, Sasportas wrote from Hamburg
to the rabbis of Amsterdam, quote.
Sometimes I will read
a little in the Hebrew.
Otherwise I will give you
my translations of it.
He wrote, quote, "Have you,
where have you seen it written
"in any book that we are
obliged to believe that anybody
"who says I am the messiah,
really is the messiah,
"prior to his having behaved
in the manner that Maimonides,
"in his code of law, specified
that messiahs will behave.
"Everything depends on the
propriety of his actions.
"Otherwise anybody who wants
the name of the messiah
"can have it, if his
piety has been proven.
"And there will be as many messiahs
"as there are pious people."
Close quote.
It was because he believed
in the Messiah that Sasportas
did not believe in Sabbatai Zevi.
This is a perfectly representative
expression of the traditional standpoint.
Opposition to a messiah is
not opposition to the Messiah.
When a savior presents
himself who will meet the
requirements of saviorhood,
well then the Jews will
straightforwardly agree to be saved.
But an unbeliever or, more
pertinently, a historian
cannot be satisfied by such an explanation
for the Jewish lack of
enthusiasm for redemption.
He may seek a different kind
of explanation, a political
explanation for example,
according to which the power
of a messianic figure
posed to great a threat
to the power of the
rabbinical establishment.
In such a view, the contradiction
between Jewish theory
and Jewish practice in
the case of messianism
was the inevitable result
of the refusal of rabbinical
elites to entertain a
challenge to their authority.
No religious establishment
welcomes a charismatic figure
or renewal of revelation.
It is certainly true
that messianic activism
in the medieval and early
modern Jewish world was often
an expression of social
and theological defiance.
And it is also true that there
existed a strong rabbinical
interest in the
discreditation of messiahs.
But a purely social or political
explanation trivializes
the perplexity that
provoked the eschatological
skepticism of the rabbis.
The contradiction between messianic theory
and messianic practice
was indeed an attempt
to avert a collision
between two types of authority in Judaism.
But I would argue that the
aversion of that collision
was more than the interest of an elite.
It was the interest of an
entire spiritual temperament.
And the short name for that
temperament is (speaking a
foreign language) or the law.
The reluctance to be redeemed
is a startling thing.
The Jews after all were in exile.
And in many times and in many places,
exile meant also persecution.
The wretched conditions in
which many Jewish communities
found themselves should have prepared them
to welcome a great reversal
of their misfortune.
And yet the opposite was the case.
The reluctance to be redeemed
was nothing less than
an indifference to their own happiness
or a refusal to confer
upon their happiness
centrality in their life.
And the same, surprisingly
enough, may be said
about the messianic expectancy.
One of the most striking
facts about Jewish messianism
is that there is no correlation
between eschatological
activity and the
experience of persecution.
As Gershon Cohen long ago
observed, quote, "There is no
"discernible connection between oppression
"and messianic movements.
"Jewish messianic movements were not
"the religion of the oppressed.
"The Crusades, the Almohad
invasion, the expulsions
"from England and France,
the blood libels, the Pastora
"onslaughts, and the
persecutions at the time of the
"Black Death, indeed even
the expulsion from Spain
"and the (speaking foreign
language) massacres did not
"generate a single messianic movement.
"Conversely, all the
messianic efforts made in Iraq
"and Persia, and above all
in Spain and North Africa
"were undertaken in areas
"and in periods of relative stability."
Now, subsequent scholarship
has somewhat complicated
Cohen's picture of the
distribution of messianic energy
across the various Jewish cultures.
But even if there were
some messianic stirrings
in the French and Germanic
lands, they were exceedingly rare
and disproportionately fewer than the
miseries of Ashkenazic
experience might have warranted.
Cohen's main point still stands.
Jewish messianism cannot
be properly understood
simply as a response
to harsh circumstances.
It was not chiefly a social
or political or economic phenomenon.
It was a religious phenomenon.
The expression of a spiritual temperament
within Judaism that continues
to clash to this day
with a different and more
normative temperament
within the same faith.
The clash between the Jewish Adventists
and the Jewish anti-Adventists
may be described as follows.
For the Adventists, or those
who hunger to experience
the climax, redemption
is required for meaning.
For the anti-Adventists, or
those who actually hunger not
to experience the climax,
redemption is not required
for meaning, and sufficient
meaning exists prior
to redemption in the
fallen or punished state.
Redemption, after all, promised an
exchange of one reality for another,
a transformation in totality.
In the words of the
great messianic thinker,
Yehudah ben Bezalel el
Loew, the Maharal of Prague,
quote, "The coming of the
Messiah represents the
"creation of a new reality
and will cause the reality
"that proceeded it to be lost."
Close.
It was the transformative
nature of redemption,
its totalism that posed the problem.
Historical transformation
for the Jews has two faces.
The arrival of the Messiah
threatened the Jews not only
with a consummation of meaning,
but also with an expiration of meaning.
The dream of a perfect
future has always served as
the standpoint for the most damning
indictments of the imperfect present.
For all its failings, however,
the world in which the
rabbis found themselves
did not seem too paltry
or too poor to nourish
the soul or the community.
The world as they found
it was not everything,
but it was also not nothing.
Their eschatological skepticism
may be properly understood,
in fact, as a defense of
the sufficiency of their
circumstances, for the significance
that they were enjoined
by tradition to impute to their lives.
