A shoot shall come forth from the stump of Jesse.
A twig shall sprout from his stock.
The spirit of the LORD shall alight upon him:
A spirit of wisdom and insight,
A spirit of counsel and valor,
A spirit of devotion and reverence for the LORD.
He shall sense the truth by his reverence for the LORD:
He shall not judge by what his eyes behold,
Nor decide by what his ears perceive.
Thus he shall judge the poor with equity
And decide with justice for the lowly of the land.
—Isaiah 11:1
The larger passage from Isaiah (excerpted here) is significant in predicting the coming of a messianic future: The Southern Kingdom of Judah will be ruled by a descendant of Jesse, David’s father.1 This will fulfill God’s promise to David: “Your house and your kingdom shall ever be secure before you; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7). And, unlike other kings, this one will rule with wisdom and understanding, bringing justice to the poor.
Although the Torah never explicitly mentions a Messiah, the idea that a descendant of David would usher in a new age came to play a major role in both Judaism and Christianity. The Amidah prayer, which traditional Jews recite three times a day, asks God to rebuild Jerusalem and establish within it the throne of David. Similar sentiments are expressed after reciting the haftarah and the Grace after Meals. In Christianity, the Gospel according to Matthew begins with an elaborate genealogy linking Jesus with the House of David and proclaims him the Messiah.
In the Middle Ages, Maimonides left no doubt about the importance of belief in the coming of the Messiah for Judaism: “King Messiah will arise and restore the kingdom of David to its former state and original sovereignty. . . . He who does not believe in a restoration or does not wait the coming of the Messiah denies not only the teachings of the prophets but also those of the Law of Moses our Teacher.”2 Maimonides also included belief in the coming of the Messiah as the twelfth of his Thirteen Principles of Faith, whose acceptance, he held, was necessary for any Jew to be worthy of salvation. In a later age, facing unspeakable horrors, Jews in ghettos and concentration camps would go to their deaths with Maimonides’ words on their lips: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, yet I believe.”3
Judaism and Christianity may differ on who is the Messiah, what he will do, and how we can prepare for his coming, but they agree on at least this much: The way things are now is not the way they have to be or the way they will be in the future. This is another way of saying that the human condition is not tragic; however formidable life’s difficulties may be at present, the forces of evil will not win out in the end.
A word of caution. In our day, we tend to think of the future as totally disconnected from the past—a time when political and technological progress will transform human life to such an extent that it will be almost unrecognizable to those who went before it. But this is not the way our ancient and medieval ancestors saw things. To them, the future would be a better time in large part because it would restore lost features of the past: reestablishing the Davidic dynasty, rebuilding Jerusalem, reaffirming the Sinai covenant. Along these lines, Maimonides thought that the Messiah would restore sovereignty to Israel so that the nation could go back to fulfilling all the commandments of the Torah. In effect, what will be is really a matter of what should have been all along.
As we have seen, Isaiah was not the first prophet to articulate such a vision. Amos talks about a time when God will rebuild Israel so that “they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine” (9:14). Hosea tells us that eventually the Israelites will seek God (3:5) and that God will take them back in love (14:5). Both mention David in their visions of return, but given that they spoke to the people of the Northern Kingdom, and the Davidic dynasty ruled in the South, these passages are often thought to be later additions. Jeremiah, who lived before the fall of Jerusalem, proclaims that God will make a new covenant with Israel and no longer remember their sins (31:31–34). Zechariah, who lived after the fall of Jerusalem, asserts that a triumphant and victorious king will enter Jerusalem but be so humble that he will ride a donkey (9:9).
Although Isaiah does not use the word Mashiaḥ (Messiah), its etymology is not hard to discern. Originally Mashiaḥ referred to someone who had been anointed with oil. In ancient Israel, kings and priests were anointed with oil as part of their installation ceremonies. Thus God tells Moses to anoint Aaron and his sons with oil (Exod. 30:30). Saul, David, and Solomon were anointed as well (1 Sam. 10:1, 16:13; 1 Kings 1:34–39). And the prophet Third Isaiah (61:1) said that God had anointed him to raise up the brokenhearted and proclaim liberty to the captives.
