Mythic Messiah
Already at the end of the first millennium, Judaism developed recognition of two types of Messiahs:
Rabbinic Messiah arriving at the end of the redemption process
A mystical Messiah who will come from heaven to begin the redemption
The rabbinical Messiah is derived from the Torah and the prophets like Isaiah. The model is the first Eile and Redemption from Egypt.
After a prophesized 400 years of exile, on that very night, God Himself redeemed Israel from the hand of Pharaoh, redemption is salvation from the hands of the nations who enslave Israel .
Then God planted Israel in the Land of Israel, like a tree that would bring good fruit that is David and the King Messiah, the son of David. There is no set time for that stage
In the second exile at the time of Jeremiah, there was a limited time set by God for exile—70 years, at the end of which they returned to the land with the consent of the nations, like the declaration of Cyrus the Persian. There was an end of the Exile, but it was not known how long the new tree of Israel would grow in the Land of Israel to bring again the house of David, and the King Messiah son of David.
The rabbis at that time, members of the Great Knesset – composed the Amidah prayer, which we still recite twice a day to this day. In that prayer, we ask the Almighty that we would repeat all the necessary steps that had brought about the House of David, re-build the Temple with the Shechinah in it, and see the Messiah. Although in the past, the process took four hundred years from Joshua to Solomon, in the prayer we express our hope that this time the process will be faster, as promised by God in Deuteronomy.
And during the 420 years of the Second Temple, the Jews did not deal much with the coming of the Messiah, but waited first for a complete redemption from the hand of Persia, Greece or Rome. The Temple stood, after all, and Jerusalem was built, but there was no redemption. And to whoever presented himself as the Messiah, the Rabbis told, “Go and save Israel from the hand of Rome, and then we will recognize you.”
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70, the third exile began, which continues to this day. This time, unlike the previous exiles, the prophets did not set a time for the end of the exile, that is, for redemption, and certainly did not set a known time for the coming of the Messiah.
The Mishnah describes an argument between two sages. Rabbi Joshua says that there is still a limited time for the third exile, and when the time comes, God will redeem us Himself as He did in Egypt. Then the Messiah will come. Rabbi Eliezer says that the third redemption will end only if the people of Israel repent. Then the whole process will begin. Both believe that the Messiah will come only at the end of the redemption, after all the stages have been fulfilled.
But as we have already learned, the longer the exile went on and the harder it became, the mor mysticism took place.
The so called literature of the Palaces developed, in which the authors ascend to heaven and meet the Messiah, waiting. My Rabbi, when will you come? The authors ask and the Messiah answer: today, if you repent.
There is recognition here to the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer who said that redemption will come with repentance. In addition, the new thing here is the notion that the Messiah is ready to come immediately with repentance. He will begin the stages – liberating Israel, gathering exiles, building Jerusalem, renewing the Sanhedrin, building the Temple. And He will bring the Divine presence back to dwell in Him. This Messiah is different from the one described in the Amidah prayer. This Messiah can arrive not only in the Galilee, but in any place in the world, and on any day, without a process of redemption beforehand.
That trend to believe in a Mystic Messiah only grew towards the end of the first millennium, as the troubles of the Jews increased and reality became unbearable. The more difficult life became, so did the anticipation for a mystical Messiah. The Kabala that appeared in the fourth and fifth centuries, through the Book of Yezirah and the Book of Bahir, only strengthened the mystical viewing.
The Book of Yeziarha also introduced the usage of gematria and mystical calculations to derive the so called secrets of the verses of the Torah and the Prophets, including and hence the calculations of the time of the arrival of the Messiah.
This led to a wave of false Messiahs, who appeared each time according to a particular calculation. All these Messiah ended with disappointment and tragedy.
From that experience, the Maimonides who lived in the 11th century – wrote that one should not listen to those calculations but should believe only in the rabbinical Messiah, as described in the Amidah prayer.
Even if the Messiah comes from heaven, he wrote, no one should follow him until He has fulfilled all the necessary steps beforehand.
Maimonides also goes out against those who link the coming of the Messiah to end-time prophecies such as the War of Gog and Magog, changes in nature and other disasters. All these things, Maimonides wrote, are obscured and no person knows their true meaning, whether they are an allegory or real predictions. The only sure thing that will change is the liberation of Israel from the hands of the nations.
As much as Maimonides’ words are revered, yet they were overshadowed by the current events and the extremely poor situations of the Jews everywhere.
People ignored his words and warnings and opted for ta Mystic Messiah who would descend and release them from oppression.
The nature of the Messiah was not so important to them as was the mere redemption and liberation from the hands of the nations.
And when the situation of the Jews reached the lowest point in history, in Spain, as James Karol writes, a new Kabbalistic book was born – the Zohar – that captured the hearts and the imagination of the Jews.
The book, which is a wonderous poem of the Torah, describes the coming of the Messiah in a bombastic manner visible to all.
Unlike Maimonides, all nations will recognize him immediately. He will appear at a pre-calculated time, in a pre-calculated form and pre=calculated events.
vFirst, a large star will appear in the East, larger than the Sun, with seven smaller stars next to it. The big star will wage a war with the seven and win, then, after a certain time, he will disappear yet come back with armies of angels and seraphim and wheels and holy beasts, as described by Ezekiel.
Clearly, the book is using symbols of redemption known to us from the previous literature.
Since Bilaam called David a “star from Jacob,” the Messiah would appear as a great star in the sky.
Since the Messiah will teach the nations seven commandments, the great star will appear with seven small stars.
Since the Mishnah says that redemption will come at a predetermined time, so does the great star.
