Adam Levin - The Instructions

Title

Actual, Potential, and Potentially Potential Messiahs

Introduction

A potential messiah is born once every generation.

No one ever knows who he is, since there are so few restrictions on who he could be. If you look into the face of any male Judite, you may be looking into the face of the potential messiah. You probably aren’t, but you may be. And because the diaspora has left so many of the records of our paternal lineages mangled, you may find yourself looking into the face of a Judite while believing he’s a Levite, which means that you are potentially looking into the face of your generation’s potential messiah whenever you are looking into the face of any Israelite male. And so if you are an Israelite male yourself, and you are looking in the mirror, you might be a lot more important than you look. You probably aren’t, but you might be.

It is surely true that the prophets were aware of this problem and wanted to address it — there are many prophecies about who the messiah could be. But it is just as true that when facts can’t get bent to fit prophecies, prophecies can bend to fit facts. Either kind of bending could be an exercise in sacrilege. Some might call that statement an exercise in sacrilege, which means some might call me sacrilegious for making it. That does not mean they would be right. They could be sacrilegious themselves. Yet even if they were pious they might not be right. If I am right, it might make me a prophet, and a prophet is a bright thing, and while those who can’t see a bright thing are blind, those who do see a bright thing can get blind doing so.

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 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.

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