And this sense of the
sufficiency of the actual world
is foundational to Jewish
civilization in ways that have
not yet been properly explored.
Now the rejection of redemption
reveals an extraordinary
confidence about one's spiritual
and existential situation.
And the proof of this confidence
in Judaism was the law.
The obligation to
perform the Commandments,
ethical commandments, ritual commandments,
implied that this imperfect
world is not so imperfect
that the ideal of perfection
is impossible within it.
The premise of Halacha life
was that the absolute is
here and now adequately,
if not completely available.
Jews of all people resolutely
do not hate the world.
And the Halacha life may be seen
as a regular rejection of such a hatred.
If the Jews preferred to wait
it is because they did not
lack the means with which to begin,
because they already found
themselves in the middle.
They could be patient for the end,
because they were already in
the thick of an engagement,
a steady and stable
engagement with the eternal.
Indeed, it was impatience that was deemed
by the rabbis to be the supreme distortion
that messianism visited upon Judaism.
Jews as is well known are
forbidden by the Talmud quote,
"To force the end and
to calculate the end."
They are forbidden, that is,
to repudiate the present,
which is the only improper time
for moral life and ritual life.
For the rabbis, the fear of the
Messiah was the fear of sin.
They viewed the rupturing of
history as the rupturing of the
ritual and ethical framework.
And the law as they knew
it, that framework as
they observed it, was a
theater of religious meaning
more desirable than any
glamorous abrogation of it.
Thus the four cubits of
Halacha were capacious enough
and strenuous enough and enchanted enough
and the fifth cubit of the
Messiah could be resisted.
The overwhelming Jewish
presence was for waiting.
The Jews had a passion for waiting.
I take this phrase from Walter Benjamin,
who once wrote, quote,
"That one cannot appreciate
"the charm of a cafe unless
one has a passion for waiting."
Close quote.
It's actually a very good
sentence to speak in Berkeley.
I wish to suggest that
one cannot appreciate the
charm of the Messiah unless
one has a passion for waiting,
at least if one is a Jew.
There is something very
radical and hugely beautiful
about such constancy,
about preferring tradition to salvation.
And this preference is
stated with surprising
but not entirely adequately
remarked upon candor
throughout the medieval
and modern tradition.
Let us follow it briefly,
beginning in 1263
in a remarkably blunt
statement about messianism made
by Nachmanides on the second day of the
dramatic Disputation at Barcelona.
Nachmanides addressed his
words directly to the King,
James I of Aragon, who was in attendance
and keenly followed the discussion.
Quote, "My Lord King hear me.
"The essence of our law and our
teaching is not the Messiah.
"You are worth as much
to me as the Messiah.
"You are a king, he is a king.
"You are the sovereign of your nation.
"He is the sovereign of Israel.
"For the Messiah is nothing
other than a king of flesh
"and blood like yourself."
Close quote.
Nachmanides point in this
exchange was not only
to diminish the centrality
of messianism and Judaism.
He proceeded to a still
more startling remark,
again addressing the King.
Quote, "When I serve my Creator
by your leave in your realm
"in the conditions of
exile and persecution
"and servitude in which we
suffer the scorn of the nation's
"daily, my reward is great.
"For I am making of my own
body and offering to my God,
"and therefore I am more
and more worthy of life
"in the world to come.
"But when a king of Israel,
a king of my own faith
"will rule the world,
and I will perforce abide
"by the laws of the Jews,
"my reward will not be so considerable."
Close quote.
Nachmanides was here arguing
for the spiritual utility of adversity.
It was almost an argument for exile.
The passage is especially surprising
in the light of
Nachmanides' own immigration
or flight to the holy land
in the aftermath of the
Barcelona Disputation.
And it reverberates
interestingly for present day
discussions about Judaism in a Zionist
and allegedly post-Zionist world.
But nevermind its contemporary
relevance for now,
it is Nachmanides'
circumscription of the messianic
idea that I want to
recommend to your attention.
In this avowal of the
great rabbi we find, again,
the Jewish attachment to the world,
the insistence that the
observance of the Commandments
as the Jews' highest purpose
and the confidence that
adversity and exile of whatever
intensity do not impair the Jews' ability
to fulfill that purpose.
Some of Nachmanides'
bluntness in this exchange
may be attributed, of course,
to the charged context
in which he was speaking.
The discussion of messianism
throughout the medieval
tradition was frequently
accompanied by harsh echoes
of the disputation between
Jews and Christians
about the interpretation of biblical
and rabbinical eschatology.
Yet it is clear from his other
writings that Nachmanides
relaxation of messianism was not
merely a polemical or diplomatic matter.
It was rather an external
expression of his internally
considered view of the place
of the eschaton in Jewish life.
(speaking foreign language)
Or the Book of Redemption,
which he appears
to have composed also
in the early 1260s, is not
addressed to the Christian
authorities of Spain but
to his own Jewish brethren.
And it includes this
reflection on what he calls,
quote, "The essence of our
longing for the messianic age."
Quote, "To be sure, we
cling to the prospect of the
"messianic redemption,
because it is a well known
"truth expounded by our
scholars and our prophets.
