The Instructions (45 page)

Either way, it is surely true that when facts can’t get bent to fit prophecies, prophecies can bend to fit facts.

Body

Persons

For example: Yeshua.

Yeshua came to Jerusalem from Nazareth, and the priests believed prophecies which stated that the messiah would come from Bethlehem. The Christian gospels say that Yeshua, though he was raised in Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Either way, who can really say where Bethlehem is? If the actual messiah turns out to have been born in Big Fork, Montana, a wiseman at a later date will manage to determine that Big Fork, Montana is, in some relevant and probably figurative way, Bethlehem. Either that, or that the meaning of Bethlehem is something entirely different than what we’ve suspected for thousands of years. In that sense, Bethlehem could be anywhere, and so the Bethlehem prophecy is useless.

In fact, nearly all the prophecies regarding the person of the messiah are useless; if not because they were penned by humans, then because humans can edit and interpret them to suit their needs.

That is what humans do—edit and interpret. That is 50 percent of 413

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what makes them human. It is an outcome of having a human soul.

More importantly, it doesn’t matter all that much who the potential messiahs of the past generations were. A tree might grow from a seed, but that does not make the seed a tree. Yeshua might have been the potential messiah of his generation. So might have been Sabbatai Tsivi. Or Shimon bar-Kokbah. Or Menachem Schneerson.

But not one of them was the messiah. The messiah doesn’t die. And Yeshua and those others—all those guys are dead.

What matters is who the
actual
messiah is, and the only way we will know the actual messiah is by his effect. He will bring perfect justice to the world. He will build the third Temple. The dead will rise from the Mount of Olives. No one will doubt Whose kingdom is the universe. The messiah may be a soldier, a king, a rabbi, or all three. His methods may be military, scriptural, miraculous, or all of these. No one will know until the messiah has succeeded. And the messiah cannot fail. That is what will distinguish the messiah from all the potential messiahs before him, whoever they were or are: victory undeniable.

Environments

For a generation’s potential messiah to become the messiah, the environment must be right; the world must be in the right condition. There are prophecies about that, too, prophecies about what conditions = the right conditions. There is a prophecy that states the potential messiah will become the actual messiah if all the Israelites celebrate a single Passover together in the land of Israel. Another one says it will happen if all the Israelites in the world, wherever they are, observe the same two consecutive sabbaths.

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Probably the most talked-about condition, most likely because it is the most interpretable one, is the Brink of Destruction condition, which is exactly what it sounds like: the entire (human) world’s very existence just being a moment or two away from assured erasure. This prophecy, however, is subject to the same difficulties as the prophecies mentioned under the heading Persons, and it is subject to those difficulties to an even greater extent because who could possibly know if the world is on the brink of destruction or not? At any given moment, some madman genius in a basement with a few plane tickets could complete his fast-acting doomsday virus and go around the world contaminating all the water and who would know? And say someone did know—like the Mossad. Say the Mossad knew all about it, and so, at any given moment, the Mossad could be at the basement in question, destroying the virus or the man: if the Mossad were to know about this and were able to prevent it, would it be right to say the world was ever on the brink of destruction? I don’t think it would be right. I don’t think you can know what the brink of destruction is until the destruction has well begun—and even then… Maybe the madman will have invented the virus because a girl he thought he loved as a boy did not love him—maybe the brink was the moment just before she called him a bancer, or laughed at his engagement proposal, or kissed some other boy in front of him. You can’t know, so the prophecy is useless.

Apart from all of that, the Kabbalists tell us that Hashem holds the world together by speaking the ten sephirot at a rate of uncountable billions of times per second and, were He to stop, the world would stop existing. So, from where we stand, as humans, the world is always on the brink of destruction, and so the world is never on 415

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the brink of destruction.

And so the Brink of Destruction condition is a useless condition to consider, not because it isn’t truly a condition under which the messiah might come—it
is
a condition under which the messiah might come—but because it is impossible to determine when the world is on the brink of destruction.

Adonai

No few scholars claim that the actual messiah will hear the voice of Adonai and that the voice of Adonai will
tell
him—in advance of his undeniable victory—that he’ll become the messiah. Rabbi Avel Salt himself once made this claim, and, for a moment, it seemed reasonable.

But then the scholar Emmanuel Liebman, in what might have been his finest moment in all of eighth-grade Torah Study, opposed the claim with oratory of such high caliber that when he was finished we applauded for minutes. Emmanuel stated that Adonai would most certainly
not
tell the messiah that he was the messiah—ever; that not only would “having heard Adonai tell you in your ears that you were the messiah” be insufficient reason to conclude that you were the messiah (this insufficiency a qualification that Rabbi Salt
had
, to his credit, stipulated), but hearing Adonai’s voice in your ears would necessitate that you were
not
the messiah.

“First of all,” Emmanuel said to us, “it’s been millenia since He spoke to anyone in their ears. He didn’t speak like that to Chaim Weitzman nor Theodor Herzl, nor Maimonedes, nor Nachmanedes.

He didn’t speak in Rashi’s ears either, and He didn’t speak into the Bal Shem Tov’s. No king, but for Saul and David—and even then only mediated by judges and prophets—ever heard Adonai 416

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in his ears. When the time of Judges was over, He stopped speaking into ears.

“And granted: to argue that examining what Adonai has
not
done can predict, with any kind of certainty, what He
will
or
might
do—that would be blinkered, and I would never even dream of attempting to put such sophistry into
your
ears and call it wisdom.

