
The End of Days
“There are always people saying that the end of days is upon us and that the messiah is about to come. But they’re always wrong.”
Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
“There are always people saying that the end of days is upon us and that the messiah is about to come. But they’re always wrong.”
Those who claim to care about marginalized voices have nothing to say about those who have no voice at all.
And so we have a difficulty—our prayers have been answered, but it doesn’t look or feel the way we imagined that it would.
We are encouraged to applaud those who flee their Jewishness, and rarely do we get to see those who cherish it, grapple with it, and live it deeply.
As my bird vocabulary expands, the phenomenological world around me grows and deepens.
It’s possible that Bibi, exhausted from putting out PR fires from his new coalition partners, might prefer to join forces with centrists like Lapid and Gantz. The left, tired of Ben-Gvir’s inflammatory rhetoric and policies, may embrace Bibi with open arms.
If Louisa May Alcott, author of “Little Women,” were alive today, would she identify as a trans man?
This is what Judaism offers—a framework for rededication. It is why we pray three times a day. It is why we have festivals throughout the year. It is why we celebrate Hanukkah and continue our endless cyclical journey through the Torah.
Zionism was always a movement for a Jewish state, not a Halachic state, and a Zionist party would pursue policies that ensure that all Jews — from the ultra-Orthodox to the solidly secular — will feel a sense of belonging in the public space.