"And we attest to its truth,
and we refute the words of the
"heretics with the proof of its truth,
"and we rejoice in it for
the reason that we hope
"that this redemption will
bring us closer to God.
"But no God help you that were
we to decide in our hearts
"that our sins and the
sins of our fathers have
"disqualified us from the
promises of consolation.
"And so the exile will lengthen
and endure without end.
"And were we also to conclude
that God wished to torment us
"for his own reasons or for
our own good in this world
"by subjugating us to the
nations, none of this would
"do any harm to the
foundations of our faith.
"For the purpose of our reward
is not the messianic era
"or to enjoy the fruits of that holy land
"or the hot springs of Tiberius
or other such pleasures.
"Even the restoration of the sacrifices
"and the services at the
temple is not our highest wish.
"No, the object of our
desire and of our gaze is
"the world to come, the Foerster Lecture
"in Human Immortality and
the delight of the soul
"in what is known as the Garden of Eden
"and the rescue of the soul
from the punishment of Hell."
Close quote.
So according to Maimonides,
the belief in the Messiah
has a place in the Jewish faith,
but it does not have pride of place.
The objective of the
faith is not redemption.
The objective of the redemption is faith.
The idea of the supreme
priority of messianism
for Judaism is not an
ancient or medieval idea.
It is a modern idea, developed
and promoted by scholars
and philosophers who worked
in an age of historicism and revolution.
But that theme is for another day.
What I would like to stress
here is that one of the most
striking elements of
Nachmanides' statement is his
unequivocal promotion of the
spiritual over the historical.
And the rabbis' eschatological
patience strikes one
with even greater force a few pages later
in his own treatise, where
he records his conviction
that (speaking foreign language).
"We are ourselves living
in the end of days."
Perhaps he even enjoyed the hot
springs of Tiberius himself.
This historical patience
that I've used Nachmanides
to illustrate had a long career
in the history of the Jews.
I will give some examples
so as to gradually build
my portrait of this
un-messianic messianism.
The same calming influence may be detected
in (speaking foreign language)
or the light of the Lord,
which Hasdai Crescas, the fiercely
anti-Maimonidean thinker and one of the
great statesmen of the
Jewish community in Spain
completed in Zaragoza in 1410.
(speaking foreign language)
was the first part,
the philosophical part of Crescas'
projected systematic treatment of
Jewish beliefs and practices.
In the third section of his book,
Crescas lists those articles of faith,
quote, "That we have seen
fit to include among the
"cornerstones of the
Torah so that the belief
"in them is mandatory and the
denial of them is a rebellion
"so enormous that the denier must be
"counted among the heretics."
Close quote.
Among those necessary
and inalienable beliefs,
Crescas elected not to include
the belief in the Messiah.
Indeed, he could not have been clearer
about the loss of its priority.
Quote, "In the absence of the Messiah,
"the reality of the Torah
is plainly warranted."
Close quote.
This moderation of the appetite
for salvation was expressed
by a man whose own son had been murdered
by the anti-Jewish mob
in Barcelona in 1391.
Joseph Albo was a student
of Hasdai Crescas.
In 1413, he played a prominent
role in the Disputation
at Tortosa, the longest and
the most troubling of all
the debates that the
medieval Christians imposed
upon the medieval Jews.
In the Latin protocol
of that confrontation,
it is recorded, quote,
"That is, if in a great rage
"Rabbi Joseph spoke as follows.
"Suppose it were proved
to me that the Messiah had
"already arrived, I would
not consider myself a better
"or worse Jew for it."
Close.
So one's Judaism does not stand
or fall on one's messianism.
Albo was making the same
point at the debate in Tortosa
that Nachmanides had made a
century and a half earlier
at the debate in Barcelona.
And Albo's account of
messianism, like Nachmanides,
was not dictated solely
by political pressure.
In 1425, in Castile, he
completed his great work
on Jewish belief (speaking
foreign language)
or The Book of Principles.
It was written in part
to fortify Jewish faith
in the wake of Tortosa,
which had been the cause of a
significant number of Jewish
conversions to Christianity.
Near the conclusion of his treatise,
Albo discusses the place
of messianism in Judaism.
(speaking foreign language)
"Whoever does not believe
in the coming of the Messiah
"denies the words of the prophets
"and violates a positive Commandment.
"And yet the belief in
the coming of the Messiah
"is not so fundamental that the failure
"to believe it will annul
the Torah in its entirety.
"The belief in the future
reward is obligatory
"for all who profess the divine Torah
"and whoever denies it is heretic.
"But an individual who
believes that the future reward
"accrues only to the soul
and only in the world to come
"or accrues to the body only
at the resurrection of the dead
"and denies that the future
reward will transpire
"in this world, that is, with
the coming of the Messiah,
"he is not considered a heretic."
In Nachmanides, in Crescas, in
Albo, the survival of Judaism
was more vital than the
arrival of its redeemer.
And this medieval disposition
had a long subsequent
history in the early modern centuries.
In Italy in the latter
half of the 16th century,
at the conclusion of a
comprehensive and skeptical
review of the traditions
of messianic calculation
in Judaism, Azariah dei
Rossi cited Nachmanides
demotion of messianism as
the last word on the subject.
In his revolutionary work,
(speaking foreign language)
or the Light of the Eyes,
the book that inaugurated
the critical study of Jewish history,
Azariah called the
Nachmidean position, quote,
"Dearer than gold and sweeter than honey."
