The Rationalist Approach to Messianism

Some of the most important questions of what will take place in the messianic era-how long will the messianic epoch last, will people live forever, will there be a radical transformation in nature, will the Messiah die, what will life be like-are a subject of dispute between two of the greatest medieval Jewish scholars: Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Mai­mon) and Nachmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman).

To begin, Maimonides devotes much attention to the subject of the Messiah throughout his writings. This encompasses lengthy discussions on the subject in his commentary on the Mishnah, notably in his Introduction to Helek, epistles to various Jewish communities around the world, and especially his Mishneh Torah (Laws of Kings and Wars). In each of these places he always demonstrates the importance of the belief in the Messiah to those who underestimate its value in Judaism. He writes:

The centrality of the Messiah in Judaism according to Maimonides is so strong that he even says, "The final goal is the attaining of the World-to-Come, and it is to it that all our effort must be directed."

Nevertheless, Maimonides understands the dangers inherent in being overzealous. He warns how careful one must be before accepting a certain individual as the Messiah. In his Epistle to Yemen he rebukes a scholar for mistakenly accepting a man who was not great in learning as the Messiah:

Likewise, Maimonides warns of the danger of mistakenly accepting a given event as ushering the messianic redemption when in fact it has not yet arrived. "Remember that even the date of the termination of the Egyptian exile was not precisely known and gave rise to differences of opinion." Although God fixed its duration in Scripture as being four hundred years there were disputes as to when the four hundred years began and when it ended. One group had miscalculated it by thirty years.

Thus, Maimonides fears that the Jews of the subsequent generations could be led to make the same mistake as their predecessors. It is partly due to this reason that Maimonides devotes so much energy to clarifying the messianic ideal. He understands that due to its sublimity and difficulty, the idea of the Messiah has become meaningless to a great many contem­poraries. He feels a need to clarify a concept, which, he says, has fallen into chaos and disarray.

In Introduction to Helek Maimonides writes:

Maimonides then begins to explain all of the different errors that people make concerning the messianic era, errors based on literal interpretations of biblical and rabbinic texts. One class of people holds that "the hoped-for good will be the Garden of Eden, a place where people eat and drink without toil or faintness." They imagine "houses of costly stones ... couches of silk and rivers flowing with wine and perfumed oil." Another class "firmly believes and imagines that the hoped-for good will be the days of the Messiah." They think that when that time comes, all men will be kings forever. Their bodily frames will be mighty and they will inhabit the whole earth unto eternity. According to their imagination, that Messiah will live as long as the Creator, and at that epoch the earth will bring forth garments ready woven and bread ready baked, and many other impossible things like these. "A fourth class consists of those who believe that the good which we shall reap from obedience to the law will consist in the repose of the body and attainment in the world of all worldly wishes, as for example, the fertility of lands, abundant wealth, abundance of children, long life, bodily health and security, enjoying the sway of a king, and prevailing over the oppressor."

The common feature of all these views is their focusing on material gratification as the ultimate goal of religious obser­vance. The popular notion of messianism was but one instance of this preoccupation with gratifying one's need for power, wealth, or sensual pleasure. It was a collective fantasy born of repression and deprivation. Maimonides goes to great lengths to combat this literalism in the minds of the majority of the community. Maimonides, for no ulterior motive, wished to return the focus of the Jewish world to regard the worship of God as the ultimate goal of Judaism. Thus he emphasized throughout his writings about the Messiah that the fundamental order of the natural world would not change or be compro­mised after his advent.

Both prophetic and talmudic references to the messianic era indicated a world that would return to the kind of existence the Jews enjoyed while wandering through the desert after their redemption from Egypt. This was an existence in which no physical effort needed to be exerted for physical sustenance. Clothing grew on backs, the "well of Miriam" followed the Jews in the desert, bread (mannah) rained from heaven, and shelter in the form of protective clouds followed the Jews wherever they went. The interaction of the Jews with the material world was virtually nonexistent. The same funda­mental changes would take place if the statements of the Prophets and the Talmud regarding the epoch of the Messiah would come true.

But Maimonides rejected these prophetic pronouncements as merely allegorical and disputed this notion vigorously. Ac­cording to Maimonides, the ultimate purpose of the Torah, ignored by all the aforementioned views, is the World ­to-Come, i.e., the immortality of the soul.

To understand the Maimonidean notion of the messianic era requires an examination of who the Messiah would be.

In Laws of Kings and Wars Maimonides lists the qualifica­tions for the messiahship.