Eventually, the future redeemer promised by Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah, the king who would usher in a whole new age, came to be known as the Messiah, or “anointed one of God.” Hope for a time when oppression and injustice would vanish rested on the basis of this vision. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, Mashiaḥ was rendered as Christos (Christ). In this way, Christians came to believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promise of ultimate redemption.
Whether one is a Jew or Christian, the importance of redemption cannot be overemphasized. To see why, one has only to recognize that the Bible does not paint a rosy picture of human behavior. The first act that Adam and Eve take in the Garden of Eden is to defy God. The next thing we hear is that Cain was jealous of his brother Abel and killed him. Eventually there is so much evil in the world that God has to wipe out most of humanity by bringing a flood. But even the flood doesn’t solve the problem, because shortly after Noah leaves the ark, Ham, his youngest son, commits some sort of atrocity against his father (Gen. 9:22). Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery and lie to their father about his death.
One might think that after God rescues Israel from Egyptian bondage, the picture would change, but that is hardly the case. Throughout the story of the Exodus, the people complain to Moses about lack of food and water, worship the Golden Calf, plead to be taken back to Egypt, and refuse to fight for their freedom. By Numbers 14, God becomes so angry with the people that they must wander in the desert until they die rather than enter the Promised Land. When Moses addresses the new generation in Deuteronomy, the generation that will enter the Promised Land, the picture still hasn’t changed. Shortly before Moses’ death (Deut. 31:16–18), God tells Moses in language similar to that used by Hosea that the new generation won’t be any better than the old one and will go whoring after other gods.
We have seen that Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah are sharply critical of the people’s behavior and warn that God is about to inflict punishment of terrifying proportions. This theme will reach its climax in Jeremiah, whose name (jeremiad) has become synonymous with a mournful complaint or recitation of woes. If these passages were all we had, reading the Bible would leave us in a state of despair. Why work to improve things if failure is inevitable? Or, to put the point another way, if the generation of the Exodus, who witnessed the miracle at the Red Sea and heard God’s voice at Sinai, rebelled against God, what chance do we have of doing any better?
Fortunately, these passages are not all we have, because the prophets assure us that sin and rebellion against God are not the end of the story. The promise of a Messiah means that however bad a nightmare, history does not have to repeat itself. The end of the story will occur when a new type of leader appears, one who is able to do what Moses and the rest of the prophets could not—bring about reconciliation between God and Israel. This is a bold claim, because it says that we should put aside the historical record and focus on something that has not yet happened. As God tells Second Isaiah (43:18–19): “Do not recall what happened of old, / Or ponder what happened of yore! / I am about to do something new.”
Needless to say, waiting for something new to happen carries risks. If the Messiah has not come in all this time, how realistic is it to keep looking forward to his arrival? Yet, risky as it is, the hope for a new and better age has sustained the Jewish people through the destruction of two Temples, thousands of years of homelessness, the Spanish Inquisition, countless pogroms, even the horrors of the gas chambers, because it gives us reason to think that, as awful as things are now, evil will not triumph in the end.
Behind the idea of a messianic future is an important principle: Unless the future offers some prospect of improvement, there would be no reason to work to make things better. The result would be a grudging acceptance of the way things are at present. From what we have seen, this attitude would contradict everything the prophets stand for because it would mean making peace with corruption and rejection of God. In short, hope for a better future goes hand in hand with a call to action.
Yet, for all its importance, hope for a better future raises problems. “There is something grand about living in hope,” wrote Gershom Scholem, “but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it.”4 The history of Judaism is littered with false hopes, false messiahs, as well as wild speculation about the circumstances in which the true Messiah will appear. In the ancient world there was Simon Bar Kokhba (who is discussed below). After him came Moses of Crete in the fifth century CE, Shabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century, Jacob Frank in the eighteenth century, and by some accounts Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the twentieth century. Christianity has faced the same problem in connection with the Second Coming of Jesus. Although hope is needed when things get difficult, it is precisely when things get difficult that people are most susceptible to folly.