And after quoting it at great length,
he epitomized it this way, quote,
"Our goal is not the messianic era.
"It is only the keeping of the Torah.
"Whether our redemption comes
soon or whether it comes late
"when we least expect
it, we will not deviate
"from any obligations of the law."
The principle of historical
composure makes a forceful
appearance elsewhere in
the 16th century in Greece.
There, Azariah's contemporary,
Solomon ben Isaac Halevi,
known as (speaking foreign language),
a great preacher and communal leader
and the grandson of exiles from Portugal,
asserted in a sermon in
Evora synagogue in Salonika,
a congregation of
Portuguese Jews, that quote,
"It is commonly known
that we do not uphold the
"Torah of Moses so that
the Messiah will come.
"Quite the contrary, we
believe that the Messiah will
"come, because we uphold
the Torah of Moses.
"Even if we conjecture that
the Messiah will not come,
"Moses is truth and his Torah is truth."
The point could not be clearer.
In a sermon in the winter of
1573, Solomon remarked, quote,
"Many times I have preached
to the populace that a man's
"reason for being a Jew
is not that in the future
"the Messiah will arrive.
"Whether the Messiah
does or does not arrive,
"an individual of Israel
is obligated to be a Jew
"by the intrinsic truth of Judaism."
Close quote.
And he proceeded to warn
against the corrupting
effects of the messianic aspiration,
again echoing Nachmanides,
quote, "The reason that we hope
"for our Messiah who we
do believe will appear
"in the future is not
that we will then rule
"in the holy land and acquire
dominion of the nations
"and not that we will then feast
"and generally please ourselves
"with the pleasures of the world.
"The sole reason is that
we will then be able
"to serve God by fulfilling
all his commandments
"that require our presence
in the holy land."
(speaking foreign language)
The commandments that can be
fulfilled only in the land.
That is the sum total of Solomon's
idea of the messianic utility.
It was just as well that Solomon lectured
on the limits of messianism
often during the year,
because on that particular
Shabbat his cautionary words
about a historical
convulsion were defeated
by a natural convulsion.
In a brief preface to his
sermon, Solomon recorded
an extraordinary event,
quote, "As I was preaching,
"the ground shook powerfully
and only I did not feel the
"earthquake owing to the
intensity of my devotion
"to the words of the Torah.
"Most of the people who were present
"in the synagogue rose and fled."
Close quote.
And so he taught the great
listen eschatological patience
to an empty room.
(audience laughs)
He insisted that the world
would not turn upside down
even as it was turning upside down.
In 1625, Rabbi (speaking
foreign language) preached
a sermon on the holiday of Sukkot
to his congregation in Amsterdam.
The congregation was
comprised of Jews who had
once lived as Christians in Portugal
and in Amsterdam had replaced
their false Christian
identity with a true and in some ways
quite virulent Jewish identity.
Some years later Mortera acquired
a brilliant pupil called Baruch Spinoza.
And in 1656, he played a
role and thereby achieved a
certain modern notoriety in
Spinoza's excommunication.
In his sermon of 1625, the
text of which was only recently
discovered, Mortera pauses in
the middle of a philological
discussion of the name
of the city of Jerusalem
to make this ringing declaration, quote.
(speaking in foreign language)
"Our perfection and our
greatness do not depend
"on the greatness of Jerusalem.
"If the Messiah comes or if
the Messiah does not come,
"we are Jews and all
that concerns us is the
"observance of the Torah."
Please note, again, that
Mortera has not denied
the belief in the Messiah, but
he has decidedly demoted it.
In the 19th century, Rabbi Moses Sofer,
the great jurist in Pressburg
and the most brilliant enemy
of modernity that Judaism
ever produced, reprised this
tradition of moderation about salvation.
In a response some on the
question of dogma in Judaism,
Sofer declared that the
belief in the Messiah is an
important Jewish belief but
not an essential Jewish belief,
quote, "It is impossible
for me to believe that our
"redemption is one of the
foundations of our faith
"so that if this stone is removed,
"the wall will come tumbling
down, heaven forfend.
"Even were we to say God forbid
that our sins have warranted
"that God condemn us to an eternal exile,
"as Rabi Akiva said
"about the 10 tribes that
are banished forever.
"Is this a sufficient reason
to throw off the yoke of heaven
"and tamper with even the
smallest detail of the law."
Close quote.
Sofer penned those words
in the spring of 1836
when the air was thick with expectation
about the year 1840, a year
whose messianic potential
had been proclaimed by no less a source
than the Zohar itself.
I will conclude this tour
and many more stops could've
been made on it in the 20th
century when the cause of Jewish
inexcitability was taken up
most memorably by a non-legal
thinker and a secular Jew
who nonetheless thought
obsessively and tormentedly about the law.
I am referring of course to Kafka.
In his Notebooks for 1917, 1918,
there appears this aphorism,
quote, "There are two human
"sins from which all the others derive,
"impatience and indolence.
"It was because of impatience that they
"were expelled from paradise.
"It is because of indolence
that they do not return.
"Yet perhaps there is only
one major sin, impatience.
"Because of impatience,
they were expelled,
"because of impatience,
they do not return."