Note that Maimonides goes to great lengths to emphasize the natural very human side of the Messiah. In another instance he further expands upon the nonmiraculous qualifications for the messiahship. Maimonides was well aware of the average public opinion of who the Messiah would be, which was ridden with supernatural powers. To an extent, this may have been influ­enced by the Christian culture in which the Jews were sub­merged. But more important, it added a dimension of roman­ticism and glory to the messianic figure. Thus Maimonides writes:

He reemphasizes the point again in Laws of Kings and Wars:

According to Maimonides, the Messiah will restore the mon­archy, build the Temple, and gather in the Jewish people, thus creating an environment in which the Jewish people will be able to observe the Torah and its mitzvot in a perfect manner. Furthermore, he will remove any obstacles to this end in the world at large. As a consequence, the Jewish people will "be free [to involve themselves] in Torah and its wisdom [without any pressures or disturbances]. At that time there will be neither famine nor war ... [and] the occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God" (Laws of Kings and Wars 12:4-5).

Thus we see throughout the Maimonidean messianic vision how the natural order of the world prevails: the Jewish people and the world at large will be elevated to a perfect state of knowledge and practice. This is the purpose of the Messiah's coming.

In order to convince his readers that knowledge and love of God for their own sakes constituted the ultimate purpose of the commandments as well as the messianic era, Maimonides offers a new perspective on the material benefits promised in the Torah and rabbinic literature:

Throughout his messianic writings, Maimonides strives to accomplish two things. First and foremost, he seeks to alter the Jewish world's attitude toward their faith by making the knowledge and love of God the ultimate goal. He tries to make clam baba, the spiritual World-to-Come, the highest good in the hierarchy of rewards that Judaism promises its adherents and to make all other goods subservient to it. To this extent, Maimonides goes to the incredible extreme of subordinating even the messianic age to Olam Haba, domain of the souls. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that even so, one should not underestimate the instrumental value of messianisim, since it offers conditions that free man of mundane worries and dis­tractions so that he can devote himself to the single-minded pursuit of knowledge of God.

In the days of the World-to-Come, knowledge, wisdom and truth will increase, as it is said, "For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord" (Isaiah 11:9), and it is said, "They will no more teach everyone his brother and everyone his neighbor" (Jeremiah 31:34), and further, "I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). [Laws of Repentance]

He further writes concerning this point:

Second, he strives to neutralize what might be mistaken as religious fantasy. He seems to try to counteract the people's exaggerated expectations fostered by biblical and midrashic literature and naturalize the concept of messianism by inter­preting it in terms of regular patterns of nature. Wherever possible, he seems to try to make the content of messianic beliefs consistent with the order of nature by allegorizing prophetic and rabbinic statements that in their literal sense place messianism beyond the natural order.

Maimonides wrote that the Messiah himself will be mortal and that the longevity that people will enjoy in the messianic era will be a perfectly natural consequence of the conditions that will then prevail. In perhaps his most astounding pro­nouncement concerning the messianic age, Maimonides wrote:

Maimonides explains how the length of days that people will enjoy during the messianic era need not imply a miraculous change in the natural order. When human society is free of violence, when people are not burdened psychologically by anxieties resulting from scarcity and the struggle for survival, and when people become conscious of their true human pur­pose, i.e., to know God, "then that society will be stable and ordered and its members will enjoy satisfying and lengthy lives."

Even amid his attempts to naturalize the messianic era, Maimonides nevertheless does not altogether allegorize the powers traditionally ascribed to the messianic figure:

And again in Laws of Repentance Maimonides adds:

But even amid this seeming concession to a more miraculous aspect of the Messiah's influence over the nations of the earth, Maimonides immediately adds:

In numerous other pronouncements concerning the messi­anic era, Maimonides repeatedly allegorizes the messianic prophecies and reinterprets them as depicting a natural state of affairs. Thus he sets out the following principles in regard to the era of redemption:

The only miraculous power, aside from the subjugation of his enemies, which Maimonides ascribes to the Messiah, is that, by virtue of possessing ruah hakodesh, the Holy Spirit, he will be able to determine who among the descendants of the tribe of Levi are priests and who are ordinary Levites. Then the Temple can be rebuilt and the sacrificial service reinstituted.

Primarily, however, Maimonides sees the messianic king's functions as being both temporal and spiritual. He must provide social and political stability and security, but also establish the sovereignty of the Torah over his entire kingdom. Because he is an instrument for extending the rule of the Torah, he may not use his power for the sake of personal aggrandizement.

Essentially, then, Maimonides sees the messianic king not as a messenger announcing a new revelation or radical change in the natural order, nor as a harbringer of an end to history. Rather, the Messiah seems simply to be the ideal embodiment of the halakhic conception of the king, who will fulfill the essen­tial purpose of all kings by reestablishing a national kingdom governed by the Law of Moses. Maimonides' description of the Messiah thus parallels his conception of messianism as the means of an ideal fulfillment and implementation of the Torah. He therefore emphasizes that the Torah will in no way he abrogated during the messianic age, but indeed will be restored in its entirety.