We can further appreciate the significance of this problem by looking at attempts to free Israel from the heavy hand of Roman domination. Two armed revolts occurred, one from 66 to 73 CE, and the other from 132 to 136 CE. With regard to the first, Josephus, our chief historical source for this period, writes: “Their chief inducement to go to war was an equivocal oracle also found in their [Jewish] sacred writings, announcing that at that time a man from their own country would become Monarch of the world. This they took to mean the triumph of their own race, and many of their own scholars were wildly out in their interpretations.”5
The first Jewish revolt led to the destruction of the Second Temple as well as much of Jerusalem, civil war between competing Jewish factions, numerous massacres and crucifixions, and a large number of people being taken away as slaves. The second revolt was led by Bar Kokhba, who was proclaimed the Messiah by no less an authority than Rabbi Akiva. But this attempt did not fare any better, and was followed by a scorched earth policy meant to teach the Jews a lesson for all time.
The record of failure against Rome raised a question that Jews have faced in nearly every age: What is the proper response to misfortune—despair or hope? Early Rabbinic leaders were ambivalent in their answer. Given the horrors of exile and oppression under Roman rule, they were not in a position to squelch a belief that gave the people something to live for. At the same time, they could not be completely comfortable with a doctrine that had led to two disastrous wars and spawned a rival religion in the form of Christianity. As the historian Heinrich Graetz put it, messianism is both a Pandora’s box and the elixir of life.6
Even if one accepts the idea of a messianic future, questions remain. What sort of person will the Messiah be—a Torah scholar who will inspire a return to God, or a warrior who will end foreign rule and reestablish Jewish sovereignty in Israel? When will the Messiah come—when things are so bad that only a superhuman figure can save the day, or when the Jewish people undergo a spiritual awakening on their own? Will the Messiah restore traditional practices such as animal sacrifice in a rebuilt Temple, or introduce entirely new modes of worship? Will the Messiah work miracles or stay within the natural order?
Although Isaiah’s promise of a righteous king who carries on the Davidic dynasty does not answer these questions, it makes it hard to avoid them. This is a clear case in which an ancient text puts us on a trajectory that goes far beyond what anyone in the ancient world could have imagined. To understand that trajectory and the full import of the text, we need to examine how subsequent generations tried to make sense of such an important doctrine.
Faced with all these questions, the ancient Rabbis conceived a variety of responses. The most obvious one was to say that while belief in the coming of a Messiah is legitimate, it should not be foremost in one’s mind. To them the foremost object in Judaism is—and always was—obedience to the commandments. This approach can be seen in the Mishnah (compiled around 200–250 CE), which included occasional references to a Messianic Age but nothing resembling a fully fleshed out theory.7 Memories of the Bar Kokhba failure would have still been fresh in people’s minds when it was compiled, and prudence likely dictated that the Rabbis not anger Roman authorities by stirring up messianic fervor yet again.
The crux of this alternative, as stated by the mishnaic scholar Jacob Neusner, is that the purpose of religious life is not salvation, understood as a future event, but sanctification, understood as an ever-present possibility.8 God will send the Messiah at the appropriate time. If you want to please God, follow the commandments as articulated by the Rabbis. Beyond that, there is not much one can say. Along similar lines, the great talmudic sage Rav, who lived in the third century CE, maintained that the appointed dates for the Messiah have come and gone; so at this point, all that remains are repentance and good deeds (Sanhedrin 97b).
As the memory of Bar Kokhba receded and the center of Jewish learning moved from Israel to Babylonia, messianic speculation sprang up again. In the talmudic tractate Sanhedrin, there are any number of views about when the Messiah will come. One view has it that the Messiah will appear when the Jewish people repent for a single day or observe a single Sabbath in accordance with the Torah (Sanhedrin 97b).
In sharp contrast, another view holds that the Messiah will not arrive when life gets better, but when it gets markedly worse—when scholars are few in number, God-fearing men are despised, young men insult the old, daughters rise up against their mothers, and the whole kingdom succumbs to heresy (Sanhedrin 97a). The rationale for this view seems to be that if life becomes completely intolerable, God will have no choice but to intercede. In an attempt to honor both alternatives, Rabbi Yoḥanan concluded that the Messiah will come in a generation that is either totally righteous or totally corrupt (Sanhedrin 98a). Still another view maintains that before the Messiah comes, there will be cosmic upheavals involving sea monsters, a decisive battle between good and evil, or a complete deterioration in the quality of life (Sanhedrin 97a, Sotah 9:15). The dire nature of these predictions led some Rabbis to say that they did not want to live to see the Messiah because there would be so much suffering beforehand (Sanhedrin 98b).
Some Rabbis went so far as to say that the Messiah would usher in a time of abundance when women would give birth to children on the day of conception, trees would provide fruit on a daily basis, and cakes and wool garments would grow from the ground (Shabbat 30b). Against this, another tradition claimed that the only difference between this world and the days of the Messiah will be that, in the latter, Israel will regain political sovereignty (Sanhedrin 91b). Yet another tradition maintained there will be two Messiahs: the Messiah ben Joseph, who will win many victories but ultimately be slain, and the Messiah ben David, who will avenge the death of the first Messiah (possibly resurrecting him) and secure the ultimate victory over evil.9 Finally, there is a tradition that imagined the Messiah as a leper at the gates of Rome, bandaging his sores (Sanhedrin 98a).
In short, there was no single Rabbinic position on the Messiah. As Neusner puts it: “The conception or category, Judaism’s Messianic Doctrine, as a systematic construct, yields only confusion.”10 It was in an effort to clear up this confusion that Maimonides put forth a well-articulated theory of the Messiah in the last book of the Mishnah Torah.
The crux of Maimonides’ position is that when the Messiah comes, there will be no cosmic upheaval or disruption of the natural order. The only difference between life now and life then will be that Israel will be at peace, regain political sovereignty, and be able to focus its attention on study and worship.11 In regard to everything else, Maimonides wrote: “Do not think that the King Messiah will have to perform signs and wonders, bring anything new into being, revive the dead, or do similar things. It is not so.”12
Maimonides had nothing but contempt for those who thought rivers would flow with wine, the earth would bring forth baked bread, or people would become angels. Even in the days of the Messiah, he believed, there would still be rich and poor, strong and weak.13 People would still have to work to put food on their table. Yet, because wars would cease, it would be easier to procure the necessities of life. Maimonides also wrote that, in time, the Messiah would die a natural death just like any other person. It is clear, then, that Maimonides tried to demythologize our understanding of the Messiah. In simple terms, he depicted the days of the Messiah not as an earthly paradise where people will live like princes and princesses but as a time when study and worship will proceed without interruption. As he tells us: “The one preoccupation of the whole world will be to know the Lord.”14
This did not mean that the Messiah will change things overnight. According to the philosopher Menachem Kellner, the Messianic Era is better understood as a process rather than an event.15 We can see this in two ways. First, Maimonides tells us that the task of identifying the Messiah will proceed in stages: Rather than relying on astrological or numerical predictions, we will have to determine whether the person in question is a king from the House of David who meditates on the Torah, observes the commandments, prevails upon all of Israel to do so, and “fights the battles of the Lord.” If all this comes to pass, Maimonides claims, we can assume that this person is the Messiah.16 If he does all of this and rebuilds the Temple and gathers in the exiles, we can be sure he is. Not only will this take time; it will require active participation from a wide range of people who will have to cooperate with each other before the identity of the Messiah can be established. Second, Maimonides allows for the possibility that Christianity and Islam will play a role in educating people and, to use Kellner’s expression, monotheizing the rest of humanity.17 Again, this is to be done by natural means, which is to say that it will be accomplished by a gradual process of teaching and learning rather than a war or a sudden upheaval.
Maimonides’ theory represents a major step forward if you believe, as I do, that progress is made when religious doctrines are subjected to rational critique. As he would say, the chief advantage of his theory is its appeal to the intellect rather than the imagination. Gone are the sort of images one sees in disaster movies or the lifestyles one associates with film stars. In their place are higher levels of knowledge and spiritual fulfillment.