And later, in a famous
paradox, Kafka wrote,
"The Messiah will come only
when he is no longer necessary.
"He will come only on the
day after his arrival.
"He will come not on the last
day, but on the very last."
All these Jewish thinkers
believed in the Messiah.
And all of them were content
for the Messiah to tarry.
For all of them redemption
was in some way redundant.
And this feeling of the
redundancy of redemption
I want to suggest is one of the
defining achievements of the
Jewish tradition and one of
the conditions of its vitality.
The passion for waiting
was owed then in part
to an anxiety about discontinuity.
But this anxiety was
a measure of strength,
not a measure of weakness.
This strength was expressed also
within the traditions
of Jewish messianism.
There is, of course,
a great diversity of
eschatological views in Judaism.
I want to be absolutely clear about this.
And not all of them
reflect the even temper
about the end that I have been describing.
There were also Jews who
burned with salvific desire.
There was an old strain of
Jewish messianism that was
militantly utopian and
militantly apocalyptic
and dreamed of discontinuity
and thirsted for a new beginning.
This new beginning would be
announced by a number of signs
and foremost among them was
the abrogation of the law.
Antinomianism is an old
and recurring feature of
apocalypticism in Judaism.
The impatience with history
was frequently expressed
as an impatience with law.
In the Age of Redemption, certain
laws will become obsolete.
The Talmud explains that the Hebrew word
for pig, (speaking foreign
language), a forbidden meat,
was given because, quote, "In the future,
"God will restore it to Israel."
(speaking foreign language)
The entire system of
law may even be replaced
with a (speaking foreign language)
or a messianic law, whatever that is.
For the apocalypticists,
there was an essential
tension between law and redemption.
And they were prepared to
overthrow their present duty
for their future happiness.
Sholo maintained that this
tension was characteristic
not only of Jewish
apocalypticism but also more
generally of Jewish messianism.
Rabbinic authority and messianic authority
could not but clash he wrote.
In this regard, Sholom claimed too much.
For the striking fact about
apocalypticism in Judaism
is that it was not remotely
coterminous with messianism.
The more prevalent, if
less exciting Jewish belief
in the Messiah was not
an expectation of the
disruption of the system of meaning
in which the community already lived.
It was Maimonides who
established this historical
sobriety most definitively.
Unlike many of the authorities
that I have just cited,
Maimonides emphatically included
the belief in the Messiah
among the foundations of Judaism.
It was 12th of the 13
principles that comprised
in his controversial catechism
the dogmas of Judaism.
And yet his interpretation
of messianism was a
long instruction in
eschatological equilibrium.
In the famous last chapters of
his great code of Jewish law,
Maimonides treats first the Messiah
and then the Messianic AQge.
About the Messiah he writes,
quote, "Do not assume that the
"Messiah must perform signs and miracles
"or introduce any new thing into the world
"or resurrect the dead or the like.
"For the laws and the
statutes of our Torah
"are for always and for all time.
"There is no adding to them
and no subtracting from them."
Close quote.
The anti-antinomianism
could not be more plain.
Eschatology here finds its
absolute limit in the law.
Not only is the abrogation
of the law not a sign of the
appearance of the Messiah, it
is a sign that the appearance
of the Messiah was a false
one, an illusion, a hoax.
In the uncensored version
of this chapter of his code
which includes an
explicit refutation of the
messianic pretensions of
Jesus, Maimonides makes the
supremacy of Halacha and its
role as the proper context
for the consideration of the
end of history completely clear.
When the Messiah arrives, he
declares, those who maintained
that he would nullify
the law, who said, quote,
"That the Commandments were
true, but they have lost their
"validity and are no longer binding."
Close quote.
Will, quote, "Recant and
realize that they have inherited
"nothing but lies from their fathers."
Close quote.
And this indissolubility of
law is not only historical,
it is also cosmic.
Maimonides begins the next
chapter, which is the final
chapter of his code,
with these exceedingly
sober and naturalistic words.
(speaking foreign language)
"Do not assume that in
the days of the Messiah
"any of the laws of
nature will be annulled
"or that any new thing will be introduced
"into the order of creation.
"The world will follow
its customary course."
For the Messianic Age to be experienced as
the fulfillment of what came before it,
some continuity had to be necessary.
Maimonides made the
Messiah less frightening
by making the Messiah less revolutionary.
By assuring the community
that upon the arrival of the
Messiah, their world would
still be recognizable to them.
In the concluding part of
his code, Maimonides famously
cited, as the correct
definition of the messianic
difference, the remark in the Talmud
by the sage Shmuel in the
late 2nd or early 3rd century
that, quote, "The sole difference
between the present age
"and the messianic days is delivery
"from servitude to foreign powers."
Close quote.
The messianic change
would be only political.
The world would be made
not new, only better.
This was a messianism that
preserved the identity of the
world and preserved the
identity of the self.
It was the titanic figure
of Maimonides who stood
athwart Sholem's lifelong
campaign to secure a scholarly
foundation for his
fascination with apocalyptics.
He went to great lengths
to deflect and even to deny
the influence of Maimonides
upon Jewish messianic belief.
He resented the widespread
notion that the medieval
rationalist had established
an eschatological norm.
He resented it on scholarly grounds,
because his researchers had
revealed a vast body of more
melodramatic thinking
about the end of days.
And on philosophical or rather
anti-philosophical grounds,
because he never abandoned the Weimar
romanticism of his youth
which he and many young
intellectuals of his
generation in Germany adopted
as a response to what they perceived
as the sterility of rationalism.
In 1978, in a response to
his critics at a symposium
which was published after
his death, Sholem railed
against the arrogance of Maimonides.
Quote, "How did he dare
to posit as matters of law
"with the explicit authority of law
"notions that have no foundation
in any tradition of the
"founders of are nation."
Close quote.
Sholem also wondered how,
quote, "The man dared
"to promote into law
ideas that appealed to him
"on the basis of his studies
of non-Jewish thinkers."
Close quote.
Aristotle, Al-Farabi, and the others.
Moreover, Maimonides, according to Sholem,
suppressed the sources
that he did not admire.
And then Sholem hurled his greatest curse,
that Maimonides owed his prominence
in the understanding of Jewish messianism
to the apologetics of the
emancipated Jews of the 19th
century who wished to
present to Europe a tamed
and reasonable and unthreatening
version of Judaism.
Sholem, of course, despised nothing more.
Quote, "I am convinced," he wrote,
"That the messianic views
of Maimonides are a radical
"element within the
tradition which pointed a way
"to all those who had no
interest in apocalypse.
"It is no wonder that in the 19th century,
"in the era of civil emancipation
of the Jews of Europe
"and elsewhere, it was convenient for them
"to cite the Maimonidean
formulations and portray the
"messianic idea as purely restorative,
"built on the denial of
its foundations in myth
"and their banishment to the
realm of the imagination."
Close quote.
About the arrogance of Maimonides,
Sholem was certainly right.
Even the most devoted
Maimonidean can be shocked
by Maimonides' conception of himself.
Sholem was also right that there is a
diversity of messianic ideas in Judaism.
But about the sin of external
influence upon Maimonides'
thought, Sholem is simply embarrassing.
Moreover, even those
thinkers whose eschatological
conceptions were more
robust than Maimonides,
Isaac Abravanel or the Maharal of Prague.
Even they did not carry
their visions of historical
disruption all the way to
the apocalyptic extreme.
And it is inaccurate to
claim that the un-convulsive
messianism of Maimonides
was based only on a single
saying by a single Talmudic figure.
His discussion of eschatology cites many
biblical and rabbinical sources.
As for the canonical
stature of Maimonides,
Sholem and the other despisers
of reason may not have liked
it, but it was a brute historical fact.
The Maimonidean construction
of the end of days
was not a radical element
within the Jewish tradition.
It was an anti-radical element.
And its influence was immeasurable.
And its insistence upon
the immunity of natural
law and religious law to
historical convulsion,
Maimonidean messianism
struck a decisive blow
against the romance of
historical explosion.
In Judaism we might say law
is the antithesis of utopia.
There isn't a variety of
medieval and early, modern
Jewish thinkers the view
that the immutability of the
Torah, an axiom of Jewish
faith since antiquity
guarantees the immutability
of the world that was
created for it to be fulfilled in.
I will not trouble you
with these texts now
except to note their
implication that a belief
in the law entails a belief in the world.
The world that abides
is not a perfect world.
The need for law is itself
evidence of its imperfection.
But it is a sufficient world,
a world right for its purposes.
The commitment to normativity
removes the grounds
for a rejection of the world
and also for the hunger
to destroy it so as to renew it.
Law or normativity in this
understanding is an antidote
to the nihilistic element,
the appetite for destruction
in the apocalyptic critique of the world.
The acceptance of the world
that is a condition of the
law is not a form of complacence
since the law is itself
a standpoint for criticizing the world
and for not conforming to it.
But the law abiding Jew
nonetheless feels adequately
conditioned for a significant life.
Messianism is commonly interpreted
as a variety of idealism.
But if idealism is only a
part of the Jewish tradition's
attitude toward the world,
then messianism must stand
in some relationship also to realism.
What we have here is a
messianic temper that includes,
that prizes an attachment to reality.
And this attachment is not
experienced as a paradox
or a tension or a contradiction.
And it helps to make sense
of the paucity of messianic
activity in this people
who invented the messiah.
For insofar as messianic
activity was an open
expression of hostility to reality,
it was bound to be constrained.
There remains of course the
matter of messianic calculation.
The Jewish tradition of
messianic calculation was long.
It amounted, indeed, to an entire
genre of Jewish literature.
This vain of messianic
speculation which was often
based upon numerological
interpretations of biblical
phrases and verses proposed
the following years as the
dates for the coming of
the Messiah if the people
made themselves worthy for it.
110, 140, 240, 620, 968, 1130,
1238, 1340, 1306, 1334, 1358
1403, 1430, 1440, 1503, 1530,
1575, 1598, 1640, 1648, 1713,
1725, 1840, 1850, 1868, and 1931.
All these annus mirabilis
despite the ancient warning
against calculating the end.
And this is only a partial listing of the
auspicious and deceptive years.
So to what end all those calculations?
In the light of the composure
that I have been sketching,
how are we to interpret all
this redemptive arithmetic?
There were many medieval
calculations that proposed
not a precise date for
the coming of the Messiah,
but a loose time span, a period in history
or in the medieval vocabulary
a cycle of creation
when the Messiah is most likely to arrive.
