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April 20, 2012
World will be ever incomplete
As the prophet Eliyahu departs, he leaves significant, meaningful thoughts in his wake.
EUGENE KAELLIS
If you attended a Pesach seder, chances are that, at one point, the door was opened to admit Prophet Eliyahu. Perhaps some food and wine were left for him to be consumed during his later, more secretive appearance, after the table had been cleared and the participants had gone to bed. What is important is not the appearance of Eliyahu himself, but the ever-unfulfilled, ever-expected, appearance of the Messiah, whose advent Eliyahu is supposed to announce.
In Jewish history, there have been at least two claims to messianship. Mordecai Zevi, a Greek, born in 1626, who as a child showed signs of a cyclical disorder, as an adult, proclaimed himself the Messiah during a manic phase. His major influence was in Poland-Lithuania, where the greatest massacre, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki, of Jews had recently occurred during the uprising of Ukrainians against their Polish landlords, who wiled away their time in pleasurable pursuits, leaving Jewish overseers to experience the wrath of the exploited peasants. Zevi was eventually imprisoned in Constantinople, converted to Islam and, ever the compulsive proselytizer, tried to convince his followers to do the same. In the middle of the 18th century, also in eastern Europe, Jacob Frank led a sect that continued in the Zevi tradition, converting about 500 of his followers, this time, to Christianity. But they weren’t the only conversions. Many of today’s European Christians, especially those of Iberia, are descended from Jews, which made Hitler’s application of the Nuremberg decrees difficult.
Understandably, Jews, especially under extreme persecution, longed for a Messiah to deliver them. His continued non-appearance introduces into Jewish life a sense of incompletion, of asymptotic expectation. An asymptote, you may recall from analytical geometry, is a curve that approaches either the ordinate or the abscissa and keeps getting closer to one of these axes, but never reaches it. It is a useful concept but, unlike the mathematical asymptote, which is a steady, unbroken curve, the history of social messianism is marred by numerous, at times totally dreadful, curvilinear retrogressions, to which the 20th century was perhaps uniquely and tragically witness. It is also useful to note that, as we progress, the coordinates themselves move to still higher levels of fulfilment, elevating our level of expectation, not only in heaven but on earth. People are no longer content with Bontche Schweig’s hot roll for breakfast.
Just as all Jews are charged with the covenant as if they had themselves been at Sinai and sworn to uphold its precepts, so are they bound to contribute to the advent of the Messiah. There is an old Yiddish story of the Messiah, seated at a table and drumming his fingers on the tablecloth, waiting to be served. Waiting, in effect, for the waiter to appear and fulfil his occupational obligations. In the meantime, the Messiah may be getting desperately impatient and increasingly hungry.
On the good side of this ongoing longing for the Messiah, obligations spelled out in the Torah – for the care of and assistance for the poor, for example – have now become societal obligations, entitlements enshrined in law, and no longer dependent on the capabilities and the often-fragile conscience of the wealthier and more powerful members of society.
In spite of the retrogressions, one must believe in the essential progress of humankind. While obviously we still have wars, armed conflict is now considered not a normal, and certainly not a desirable, state, making it necessary to justify war on a security, more than on an ideological, basis and not merely on the greed for greater territory or wealth. While we still have exploitation, that too, especially when carried to excess, is not considered a normal or tolerable state. Apple, for example, after embarrassing disclosures, was recently forced to increase the wages it pays to workers in its Asian manufacturing plants in order to sustain its image and, presumably, its market share of consumer technology in North America.
As well, we have effectively eliminated the pandemics that periodically exacted such a toll in suffering and death. Slavery, a common, near universal, practice in human history, has been abolished in much of the world. We still live in sexist societies, but women are increasingly recognized, compensated on an equal basis, and accommodations are made for their unique function of child-bearing and -nurturing. Expressions of racism are not only illegal, perhaps more important, they are considered in poor taste. Even such often-violent contact sports, like hockey and football, have been forced to become less violent, less gladiatorial. It is sometimes difficult to accept the progress of the world, but it is nonetheless a reality, fragile and reversible though it may be. The “norm,” the standard against which we judge, has certainly improved. It has been substantially elevated.
Christians, of course, believe that the Messiah has already come and, additionally, that Jesus was the son of God. That his advent did not usher in the Kingdom of Heaven is accommodated, by many Christians through the concept of the Parousia, the Second Coming, when, it is alleged that Jesus will return at the End of Days, and that all true believers, then including Jews, who will have converted en masse, will be saved, while the others and the world itself will be destroyed. Following Armageddon, in the salvation of the spiritual survivors, they will be elevated to an eternity in heaven. Typical of much of Christianity, this approach emphasizes the primacy of belief over behavior.
Yet, if one compares centuries, rather than years or decades, who can deny that, even with its two world wars, its atrocious and brutal dictatorships and its Holocaust, at the end of the 20th century and persisting to now, most people are better off than our ancestors were in the 19th century, longed for only as a symptom of social nostalgia. (And, as Simone Signoret, the French-Jewish actor, has pointed out, even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.)
The incompleteness of Judaic messianism is a reflection of the incompleteness of the world. People, now powerful enough to shape much of nature, are, as a consequence, charged with the responsibility of preserving the world. The next and greater frontier for Jews and the rest of humanity is, as Teilhard de Chardin and others have pointed out, the spiritual realm.
Some Jewish thought maintains that God deliberately did not complete the world, charging that task to His supreme creation, people, and that, moreover, its completion is an ongoing, ever-incomplete project, in which all of us are charged with participating.
Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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