Messianism and Apocalypticism in Jewish Thought

Back in August, I saw that my friend David Benjamin Blower was engaging with an influential essay by the Jewish historian of religion Gershom Scholem entitled "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism."  I'd never heard of Scholem or his essay, so I read it and have gathered below some summary thoughts and reflections. 

At the start of his essay, Scholem describes three views that characterized Jewish thought regarding the law during the Jewish Diaspora, what he calls the conservative, restorative and utopian views.

The conservative view was the simple and pressing urgency to conserve, preserve, and observe the law under conditions of exile where the Sinaitic Law could not be fully observed (e.g., the temple no longer existed, affecting how one might obey the statutes in a book like Leviticus).  

The other two views were the restorative and utopian, from which Jewish Messianism emerged. According to the restorative view, the coming Messianic age would restore Israel to its former freedom and glory. Israel would be restored to a state where the law could be fully observed again. In the restorative view, an idealized past would become a present reality. In the utopian view, by contrast, the Messianic age ushers in a future that has not yet been realized within history. Something new enters the world.

While different on the surface, Scholem makes the point that, within Jewish thought, the restorative and utopian visions of the Messianic age are really points of emphasis rather than opposed visions. The reason is due to how an idealism informs and is informed by each perspective. In the utopian vision, ideals from the past are projected forward onto an idealized future. In the restorative vision, an idealized past is recovered and realized with utopian expectations. As Scholem observes, "The completely new [utopian] order has elements of the completely old, but even this old order does not consist of the actual past; rather it is a past transformed and transfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism." You see this same sort of dynamic in how many Christians long for a lost Christendom, idealizing the past and projecting that forward in a utopian political fantasy. 

Having described the idealism of the restorative/utopian Messianic vision, Scholem turns to describe how these Messianic visions relate to Jewish apocalypticism. The issue here is how the Messianic age relates to history. Specifically, does the Messianic age come about from immanent processes within history? Or does the Messianic age require God's intervention from outside of history? 

As described by Scholem, Jewish apocalypticism was "a theory of catastrophe." The Messianic age introduces a discontinuity within history as the present age ends and a radically new age begins. Apocalypticism, Scholem continues, "stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the Messianic future." During this time of travail, what Isaiah calls "the Day of the Lord," the world experiences the "birth pangs of the Messiah." That idea, also called the "Messianic Woes," should be familiar to readers of the Apostle Paul. 

The central idea of Jewish apocalypticism concerned the transcendent intervention of God in bringing about the end of history. As Scholem describes:

It is precisely the lack of transition between history and the redemption which is always stressed by the prophets and the apocalyptists. The Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to the redemption. The redemption is not the product of immanent developments such as what we find in modern Western reinterpretations of Messianism since the Enlightenment where, secularized as the belief in progress, Messianism still displayed unbroken and immense vigor. It is rather transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its run because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source. The constructions of history in which the apocalyptisist (as opposed to the prophets of the Bible) revel having nothing to do with modern conceptions of development or progress, and if there is anything which, in the view of these seers, history deserved, it can only be to perish. The apocalyptists have always cherished a pessimistic view of the world. Their optimism, their hope, is not directed to what history will bring forth, but to that which will arise in its ruin, free at last and undisguised.

As many other scholars along with Scholem have noted, our modern vision of "progress," that history is "going somewhere," is rooted in the Jewish and Christian eschatological imaginations. However, this vision of progress is immanent and disenchanted. Rather than seeing "transcendence breaking in upon history" where history is transformed "because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source," the secular and humanistic vision of progress is brought about through purely human agency and work. We will save ourselves. We become our own Messiahs.

This immanentization of the eschaton is understandable given how, as Scholem goes on to note, Messianic expectations have always created political temptations. Instead of waiting upon God, we want to participate in or help speed up the coming of the Messianic age to, in the words of Scholem, "force its coming by one's own activity." But according to the Bible, as Scholem observes, "the Messianic idea is nowhere made dependent upon human activity." 

And yet, Messianic movements, both Jewish and Christian, frequently overstep their bounds here, grasping at the levers of history to bring out the end of days. As Scholem describes, "Ever and again the revolutionary opinion is that this attitude [that God alone brings about the end of history] deserves to be overrun breaks through in the Messianic actions of individuals or entire movements. This is the Messianic activism in which utopianism becomes the lever by which to establish the Messianic kingdom." Messianic hope fuels a desire for a better world, and those utopian desires create what Yoder called "revolutionary impatience." Instead of waiting on God in hope, utopian political revolutions, what Scholem here calls "Messianic activism," step in to take control of history in the name of God. What we see here is how Jewish and Christian visions of apocalypticism can converge upon secular visions of political revolution, an immanentization of the Kingdom of God.