I say, ‘The time of Judges is past,’ and Rabbi Gurion, who breathes deep, hands animating, he wants to say, ‘While no longer in the time of Judges, Emmanuel, we are no longer in the time of Kings, either, and this, the time of the disapora, is certainly on its way out.’ He wants to say, ‘Times change, earnest student, and times are always changing. It is impossible to define clearly the characteristics of our own era, let alone those of eras to come.’ And with Gurion ben-Judah—by whose suddenly relaxed posture I can see is satisfied with the words I have put in his mouth—I would, as always, agree.

The argument from eras may be compelling, but it is well shy of convincing. I only note the history as an introduction to the following explanation, which, among other things, may help account for the history. And while you consider the following explanation, I ask
you
to note that you’re being asked to do nothing other than consider, however more explicitly, that which you already consider every waking moment of your lives.

“We have the written Torah. We have the one document that contains the universe, and therefore all the truth in the universe; all the truth that is, was, and will be. As well, we have this world; a world that Adonai is constantly acting on. And finally, we have scholars who study both—the Torah and the world. We
are
scholars who study both, and we are scholars who study the methods by 417

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which we study and the methods by which others who were like us have studied.

“In other words, all the truth is before us, arranged perfectly.

And so I submit that it would be
inelegant
of Adonai to speak into ears with words. And Adonai is elegant. I submit that it would be sloppy, and He is not sloppy. For Adonai to speak into ears with words would furthermore be shmaltzy in the slickest, schlockiest Hollywood tradition, and He is no more a Spielberg than was Moses a homesick alien or Ruth a tragic cutie pie in a little red dress.

“It is through studying Torah, the world, and the way others have studied them that the messiah will know how to bring about the events which will characterize the messianic era. It is through studying those same things that
we
will know how to recognize the messiah when he arrives; for though he will be a scholar like the rest of us, he will be better than us; he will teach us how to be like him and we will be ready to learn. In the end, that is why we seek truth, why we study Torah: Our scholarship speeds the coming of the messiah. If we did not believe that, we would not be scholars. In sum: The messiah will not
need
to hear the voice of Adonai in his ears, and so the messiah will
not
hear the voice of Adonai in his ears.

“And now Samuel Diamond, my wise, forward-leaning friend, leans forward, wisely, wondering to himself, ‘How does all of this fit itself into Rabbi Gurion’s teachings about potential messiahs and proper environmental conditions?’”

“It fits perfect,” said Samuel Diamond, elbows on the table, chair balanced on two legs.

“
Perfect
you’re saying?” said Emmanuel, averting his eyes.

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“You’re saying
perfect
? Does that mean I should be flattered or anxious? Because I am beginning to feel anxious. Have I mistaken an enumeration of the obvious for a strong argument? What must you guys think of me? ‘Loquacious Liebman’? ‘Mamzer, stop asking questions you and we already know the answer to’? ‘Button up, you windbag shmendrick’?”

“No,” the scholars protested. “Tell us,” they said. “Finish,” they said. “Tell us how it all fits together.”

With shaky hands, Emmanuel touched his yarmulke. It was still there, held fast by black bobbypin. “If not the
sole
,” he said, “then we are, at the very least,
the most
central
environmental condition that needs to get proper. We are the ones who will make actual the potential messiah. And as I have already said in so many words: that is why we are scholars.”

And that is when the applause started. It was me who started it.

In
Conclusion
s

It seems to me that even though the messiah can’t know he is the messiah until he has had the undeniable victory of the messiah, it would not be unreasonable to assume that he would, prior to the victory,
suspect
he was his generation’s
potential
messiah.

Therefore: A person who suspects he is his generation’s potential messiah is not necessarily false, or crazy.

But what would such a person do with this suspicion? What, if anything,
should
he do with this suspicion? There is no doubt that he should keep the suspicion to himself, no doubt that he should not speak about it to anyone, at least not directly, that’s a no-brainer: Were he to mention the suspicion, those who already 419

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shared it—assuming there were any—could overreact and annoint him too early, spoiling his potential. Those who did not share the suspicion could spoil the potential in other ways. They could—as is done with so many of those who claim they
are
the messiah—lock the person up.

But what should he
do
? In the world. How should he act?

What if, for example, a part of the world is persecuting him?

What if he’s already locked up?

What is the righteous thing for this person to do?

Is it righteous for him to throw his hands up and say to himself,

“Right now I am, at best, only this generation’s
potential
messiah, and I suffer persecution because the proper environmental conditions that would allow me to become the actual messiah and bring perfect justice to the world have clearly not been met”? = Is it righteous for this potential messiah to be humble about his potential?

To allow that messianic actuality is solely in the hands of the world at large?

Or is it righteous for him to say to himself, “In persecuting me, a potentially potential messiah, my persecutors may be haunting the world’s future, and I will therefore rise up and smite them?”

= Because the potential messiah might one day become the actual messiah, might not smiting his enemies be righteous? Might not this smiting, in itself, help to render him the actual messiah?

Clearly, if the person who suspects he is the potential messiah is being persecuted because he is an Israelite, he must try to rise up and smite his persecutors—not necessarily because they are
his
enemies, but because they are the enemies of the Israelites, and therefore the enemies of the world, who all Israelites must face down. But if that’s 420

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not the case, or if—even more confusingly—some of his persecutors are, themselves, Israelites, then what is righteous becomes much harder to figure out.

It is what I am trying to figure out.

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It wasn’t easy to stay pissed at Benji, the way his chin would drop. After I finished my detention assignment and Nakamook still hadn’t said anything, I saw I’d really hurt his feelings. I was trying to figure out how to make it up to him when I noticed the top half of his assignment was sticking out from under his nearer arm. I saw the title of it was
Villainy
, and I started to read the intro: