Bekhukotai: “There is no despair”
Our parshah, Bekhukotai, begins with God’s promise of blessings if we follow the Torah. Among those blessings is a passage that may be familiar from the “Prayer for Peace” we say after the Torah reading:
I will grant peace to the land and you shall lie down and no one will terrify you. I will rid the land of vicious beasts and no sword shall pass through your land. (Lev. 26:6)
Reading this passage again and again this week, it’s been hard for me to imagine ever living in such a world.
It’s hard to imagine peace after two more horrific mass shootings, and it’s hard to imagine that NRA-backed politicians will ever allow even the most moderate changes to our gun control laws.
It’s hard to imagine peace as the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, and as Russia takes steps to cut off Ukrainian food supplies.
Sometimes it feels better to just resign ourselves to believing that things will always be the way they are; at least that way we won’t be painfully disappointed.
Perhaps, then, it’s better not to imagine peace; maybe it’s better to set our sights low and trudge along.
This temptation to reconcile ourselves to the world-as-it-is is expressed in a Talmudic debate in Tractate Shabbat (63a) about just how different the age of the Messiah will be from our current time.
According to Shmuel, an important rabbinic authority, “There will be no difference between the days of the Messiah and this world except the oppression of [the Jewish] exile.”
Shmuel is what we might call a “realist.” In his eyes, the world is the way it is. Even in the messianic age –even in the best version of this world – there will still be war, famine, and suffering. The only thing that will change is that the Jews will return to the land of Israel and therefore no longer be any worse off than anyone else
If that’s the only difference, we may basically be living in Shmuel’s version of the messianic age, and it leaves quite a bit to be desired.1
In contrast to Shmuel, the majority opinion of the Rabbis is what we might call “utopian.” According to them, the age of the Messiah will be radically different from our own.2 The Rabbis cite the famous passage from Isaiah, which states, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares. No longer shall nation lift up sword against nation, and they shall learn war no more” (Isaiah 2:4). This means, the Rabbis say, that there will be no weapons in the age of the Messiah – it will be a time of world peace and radical transformation.
Shmuel’s realism has its allure; in a bizarre way, it’s comforting to be told not to get our hopes up – if things are the way they’ll always be, we don’t need to feel angry that the world isn’t better than it is. We can just accept it, maybe with some despair or numbness, but without the heartbreak that comes from yearning for a redemption that has yet to arrive.
The Rabbis’ vision is compelling – the notion that the world can be changed, that things don’t have to be the way they are, that there might be a utopia at the end of the road that will justify all of the suffering along the way. In the words of Hegel, some final purpose “[t]o [whose] end all the sacrifices have been offered on the vast altar of the earth throughout the long lapse of ages” (General Introduction to the Philosophy of History).
But the rabbis’ vision of redemption carries its own source of despair: they articulated their hopes almost 2,000 years ago, and we seem farther away from realizing those hopes than ever, with no clear idea about how we might begin to fix things.
How do we navigate between a utopianism that seem unachievable and a realism that doesn’t hope to achieve much of anything?
The Rambam, the great 12th century philosopher and halakhist, offers a synthesis of Shmuel and the Rabbis’ positions that on first glance seems contradictory, but upon deeper reflection offers a powerful path to redemption.
In his description of the Messianic age, he begins by quoting Shmuel’s insistence that there will be no difference between our world and that of the Messiah except the Jewish exile (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 12:2).3
He then concludes, though, with this:
At that time there will be no famines and no wars, no envy and no competition. For the Good will be very pervasive… The world will only be engaged in knowing God… They will then achieve knowledge of the Creator to as high a degree as humanly possible, as it says, “For the Earth shall be filled of knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9) (Laws of Kings, 12:5)
How can the Rambam say, on the one hand, that there will be “no difference” between our world and the age of the Messiah except the Jewish exile, and at the same time say that in the age of the Messiah, everything will be different: “there will be no famines and no wars, no envy and no competition” and everyone will know God?
The key to understanding that apparent contradiction is in the Rambam’s apparent interpretation of the phrase “no difference between our world and the age of the Messiah.” Whereas Shmuel originally seems to have meant that our world will still be pretty bad in the time of the Messiah, the Rambam seems to reinterpret it to mean that there will be no supernatural difference between our world and that of the Messiah. God will not change the laws of nature in order to bring about redemption (Ibid., 12:1): redemption will, instead, be a human endeavor (see 11:4).
