May it be a year that lifts our spirits and brings us together.
We are returning, after a brief hiatus, to our weekly emailed Divrei Torah (words of Torah) derived from the conversations we hold each week during our Shabbat morning services. (Shabbat morning services start each week at 10 am. Shacharit, the morning prayer service, runs from about 10-10:45 a.m.; the Torah teaching and discussion runs from about 10:45-11:15, followed by the chanting of brief excerpts of the Torah and haftarah portions, with mourner’s kaddish and the close of the service at just around 11:30. All that communal connection, joy, and spiritual uplift in just 90 minutes! I encourage you to spend that brief part of Shabbat mornings with us!)
This past week we read from the final portion of the book of Bereshit (Genesis) wherein our ancestor Jacob (also known as Israel), who has migrated to Egypt to reunite with his beloved son Joseph, is on his deathbed offering last words and testaments to each of his twelve sons. We focused on an auspicious few words he delivered to his son Judah, a son, though not the first born, who had taken a sort of leadership mantle among the other sons: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the rulers from between his feet, until Shiloh comes” (Gen. 49:10). Later commentators, including one of the leading medieval Jewish scholars, Nachmanides, found this mysterious phrasing to be a reference to a quizzical part of Jewish theology: the Messiah. These words of Jacob, according to Nachmanides, portend the eventual coming of the Messiah out of the line of Judah.
I say quizzical because for many contemporary (at least non-Orthodox) Jews, the Messiah has always figured only cloudily, if at all, in our core understanding of what Jews believe. It rarely, if at all, is touched on in basic Hebrew School education. Some Jews are even surprised to learn it is part of our tradition.
And yet it is. Every time we say the Amidah, which happens at every Jewish service, from Friday nights, to Saturday mornings, to shivah minyanim (gatherings for mourning), we say the words Baruch atah adonai… mevi goel livenei veneihem lema’an shemo beahava. Blessed are You Adonai… who brings a Redeemer to the descendants of [our ancestors] (i.e., us) for the sake of Your name, in love.
What is a “Redeemer” if not the Messiah?
So what do we do with this if the “Messiah” is not a word or an idea with which we feel comfortable or at home or which makes any sense to us?
The participants in our conversation spoke of many ideas as to how they understood that term, many of which boiled down to one concept: hope. The articulation of the Messiah (a figure which Jewish texts themselves are not necessarily consistent about; many different depictions in many different texts articulate different images of what “Messiah” means, that differentiation itself being a very Jewish experience) for us was a means of expressing the fundamental hopefulness with which we view the world. No matter the troubles we go through—and wow have we gone through some troubles over the generations and lately—our belief is one that speaks to the fundamental goodness and holiness in the universe. As one Conservative movement document put it, the “central thrust” of the metaphor of a messianic age is that “in partnership with God, we can create an ever more perfect social order — not inevitably, not steadily, and perhaps not in our lifetimes — but eventually, and with the proviso that we strive to the extent of our ability to help bring it about.”
