The Messiah and Judaism, Part Two.

In Response…

The quote you provide is by Rabbi Joel R. Schwartzman, and crystallizes the new versions of messianic interpretation regarding the nature of the “Messiah”.

He also gives this in his reasoning for denying the need for a Savior: “We dare not fall into a pattern of believing that someone else will come along to salvage our bad decisions or save us from them.”

We do dare, and even feel compelled. But there are, by my thinking, a few serious problems with this interpretation favored by some in the Reform and Reconstruction movements within modernist Judaism.

The first is that what it is really saying is, “there is no Messiah, will be no Messiah, and there was never going to be a Messiah”, which seems hardly helpful within the context of serious Messianic studies. It’s kind of like studying chemistry when you don’t believe in molecules. It dismisses the history Judaism and Christianity without much of a fair hearing. I’m not saying that there aren’t first rate scholars that take this tack, just that any kind of an approach that takes a serious look at the Hebrew Christian tradition as it has carried down through history and adopts this kind of analysis might have dismissed before beginning the process any possible positive answers, and so bias’ the research to a certain set of preconceived answers before the gathering of the data begins. Method is everything. For the most part, that there is no, will be no, never was going to be a Messiah would be fine if there were none or if we had no need of one, but as there is one, and we do need one, just saying there is not one, doesn’t seem to answer any very important questions.

Second, that we have “freedom” and that the exercise of our moral freedom somehow excludes the need for a Messiah or that the two are somehow mutually exclusive seems contrary to common sense and sacred Scripture. Rabbi Schwartzman paraphrases Scripture when he writes, “God tells us in the very first lines of Genesis that God has created a world that is good. Over and over again we are told, both here in Torah and in Pirkei Avot (3:19), that we have the power, the awesome power, to choose how we shall live our lives.” But this seems to be dismissing the next 1200 pages of scripture. This is a principle (that all things were created good) found on the first page and then rejected on every page after it. The question is never whether or not the world was created “good”. All sides agree on that. It is whether or not that remained the moral state of man and whether or not man’s moral inclination remains good today. The Scriptures teach that the explanation of man’s inhumanity to man is not some kind neutral un-inclined moral ability, but an actual inclination in morality toward that which is not good. When we think about it, a moral ability with no inclination at all is one that is, immoral. What is presented by Rabbi Schwartzman is really just a slightly more Jewish form of Pelagianism.

That there is good and evil in the world might imply moral agency, but that there is evil in the world as a result of moral agency seems to imply the need for a Messiah. To deny the need for a Messiah is not to embrace our responsibility as moral agents but to assume to ourselves an ability to do that which only G-d can do. We are not good at saving ourselves. We should let history teach us lessons too tragic to learn again. We do not suffer from merely a practical inability but a moral inability requiring someone to save us from ourselves. Moralism is the perennial answer of those that re-interpret the law into a form that is mildly achievable by mere human effort. The rectification of our moral bearing is an insufficient cause to bring us a humanistic messainism in which we are to become our own saviors. Making ourselves the Messiah is a shallow replacement for a more biblical messianic hope; the hope of another’s Divine intercession.

And if someone disagrees, then I’m fine with you being as legalistic and moralistic as you’d like. It’s always good when obeying the Golden Rule is foremost in someone’s mind. Some of the nicest people I know are legalists. But if we raise the bar to perfectly in all things loving G-d primarily, and our neighbor as ourselves as the natural expression of that love in thought, word, and deed, we might find ourselves seeing an incapability that mars even the best of intentions. We can be goodish, but not good enough? Choosing a lesser good that we might fallibly achieve is not an avenue open to me. The true good should not be relativized for the sake of convenience. Proximate goods are insufficient when that which one is seeking is an ultimate moral purity. And this might bring us to see the need for the Promised Messiah.  The denial of such seems to be the fruit of a demand for lowered expectations.

Third, this mode interpretation of course comes not from the study of traditional ancient Jewish sources, but from much more recent liberal protestant religious studies, what we like to call for reasons of politeness “Higher Critical Studies”. They are not higher, but are certainly critical.

All the best,

Christopher Neiswonger

Joel R. Schwartzman is the rabbi at Congregation B’nai Chaim, Littleton, Colorado© 2008 Union for Reform Judaism

http://urj.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=4128&pge_prg_id=27492&pge_id=3447

http://christiantheology.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/on-the-messiah-and-judaism/