At this point, Scholem makes some interesting comments about how Jewish and Christian apocalypticism influenced each other. Scholem argues that various streams of Christianity, especially those taken with millennialism, have been tempted by "Messianic activism," the desire to create a political Kingdom of God within history. Current visions of Christian nationalism are an example of just such "Messianic activism." By contrast, Scholem contends that, within Judaism, "this activism remains singular and strangely powerless precisely because it is aware of the radical difference between the unredeemed world of history and that of the Messianic redemption..." That is to say, Jewish apocalpyticism knows it must wait upon God for the redemption of history, whereas many Christians become politically impatient. I do wonder, though, how Scholem might want to revisit this clean contrast in light of the history of Zionism and the modern state of Israel. 

For its part, if streams of Christianity were politicized by Judaism, streams of Judaism were spiritualized by Christianity. In Judaism the "mystical aspect of the interiorization of the Messianic idea" began to take root, the Kingdom of God less a political revolution than a matter of spiritual transformation. We see this mystical vision developed in Jewish Kabbalah. 

After making these observations, Scholem turns to talk about tensions between the restorative and utopian visions of Jewish Messianism, and how those have affected Jewish thinking about the law. Recall, the contrast here is a vision of restoring an idealized past or looking forward to something wholly new. In the restorative vision, the law would, during the Messianic age, be able to be fully observed and practiced. But in the utopian view, a new reality emerges, and it stands to reason that parts of the law would no longer be needed under the new conditions of the Messianic age. Prior restrictions under the law, necessary within history, would give way to freedom. According to Scholem, this Messianic hope, the law giving way to freedom, introduced into Jewish thought an "anarchic element" along with "antinomian potentialities." Whenever and wherever Messianic hopes begin to break into history, old restrictions and prohibitions are thrown off in anticipation of a soon-to-be realized Messianic liberty. Scholem mentions the Apostle Paul here as an example of one who, as a Messianic Jew, most definitely struck his Jewish contemporaries as anarchical and antinomian. 

Scholem here turns to Jewish thinkers who, in the 19th and 20th centuries, wanted to shut down the disruptive aspects of Messianic expectations by marginalizing the role of apocalypticism in Jewish thought. Their goal was to create a "purified and rational Judaism." According to Scholem, the "rationalism of the Jewish and European Enlightenment subjected the Messianic idea to an ever advancing secularization...Messianism became tied up with the idea of the eternal progress and infinite task of humanity perfecting itself." According to this rationalistic vision of Judaism, apocalypticism was "meaningless, empty nonsense." 

Scholem takes a close look at Maimonides as an example of this rationalistic development. Seeking to contain the disruptive elements continuously being introduced into Judaism by apocalyptic fever dreams, Maimonides argued that the messianic age would be a wholly immanent phenomenon, requiring no transcendent intervention from God. As summarized by Scholem, according Maimonides "The Messiah must prove his identity to justified skeptics not by cosmic signs and miracles, but by historical success. Nothing in any supernatural constitution of his guarantees his success and makes it possible to recognize him with certainty...Only contemplation of the Torah and the knowledge of God within a world that otherwise operates entirely according to natural laws remains." In a word, apocalypticism is wholly ruled out. The Messianic age occurs immanently as developmental progress, though guided by the Torah, within history. In contrast to apocalyptic Messianism, Scholem describes this vision as a "rationalistic Messianism." 

Having traced the strains of Jewish Messianism and apocalypticism, Scholem ends his essay with some reflections upon "the price demanded by Messianism." 

Specifically, while the Messianic idea was a gift of the Jewish people, it was offered during the time of her exile when she was "unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history." Messianism, thus, created some emotional cross-currents. On the one hand, during the exile the Messianic idea gave the Jewish people "consolation and hope." But on the other hand, these same hopes clashed with the grim realities of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Messianic expectations create an emotional squeeze. As Scholem observes and expresses a concern about this squeeze:  

There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished. One might say, perhaps, the Messianic idea is the real anti-existentialist idea. Precisely understood, there is nothing concrete which can be accomplished by the unredeemed. This makes for the greatness of Messianism, but also for its constitutional weakness.

One hears echos of Tolkien here, when he described history as "the long defeat," where nothing can be done definitely or irrevocably accomplished, where one must wait in hope upon God's eucatastrophic action. Hope sustains, but it can also produce passivity if nothing definitely can be accomplished by us in this world. There is also, here, the Christian belief that we live "between the times," a season of expectant groaning where hope is mixed with lament. 

And so, we toggle back and forth. Consolation and hope in the face of a life lived in deferment sits in tension with the revolutionary impatience of "Messianic activism," the temptation to take history into our own hands. These are the cross-currents of apocalyptic expectation. As Scholem says, in this life Messianic hope "never finds true release" yet "never burns itself out."