In 1497, for example,
in his book (speaking foreign language)
or the Redemptions of His Savior,
the ardent messianist
Isaac Abravanel declared
that all messianic
calculation was general.
Its task he wrote was
to analyze history into
three periods, quote, "The
period during which the advent
"is impossible, the period
during which the advent is
"possible, and the period
"during which the advent is necessary."
Close quote.
That is not the sort of
historical information
that makes one pack one's bags.
(audience laughs)
There is a difference
between messianic calculation
and messianic activism.
Indeed, many of the ancient
and medieval calculations
projected the redemption
many years into the future
well beyond the life
times of the respective
writers and their contemporaries.
For many of the speculators,
the year 6,000 was
an especially enchanted time.
The next Jewish millennium
which will arrive
in the Christian year 2240.
We should all be glad
that we will miss it.
The messianic calculations
were not designed
to incite, though some of them did.
They were designed rather to console.
They were promises, not plans.
The problems that they,
the problem that they were
designed to solve was not
the problem of Jewish exile,
it was the problem of Jewish despair.
For the messianic calculators
were playing with fire.
Eschatological precision ran
the risk of eschatological disappointment.
This was clear already
in the Talmud, quote.
(speaking foreign language)
"Said in the name of Rabi
Yonatan, may the bones of those
"who calculate the end be blasted,
"for they would conclude
that since the determined
"time has arrived, but the
Messiah has not yet come,
"he will never come.
"No, we must wait for him."
Close quote.
Similarly in the 11th
century Moses ibn Ezra
in his treatise on Hebrew
poetry, sardonically
dismissed messianic calculation as, quote,
"Ignorance that will do no harm
"and wisdom that will do no good."
A century later, Maimonides'
12th dogma included
the indeterminacy of the messianic date
as a part of the belief in the Messiah.
Even if he tarries, we will wait for him.
And Maimonides explicitly
argued that quote
"One must not fix a specific time."
Nachmanides warned that
the disclosure of the
date of redemption would lead, quote,
to (speaking foreign language).
"A demoralization and a
weakening of the people's hope."
This is especially striking,
because Nachmanides himself
engaged in eschatological computation
and promoted the year 1358
as the messianic year.
He explained his apparent
inconsistency this way,
"What we have said about the end."
(speaking foreign language)
"Those are words of maybe and perhaps.
"We possess no knowledge
on the basis of which a
"certain truth may be
inferred so that we could
"say it is just so.
"We are not prophets who can
vouchsafe the secrets of God.
"It is rather the case that
we hope for the time to come,
"and we hold this belief generally."
So it was not knowledge
that these dates furnished.
It was hope.
When the prediction's were valued,
it was not for the historical illumination
that they provided, but for
the spiritual fortification.
Insofar as they abetted
hope, they were acceptable.
Insofar as they impeded hope,
they were not acceptable.
For as Josef Albo remarked
in his discussion of
these calculations quote,
"These things are mutually determined.
"Hope is the cause of
strength and strength is
"the cause of hope."
While there is no
correlation between crisis
and messianic activity.
There is a correlation
between crisis and messianic speculation.
This is not hard to understand.
In the wake of persecution
and displacement,
particular in the wake of
the expulsion from Spain.
(speaking foreign language)
Words of maybe and
perhaps were not enough.
There was a wound to heal.
And the discussion of the
Messiah and the concretization
of the messianic process hoped to heal it.
But again, adversity is
never the whole story.
I would like to suggest
another way to understand
this disjunction between messianic
fantasy and messianic activity,
between the theory and the practice.
This disjunction is problematic
and seems like a contradiction
only if we continue
to accept the most common assumption
about Jewish messianism, which is that
it was essentially revolutionary.
Sholem in particular stressed the
revolutionary character
of Jewish messianism.
He painted a long and thrilling
portrait of the messianic
energies in Judaism and in
the flamboyant figure of a
certain Moses (speaking foreign language),
a Moravian Frankist
who became a free mason
and died with Danton at
the guillotine in 1794.
Sholem believed that he
had tracked those energies
all the way to the French revolution.
More generally, the revolutionary
interpretation of Jewish
messianism was popularized
by the so-called
secularization thesis,
according to which marxism
and the revolutionary
traditions of the modern world
were at bottom translations
and transpositions of Jewish
or Judeo-Christian eschatology.
But what if the opposite is true?
What if messianism played
not a revolutionary road
in Jewish life but a conservative role?
Recall Sholem's most famous
formulation of Jewish
messianism, quote, "A
life lived in deferment."
Sholem believed that
messianism demanded a price,
and the price was a certain unreality
that attached to Jewish existence.
Quote, "There is something
grand about living in hope.
"But at the same time there is something
"profoundly unreal about it.
"It diminishes the singular
worth of the individual,
"and he can never fulfill himself,
"because the incompleteness
of his endeavors eliminates
"precisely what constitutes
its highest value.
"Thus, in Judaism the
messianic idea has compelled a
"life lived in deferment
"in which nothing can
be done definitively.
"Nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.
"One man, they say perhaps
that the messianic idea
"is the real anti-existentialist idea.
"Precisely understood,
there is nothing concrete
"that can be accomplished
by the unredeemed."
Close quote.