And just as the Mishnah says that redemption will come with repentance, the forthcoming of the Messiah star can be shortened by studying Torah and Kabbalah and the Book of Zohar.
The book gradually spread throughout the Jewish Diaspora, and within 100 years it became accepted as a holy book, next to the prophets. No other book was ever revered to such an extent.
But as Maimonides had warned, it brought with it a new wave of false Messiahs—most recently in the late 18th century
Here we will discuss three such events that have influenced Judaism to this day
- Acceptance of the Ari in Safed
B The false Messiah Shabtai Zvi
C End messianic calculations of 1777
The Ari –
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 brought a group of Kabbalistic sages to the city of Safed, north of the Sea of Galilee. The head of the group, Rabbi Yitzchak Loria, raised Kabbalah to a height that had never existed before.
Among other things, he taught that redemption does not come immediately because exile also plays a role for God.
Just as in Egypt, where Israel influenced the Egyptians and Pharaoh, so too the third exile was meant to collect sparks of holiness everywhere in the world. The exile will end, he preached, only when all these sparks are gathered. Until then, Israel should ” Break through to the west, east, north and south” – a popular song that Chabad Hasidim sing to this day.
The Ari ZL kabala is very sophisticated and hard to comprehend, but it left an important impact – it increased the distribution and usage of The Book of Zohar, more than ever before.
And with this, the mystic calculations of the Redemption also increased. The new date found for was 1648 AD. It so happened that in those years a terrible war broke out in Ukraine and Poland when the Tatar peasants rebelled against the Polish nobles who owned land. In the war, both sides killed Jews by the thousands – more than 150 thousand dead – with the destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. wounded and missing.
The severe suffering increased the messianic expectations, which indeed brought about a false Messiah, Shabtai Zvi, who appeared exactly according to calculations. Shabti Zvi was a master of Kabala and he knew well how to present himself and aways the people – eve great Rabbis 0- to follow him.
But as Maimonides had warned, this movement too ended in disaster and disappointment and great destruction. Shabtai Zvi was forced to convert to Islam , along with thousands of his followers. He failed, yet the messianic views did not disappeared with him.
The movement also left some positive customs such as singing and dancing and clapping hands in prayer, and more.
Another date of the Messianic calculations was 1777, which I want to expand on because it has had an impact to this day.
As mentioned, the calculations showed that redemption would come between 1777 and 1781. The book of Kabbalah that calculated this was printed in 1770, that is, 70 years before the estimated date. During these 70 years, thousands of believers emigrated to the Holy Land to welcome the Messiah.
The trip in those days was long and dangerous. Many pilgrims drowned in the Black Sea or the Mediterranean, and those who arrived in the land found it in ruins and meager with almost no inhabitants, as Mark Twain described a century later.
There was no Palestinian people there, and the land was considered a distant province of the Ottoman Empire. The coastal area, which today contains most of modern Israel, was covered with swamps that the Arabs had deliberately created centuries earlier to stop a Crusader invasion.
The roads in the country were deserted and controlled by robbers. The immigrants settled in three places – Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron. They did not come to build the land, but to welcome the Messiah with Torah study and Kabbalah and the Book of Zohar.
There was no livelihood or work, and epidemics broke out every two years, killing young and old. Despite the difficult situation, the faithful continued to immigrate to Israel, and as the date of 1777 approached, so did the influx of immigrants. Among those who tried to immigrate was the founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov, and his rival, the Vilna Gaon. As you know, Judaism in Europe was split at that time into two camps – the Hasidim who taught that one should cleave to G-d emotionally, by prayer and singing, and those who opposed it – like the Gaon – who considered only Torah study.
And both the founder of Hasidism and the Gaon were prompted by the mystic calculation to immigrate to Israel and receive the Messiah there, in the Galilee, as the Book of Zohar says
The anticipations were enormous, and the excitement great, but the date passed by and the Messiah did not come. But unlike all the disappointments before, this time it caused a great meta morphosis in both Hasidism and the Vilna Gaon
As for Hasidism, the disappointment brought an end to the calculations of the Messiah arrival. Although you may still hear a person still doing it on TV and other private places, they do not allow such teaching in the yeshivot.
IN fact, in those Hassidic communities the national Messiah was replaced by a new type of a religious mystic leader – the Tzadik who heads a Hasidic community. The role of the Tzadik is to bring a spiritual redemption to his people.
The second group led by the Gaon also underwent a change. The Gaon himself, who had spent all his life studying Torah and Kabbalah in his room alone, established for the first time a small yeshiva near his home in Vilna, for an elite students whom he himself chose.
And instead of studying general halacha and Torah and Kabbalah, he taught them the mitzvot that depend on the Holy Land, such as how to keep a Shmita year in Israel and how to pick up tithes and keep all the mitzvot related to agriculture.
And to his students, he said, you are to immigrate to Israel not to study Torah and Kabbalah, but to establish agricultural colonies outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem and Tiberias and Hebron. You must build the land, build Jerusalem, renew the Sanhedrin and bring about David’s government, and that is how the Messiah will come. In other words, instead of anticipating a mystical Messiah, he returned to Maimonides’ Messiah and the Amidah prayer
Indeed, a few years later, after his death, 500 families of his students immigrated to Eretz Israel and founded the first agricultural colony – Petah Tikva – today a city near Tel Aviv. By this, the Gaon and his disciples were the beginners of todays’ religious Zionism.
The ultra-Orthodox, on the other hand, continued to expect the Messiah to come immediately. Both sides stopped calculating the end of days from the verses of the prophets.
The Mystic Jewish Messiah 2
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Rabbi Dr Z Aviner