In relinquishing the miraculous dimension of the Messianic Age, Maimonides creates another problem. If we retain the miraculous dimension, we raise the bar of acceptance for any pretender so high that it is nearly impossible to cross. If Elijah has not come to herald the Messiah’s arrival, if the exiles have not returned to Zion, if rivers do not flow with wine, if no cataclysm or apocalypse has approached that described by the prophets, then the Messiah has not come, and we will have to go on waiting. Such a standard would have eliminated virtually all of the false messiahs mentioned above. If, however, we eliminate the miraculous dimension, we lower the bar of acceptance, and thus make it considerably easier—perhaps too easy?—for pretenders to make their case.
As we have seen, the original conception of the Messiah was that of a king who will carry on the Davidic dynasty. As democratic movements took root, beginning with the American and French Revolutions, people began to question whether the Messiah had to be a king rather than just a charismatic leader. By the nineteenth century, belief in a personal Messiah began to wane, and for many people was replaced by belief in a Messianic Age. According to the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen: “Therefore he can no longer have the meaning of an individual person; his dynastic designation, as in his general political and particularistic limitations, must be abandoned.”18 This is another way of saying that we should not expect an extraordinary person to appear on the scene, hold press conferences, or sign autographs. If Cohen is right, then questions like “Who is the Messiah?,” “How will he make himself known?,” or “How will we know that he is descended from David?” no longer have to be asked. Rather, we should think of messianism in moral terms: What must we do to correct injustice and bring about a more humane society?
Cohen also stresses the important difference between messianism as understood by the prophets and the idea of the Golden Age in Greek mythology. A return to the Golden Age takes us back to a state of lost innocence. But, Cohen insists, the prophets never speak of a return to the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. On the contrary, their idea is that humanity will go forward to a new and better age. According to Isaiah (11:9), it will not be an age of innocence, but an age when knowledge of God fills the earth as waters cover the sea.
For Cohen this means that the prophets introduced Western culture to the idea of the future.19 It is not just that one day will follow another, but that the future will give us something different than anything we have known before. As we saw, Second Isaiah said that God is about to do something new. Again from Cohen: “The future is a postulate of religious faith and indeed its most wondrous flower.”20
In addition to stressing the idea of a new and better future, Cohen also emphasizes the universal dimension of prophetic teaching. Hope, he writes, is transformed into faith when we no longer think of ourselves alone, which is to say when we associate the future with the emergence of a community whose concerns reach beyond family or friends—even national boundaries—and come to represent the community of humankind as a whole.21 This, in Cohen’s view, constitutes the crux of the messianic ideal. As he puts it: “The Messianic ideal offers man the consolation, confidence, and guarantee that not merely the chosen people but all nations will, at some future time, exist in harmony.” In the words of Isaiah, knowledge of the Lord will not just cover Israel, but the entire earth.
Still, there is one aspect of Cohen’s view that remains controversial: the idea of a Messiah who is always in the process of coming but never actually arrives. For Cohen, the Messianic Age represents an ideal of moral perfection, a condition in which all forms of injustice have been eliminated. He agrees with Kant that even though this ideal has never been achieved, we are obliged to work for its realization. Furthermore, he believes, the elimination of all forms of injustice will require not just an enormous effort, but an infinite effort. Morality, in his view, is a never-ending task. Though the future may be better than the past, it will never be everything morality demands. It follows that, no matter how much effort we expend, there will always be promises to keep, sins to confess, people to attend to, and institutions to safeguard.
