Is This What Redemption Looks Like?

In a column I wrote a few weeks ago, I addressed the pain that sometimes accompanies the experience of prayer in a broken and unredeemed world. “​​It is frustrating to pray for the same things three times a day and not to get them,” I wrote. “It is frustrating to want a better world and not to have one.”

Today, I would like to take a different approach to this same issue, entertaining the idea that the requests we make in our prayers actually have been answered, especially those expressions of national longing for redemption that have animated the Jewish soul throughout history.

We pray for the ingathering of exiles, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the return of Davidic rule, the restoration of the Temple service, and for peace. Is it really possible to say that these prayers have not been answered? After all, here we are—an ingathered Jewish people in a rebuilt and thriving Jerusalem in a sovereign Jewish state where Jewish religious practice and learning flourish. As for peace, we enjoy that too, in a relative, if not an absolute way.

If this isn’t enough for us, I can’t imagine what could ever be.

Then again, it isn’t enough, and the dominant feelings in Israel at this moment in history are anger, fear and resentment.

This is not because we are ungrateful. Our reasons for dissatisfaction are utterly legitimate. There remain societal inequalities, wars, internecine power struggles, and an unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Moreover, the classic signs of Jewish redemption—the Temple service and a Davidic monarchy—have yet to materialize.

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. As Saint Teresa of Ávila said, there are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

Many religious Jews resolve this difficulty by referring to the state of Israel as the “first flowering of our redemption,” the first step in a process that will conclude with the coming of the Messiah and the end of history, war and strife.

This allows Jews to recognize with gratitude the significance of our historic moment, and yet preserves the Messiah as he who, in the words of philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, is always on his way but who never arrives, perched eternally on the ever retreating horizon where we humans mount our most beautiful hopes.

And yet, by claiming that the Messianic process has begun, this shimmering vision is dragged—albeit partially—into the morass of the present, where it becomes distorted. Take, for instance, the idea of the Third Temple. For millennia, the restoration of the Temple on the Temple Mount has been central to the Jewish vision of future redemption, tied to notions of universal peace and accord. When this dream is brought into reality, however, it becomes political. Third Temple activists in Israel believe that a Jewish state ought to be building a Temple on the Temple Mount in the here and now, an idea with terrible implications for the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount. By forcing this dream into our waking reality, these activists have debased it. It is no longer a symbolic light, but an abhorrent form of fundamentalism.

And yet, by claiming that the Messianic process has begun, this shimmering vision is dragged—albeit partially—into the morass of the present, where it becomes distorted.

Another way to resolve the difficulty posed by the simultaneous sense of redemption and brokenness in our midst is to hold like Shmuel, the Talmudic sage who suggested that perhaps our expectations of redemption are unrealistic.

In the Talmud, Shmuel says that there is no difference between this world and the Messianic world (B. Talmud Shabbat 151b). It will not be, as perhaps one might think from the words of Isaiah, a preternaturally blissful utopia in which wolf lies down with lamb. Rather, according to Shmuel, the only change will be the release of the Jewish people from foreign subjugation. He bases this on a passage from Deuteronomy: “for there will never cease to be poor ones in the land” (15:11).

In other words, there will still be work to do in the age of the Messiah. Even in a redeemed world, there will be iniquities and inequities that require our concern and our action. As it is also written in Deuteronomy, “there shall be no needy among you” (15:4). Even though we know that this work of perfecting the world will never be complete, we will not be free to desist from it.

This has a ring of truth to it. The question is, do we want our idea of redemption to have a ring of truth? Is it better to let the vision of future perfection warm us like a flame in the long winter of history? Or is it better to accept redemption when it comes, as Shmuel would recommend, letting go of perfection so that we can get on with things—taking care of people in need and working to improve our lot without reference to unattainable utopias?

I continue to waver on this issue. The machlokets, disputes, that we carry on within ourselves are destined to endure—enlivening us as we pray, knowing not whether we are saying please or thank you.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.