So, how does the Rambam think that we’ll achieve that redemption?
Shmuel believed that the end of the Jewish exile is the only thing that distinguishes our world from that of the Messiah but for the Rambam, that’s only the first step. In the land of Israel, he says, Jews will finally have time to study Torah, and they will thereby be able to exert a moral influence on the world (Ibid., 12:3-4). Though it’s not totally clear from the Rambam’s writing how exactly the world will change, it seems that he believes Jewish moral influence will be significant enough to eventually turn the entire world away from war and competition and towards peaceful contemplation of God.
In sum, the Rambam has taken Shmuel’s pessimism– the world won’t be any different in the age of the Messiah – and turned it into a challenge – the world won’t be any different unless we make it different. And he has taken the Rabbis’ vision – a peaceful, redeemed world – that seemed impossible and tried to come up with a plan for how to get there.4
Now, the Rambam’s vision might also strike us as somewhat impractical. But we can still appreciate that what he’s trying to do is make the utopian realistic – not by compromising on the audacity of utopia, but by imagining how we might make it possible. In the words of Israeli theologian Rav Shagar, “What excites the Rambam is the fact that redemption is not a miracle. Specifically for this reason, it becomes a realistic option” (Briti Shalom, “On Messianism, the Right, and the Left”).
My point isn’t that right now, we need to be coming up with plans. Rather, it’s that if we assume from the outset that the world can’t be changed, we’ll certainly never be able to change it. But if we begin from the assumption that radical change is possible, we might be surprised by our own creativity about how to achieve it.
So how, in the midst of the world as it is, can we maintain the imagination and hope necessary to change it?
Last year, a dear friend introduced me to the work of abolitionist activist and scholar Mariame Kaba and her insistence that “hope is a discipline.” In an interview last year, Kaba explained what that phrase meant to her:
“Hope is a discipline.” It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other…
It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling… But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible to change the world… [W]e don’t live in a predetermined, predestined world where like nothing we do has an impact… We’re constantly changing. We’re constantly transforming. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good or bad. It just is. That’s always the case. And so… we have an opportunity at every moment to push in a direction…towards more justice.
It’s hard to stay hopeful in a broken world. But if we want the world to change, we can’t wait for proof that our hope is justified. We have to commit to hope, and that very belief will help us bring about that which we hope for.5 And even if it feels sometimes like keeping our hopes muted is a way to protect ourselves, the only thing it really protects is the status quo and those who benefit from it.
The Hasidic sage Rebbe Nachman, we are told, would repeat again and again, “There is no despair,” drawing out the words: “There – is – no – despair” (see Likutei Moharan II:78).
There is no despair, not because there is no reason for despair, but because we are never beyond hope.
Even if the world we are dreaming of – a world without violence, antisemitism, racism, economic exploitation, climate disaster – exists only in our dreams, by dreaming it we have begun to make it real.
The Tosafot argue that Shmuel doesn’t really mean that this will be the “only” change and that he also believes the Temple will be rebuilt.
In the Talmud, the Rabbis’ position is stated first. I have inverted the order for clarity.
The Migdal Oz states that the Rambam is referring not to the passage in b. Shabbat 63a, but rather to a parallel passage in b. Brachot 34b, presumably because it comes earlier in the Talmud. That latter passage, though, focuses on individual redemption rather than national or universal redemption. See other parallels in b. Sanhedrin 99a and b. Pesachim 68a. The Rambam, of course, does not say which passage he is referring to.
The Rambam offers a slightly more explicit reinterpretation of Shmuel’s position in his introduction to the tenth chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin, Perek Chelek. As per the previous note, it is not clear that the Rambam is drawing on the specific messianic vision presented by the Rabbis in b. Shabbat 63a as opposed to more general messianic claims in the tradition.
Even if this isn’t how he meant it, perhaps this is how we can read the twelfth of the Rambam’s thirteen principles of faith, also stated in the introduction to Perek Chelek: “The twelfth principle of faith… is to believe and to confirm that the Messiah is coming.” (Introduction to Mishnah Sanhedrin, ch. 10).