This is Cohen’s way of warning against complacency. He insists, however, that morality cannot amount to a labor of Sisyphus, where every time the hero rolls the rock up the hill, the gods see to it that it falls back down again.22 Unlike Sisyphus, we can make ever closer approximations to moral perfection. As applied to the Messiah, this means that while the Messianic Age will never be realized in full, we can still hope that humanity will make progress toward it. Thus we can understand Cohen’s claim: “His [the Messiah’s] coming is not an actual end, but means merely the infinity of his coming, which in turn means the infinity of development.”23 In short, the Messianic Age is always ahead of us, always something to work for. As Steven Schwarzschild, a follower of Cohen, puts it: “The Messiah not only has not come but also will never have come . . . [rather] he will always be coming.”24
Like Maimonides, Cohen eliminates the miraculous dimension of messianism. The natural order will remain as it is; only the moral order will change. By arguing for the Messiah’s coming as an ideal rather than an actual end, he also closes any possibility of a pretender claiming he is the person everyone was waiting for. Yet, as one might expect, the idea of a Messiah who is always in the process of coming but never actually arrives does not appeal to everyone. After all, the whole point of messianism is to give people hope that the future will not repeat the mistakes of the past. If the Messiah (or the age he represents) never actually comes but is always in the process of coming, then, it would seem that, far from a guarantee of hope, belief in the Messiah is a guarantee of relative failure.25
To understand the difficulty Cohen gets into, suppose I asked you to walk to a location one hundred miles away. Although getting there would take time, it could be done. Ditto for a city one thousand miles away. But now suppose I asked you to walk to a location that is infinitely far away. The problem is not that infinity is a large or even a very large number. Rather, given the nature of infinity, no matter how many steps you take, you will still have an infinite number of steps to go. Applying this reasoning to the Messiah, the conclusion is clear: The Messiah will only come at eternity. As Franz Rosenzweig objected, what only comes at eternity does not come for all eternity.26 If the Messiah is not coming for all eternity, then he is not coming at all. How, then, can belief in the Messiah offer hope?
My response is to say that Cohen is half right. He is right to eradicate miracles, kingship, and anything that might contribute to a personality cult. He is also right to say that history cannot determine the standards of morality. Just because no society to date has eliminated all forms of corruption, it does not follow that we should give up trying. Again, per Levinas, the distinguishing feature of Jewish existence is its ability to stand apart from history and be its judge.
Where I think Cohen goes wrong is his claim that morality presents us with an infinite task, and therefore the ideal of a Messianic Age can never be fully realized. Though Judaism does ask us to strive for goals that exceed the capabilities of any one person, I do not believe that it asks us to strive for goals that are infinitely far off. My position is an outgrowth of Deuteronomy 30:11–14:
Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.
I take this to mean that God does not ask us to do anything we are incapable of doing. If God wants us to end war and treat the poor with respect, then we must have it within our power to do so.
In essence, I believe that a Messianic Age can be attained, and that if there has been any delay in realizing it, the fault lies with us. From my perspective, then, the sharp rebukes that occupy so much of prophetic literature are perfectly justified so long as present reality falls short of divine commands. With these points in mind, I am partial to a Rabbinic legend that says the Messiah will come when all Israel observes the Sabbath two weeks running. On the one hand, we have realism: No one thinks this is likely to happen any time soon. On the other hand, we have a requisite degree of optimism: Nothing stands in the way of realizing it except a concerted effort on our part. In principle, the Messianic Age is never more than thirteen days off.
Our discussion has taken us a long way from the pages of Isaiah. But that in itself is astonishing, because it means that after more than 2,500 years, Isaiah has become a significant part of Jewish self-understanding, and continues to inspire us. Although some of the details accompanying the prophet’s vision have since been modified, including the idea that the Messiah will rule as a king, its central theme remains intact. The way things are is not the way they have to be—or, in time, the way they will be, if we do what the prophets teach us. If we are going to be true to the prophetic view of religion, it is not enough, for example, to offer lip service by reciting the standard prayers for the Messiah to come. Prayer is only meaningful if it is a spur to action. As long as the poor are neglected, the courts permit special treatment for the rich and powerful, and merchants cheat their customers, which is to say as long as history repeats itself, the Messiah—or the age that bears his name—will not arrive.
Although the promise of a better future has held special significance for generations of Jews who have suffered oppression, its appeal is universal. Without hope, there is despair. Despair, in turn, is the enemy of moral progress. As the Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann remarked, it is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.”27 So while the Messiah has still not come—at least as Jews see it—the promise of his coming speaks to an elemental feature of the human psyche: the need to face the future with confidence.