Thus Maimonides allows for the possibility that new Jewish kings or governments may arise in the land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah himself. The Messiah is thus not pictured as a prophetic figure performing spectacular miracles, but rather as one among a series of kings who will follow him and perhaps also precede him. What distinguishes the messianic king from all other kings, however, is his success in restoring Jewish national life in all its aspects and the dissemination of the knowledge of God throughout the world through teaching and the abolishment of idolatry.

In equating the Messiah with other Jewish kings, Maimonides even enters into a discussion of the possibility of his failure:

Messianism, then, is simply the fulfillment of the biblical promise that the Jewish people will be given the historical opportunity to observe the entire Torah. This promise, as interpreted by Maimonides, does not presuppose an end to history as we know it. Maimonides claims that this somewhat less romantic view of the messianic epoch has always been the Jewish view of that time:

Whenever material well-being is promised or hoped for in Judaism, it is not regarded as an end in itself, but rather as a means for furthering knowledge and love of God. Messianic times are ideal and desirable because the conditions that will prevail will be conducive to becoming worthy for life in the World-to-Come. It is realism and not materialism that accounts for Judaism's concern for material well-being. Human beings cannot devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge or disinterested worship of God when they are overburdened with physical and psychological concerns. This understanding also accounts for some of the better-known promises of the messianic era, such as the stability and peace of the world at large.

This change in the stability and material perfection of the world will benefit the non-Jewish nations as well. If they observe the Noachide laws, the fundamental principles incum­bent upon all human beings according to halakhah, and subju­gate themselves to God's authority, they too will share in this world of the future. They must keep the Bible's universal code of universal ethics and morality, known as the Seven Noachide Laws, which entail prohibitions on idolatry, blasphemy, mur­der, sexual immorality, kidnapping, sadistic treatment of ani­mals, and a postitive commandment to set up courts of law and uphold justice. But there is a very important precondition to these laws insofar as they necessitate an acceptance of Sinaitic revelation as the exclusive source for validating obedience to the Noachide laws.

In fact, the teaching and dissemination of these Noachide commandments comprised, in the opinion of Maimonides, one of the integral components of the messianic ideal. The Noa­chide commandments, which among other things prohibit idolatry and enjoin certain fundamental norms of social justice, comprised what Maimonides believed to be the essential con­ditions necessary for a universal monotheistic world order. The obligation to enforce them was unconditional and thus could not be confined to the geographical borders of Israel and its surroundings. In the times of the Messiah the laws would spread throughout the world to be adopted by all nations.

What is possibly one of the most interesting facets con­cerning the non-Jewish role in the messianic era is the role that the major non-Jewish religions play in educating the heathen world about the Messiah before his arrival. After making it clear that his interpretation of the emergence of the two religions is based more on speculation than on knowledge, since the limitations of human understanding preclude the possibility of acquiring knowledge of God's ways in history, Maimonides explains how he saw in Christianity and Islam a connection between the restoration of Israel's sovereignty and the uni­versal triumph of monotheism. Since the two religions have exposed vast numbers of people to the biblical world of concepts and ideas, they have created a plausible framework for Judaism's reemergence in history as the dominant mono­theistic religion.

What emerges from this discussion of the Maimonidean view of messianism is this: The age of the Messiah is not the final and loftiest stage in the historical process. Rather, it is a precursor to what is the final and loftiest stage in the creative process­when all bodies will die and we will live an ethereal existence in the World-to-Come. Note that according to Maimonides, the World-to-Come does not refer to the messianic era. Rather, it refers to the heavenly realm and the Garden of Eden. Maimo­nides is of the opinion that ultimately the spiritual transcends the physical and it is toward this spiritual existence that we are all headed and that constitutes the final reward. Only in a spiritual guise, uninhibited by the body, can the soul finally attain a knowledge of God:

Thus, Maimonides sees all corporeal references pertaining the World-to-Come as mere allegory. The World-to-Come is a world of souls, and it is this spiritual domain that constitutes the final good that God offers.

Notwithstanding the rationalism of the Maimonidean ap­proach to the subject of the Messiah, and notwithstanding the fact that in his view the messianic age is not the culmination of the historical process, the seriousness with which Maimonides deals with the subject of the Messiah is beyond question. Aside from his earlier quoted statements of the heresy of those who deny the coming of the Messiah, he devoted significant portions of his epistles to Jewish communities around the world, encouraging the suffering masses of Israel never to lose hope in his arrival. Notwithstanding the advances of the Gen­tile nations amid the lowliness of Israel and notwithstanding how improbable, indeed impossible, the advent of the Messiah would ever seem, one could rest assured beyond the shadow of a doubt that God would keep His promise and send the Messiah.