To a student of the Jewish
community of the medieval
and early modern world,
this passage of Sholem's is deeply vexing.
Nothing concrete that can be
accomplished by the unredeemed.
As a description of the inner
and outer realities of traditional Jews
that is spectacularly wrong.
Jewish life was never as
drained or as postponed
by the future as Sholem described it.
It was the objective of
Halacha and of the Halachaly
constituted community
to ensure that something
can be done definitively,
that something can be
irrevocably accomplished.
And this objective was
attained annually, monthly,
weekly, daily, and hourly.
The remarkable thing
about Jewish life in exile
was not how much was deferred
but how much was not deferred.
Anyway, what sort of ideal is
the deferment of the ideal?
Is not the deferment of the
ideal in fact a way of making
peace with the real?
Sholem describes the duration
before the arrival of the
Messiah as, quote, "The centuries of exile
"when Jewish history was
unprepared to come forward
"onto the plane of world history."
Close quote.
I do not quite know what he
means by this Hegelian judgment.
This long, unredeemed
period in Jewish history,
this allegedly pre-historical
or non-historical
or a-historical era was precisely the time
in which the Jews created
their civilization.
More importantly and here
we approach the modern
bias in the interpretation
of Jewish messianism
which Sholem perfectly exemplified.
The Jewish spirit never regarded
itself only historically,
never regarded history as the last word.
If thinking messianically
is the most intense
way of thinking historically,
then the circumscription of messianism,
the restoration of a more complicated
and less inflamed view of
its place in Jewish life
is also a circumscription of historicity.
So I would describe the conservative
character of Jewish messianism this way.
It protected the traditional
acceptance of the world
by confining the desire
for change to a hope.
For it was the premise of
the current of thought that
I am here describing that
the acceptance of the world
was worthy of protection.
The acceptance of the world, indeed,
was one of the great
achievements of a people
to whom the world had not been kind.
This was the spiritual
challenge posed by Jewish messianism.
To criticize the world
without rejecting it
and to change the world
without destroying it.
Or conversely, to accept the world
without being complicitous with it.
The paradoxical character of
this eschatological temper,
this spirit that wished
to conserve what it wished
to perfect, accomplished both these goals.
In one of his letters,
Seneca declared, that quote,
"You must either hate the
world or imitate the world."
But surely it is possible
neither to hate it
nor to imitate it.
Messianic speculation was
an exception to the Jewish
patients with history,
was not the exception,
it was the expression of it.
It was the tribute that
realism paid to idealism.
It bled off the bitterness
about Jewish historical
experience that otherwise might have
exploded the whole thing.
Was hope then false or insincere?
Was hope a form of bad faith?
Was hope an illusion?
Was it, as Sholem believed,
the enemy of reality?
Not exactly.
The understanding of
messianism and Judaism will
not be furthered by platitudinous notions
about the relationship
of theory to practice.
For hope stands somewhere
between theory and practice.
It is the ground of but not the
reason for historical action.
Hope is a weaker form of historicity.
Quote, "The longer the Messiah will tarry,
"the greater will be the hope."
Maimonides explained to
the Jews of Yeman in 1172.
Better hope than disappointment.
That was the Jewish retort to utopianism.
In the Jewish tradition
then messianic speculation
may be seen as a kind
of thinking about change
that was not quite a
preparation fof action.
Messianic calculation describe the point
at which the world would be changed by an
accumulation of actions none of which were
designed to change the world.
"The Messiah would arrive,"
the ancient rabbi said,
"When all the people of
Israel kept two sabbaths."
Did they mean that the
keeping of the sabbbath
was a messianic activity?
They did not.
They meant only that
the performance of moral
and ritual duties by the
individual and the community
would have a cumulative effect
upon the destiny of the Jews
and the destiny of the world.
But this destiny was to
be attacked indirectly.
We are not enjoined to live climactically.
We are enjoined to live significantly.
A messiah who is not a revolutionary,
criticism without nihilism,
a change that is not an end,
fulfillment without closure,
a climax that preserves,
a hope that neither lulls nor incites,
those are not contradictions.
They are rather the terms of a certain
messianic spirit in Judaism.
And they are remarkably
unlike the terms of messianism
in modern westers politics.
At the end of Minima
Moralia, Adorno wrote, quote,
"The only philosophy
which can be responsibly
"practiced in the face
of despair is the attempt
"to contemplate all things
as they would present
"themselves from the
standpoint of redemption."
Close quote.
The Jewish tradition or at
least the portion of it that
I have presented here, teaches otherwise.
It teaches that in the face of despair,
one must resist the
standpoint of redemption.
For what is redemption if
not an invitation to despair.
Perhaps that is precisely
where modern messianism lost its way.
It sought to meet despair with revolution.
Against Adorno and the
modern secularization of the
apocalyptic dream, I
would leave you with this
exhilarating remark by
(speaking foreign language)
in a commentary on a Talmudic parable.
(speaking foreign language)
"If an individual cleaves to God,
"what does the destruction
of the temple matter to him?"
And he continues, "The
power to cleave and to pray
"and to plead is available
even in the era of exile."
And he concludes, "There is
nothing lacking for perfection."
Close quote.
Nothing, that is, in history.
What is lacking for perfection is only
the lack in ourselves.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
(soothing music)
