Shai Furstenberg ’17

Posted on May 3, 2024

Last week, on another day of reserve duty among who knows how many that I have served since the seventh of October, while doing our usual army work, my friends surprised me. Without any advance preparation, they asked me: “Tell me, do you believe in the Messiah?”

I did not at all expect these friends, who do not have a religious bone in their body, to suddenly want to discuss religious concepts and principles of faith with me. So before I overwhelmed them with: “Maimonides says such and such… But Leibovitz comments that…,” it was important to me to ask what made them ask this question. Very quickly, they threw out the words, “Gog and Magog” – in other words, this was their attempt to understand whether these difficult days we are going through actually have a promise hidden within them for a new, redeemed era.

My army friends are not the only ones to have a messianic awakening as a result of current events. For the Jewish people, the hope for a better future is expressed, almost automatically, as longing for the Messiah. For certain segments of Israeli society, this simple faith in a quiet and safe future is accompanied by other elements that can be found hidden within Jewish messianism.
I am ashamed of broad segments of the religious Zionist community (which I belong to) that choose to emphasize specifically the violent elements contained within messianism. This is how “revenge” becomes a central, motivating value among certain rabbis and Knesset members, and Palestinians all become demonized in an extremist way. This kind of messianism also leads to concrete calls to bring back Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, completely disregarding not only the shameful humanitarian situation in this war-torn area, but also the huge price in security that Israel would have to pay, both in terms of resources and human lives.

Those who espouse this kind of messianism have absolute faith not only that they are right, but that they are able to predict how history will progress and that they can control history for their own benefit. This faith gives them the audacity to act hastily and thoughtlessly in any way they feel, without considering long-term strategy and without thinking twice about the morality of their aspirations. Why should they consider the implications of this action or that, when time will prove them right regardless?

These voices are not foreign to Jewish tradition (the desire for revenge, combined with hope for redemption, echoes in verses such as Isaiah 63:4, “For I had planned a day of vengeance, And My year of redemption arrived”). Yet they certainly do not reflect all of Jewish tradition. Several sources present an alternative picture of messianism, saturated with deep ambivalence.

The Babylonian Talmud, in Sanhedrin 99a, brings the opinions of several important sages who believe that redemption will not be an absolute transition to a different reality – the end of history – but rather a limited time period, a one-time flash: “Rabbi Eliezer says: The messianic era will be forty years long… Rabbi Eliezer son of Azarya says: It will last seventy years… Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nasi says: It will last three generations.”

The opinion brought next is even more surprising: “Rabbi Hillel says: There is no Messiah coming for the Jewish people, as the prophecies were already [as all the prophecies relating to the Messiah were already fulfilled] during the days of Hezekiah.” In other words, there is no guarantee at all that there will be a messianic era. There is a potential for a messianic era, which may or may not be realized.

Another opinion brought in this passage (Sanhedrin 97a) has become a personal mantra for me since Simchat Torah: “There are three things that come only by means of diverting attention from them: The Messiah, a lost item, and a scorpion.” We know all too well, from that bitter, shocking day, the suddenness of a scorpion’s attack when calamity strikes. At the same time, this source promises that redemption will also come in this way, without us paying attention or preparing for it.

The desperate need for hope brought me to believe that in this incidental way, the wound that has not stopped bleeding before our eyes – the citizens and soldiers held hostage in Gaza – will also heal. With endless naivety, I tried to believe that without making a big deal, the hostages would simply return one day to walk around among us, in the same, normal way that each one of them walked around on the 6th of October, the 5th of October, and the 4th. I believed so much in this incidental return that I began to see Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who grew up with me in the same community, and, at the time of this writing, has been held hostage for nearly 200 days in the Gaza Strip, in the faces of the people who happened to walk by me on the street – in one person’s flapping hair, in another person’s mischievous glance. I would wonder to myself whether Hersh had simply returned home, and no one had bothered to tell me.

It will not surprise you to hear, but sadly none of these unfamiliar young men was Hersh, who is still held hostage by Hamas. Furthermore, when Hersh returns home to his family, all of us will know, because it will not be done by “diverting our attention,” by some kind of Divine, miraculous intervention; it will be the result of enormous human effort. Precisely because we do not have faith that all of our actions are right, in the eyes of God or of people, we must continue to fight for the welfare of our brothers and sisters. We must act according to the most fundamental values that our tradition teaches us. We cannot give up until Hersh returns home.