The modern messianic Zionism that keeps alive our hope

While there is no doubt that a national Jewish state can be, and has been, ethically compromised by the need to defend its borders, its existence nonetheless realises the possibility of a fully humane society.

In 2024, when the gulf between Israel’s reality and its ideal seems wider than ever, we need reminding that in the years after the pogroms and the Holocaust, a Jewish state was seen as a messianic event in world history.

Almost miraculously, a people persecuted for 2,000 years could now enjoy a day-to-day life free from the threat of the arbitrary, unpunished violence that had characterised the Jewish condition in the diaspora. Zionism anticipated a world without mass-murder.

“Zion” was a symbol of eternal sanctuary, not just for Jews but for defenceless sufferers everywhere. Zionism was the project of building, and rebuilding from its ruins, a better world, one mitzvah at a time.

As such, for modern Jewish thinkers, the coming of a messianic era didn’t require an apocalypse or a Messiah sent from heaven. On the contrary, for a post-Holocaust philosopher like Emmanuel Levinas, even the smallest courtesy - holding open a door for another person and saying, “After you!” - assures us that a kinder world is already on its way.

For him, this messianic ethic found yet more powerful expression in Israel. For it is only there that Jews can be ethically and politically responsible for the wellbeing of their neighbour.

I remain convinced that the messianic is still the practical redemption - the returning home - of love from its captivity to hate. It therefore remains more of a verb than an adjective. And there are numberless examples of how ordinary Jews, and Jews and Muslims together, have been “doing” the messianic before and since October 7, seldom, if ever, using the word “messianic” at all.

In Israel, for two weeks after October 7 massacres, the chevrot kadisha prepared the bodies of women raped and mutilated by Hamas for burial. The tenderness with which the women gently washed and wrapped their corpses surely brought the messianic “not yet” a little closer to the “now”. For as Shari Mendes, a volunteer for the IDF’s chevra kadisha put it, the room she was working in was not only full of death, but also full of love.

Or again, the modern messianic “now” in the “not-yet” may be discernible in the work of Zaka, another body of volunteers who find and collect the dead with due care and honour. The terrible labours of Zaka, like those of the chevrot kadisha, are a direct revelation of a God who is on call 24/7, the First of the first responders.

In their work, the resurrective word of love is as strong as death, strong enough to reach even those who can no longer hear it.

Ahavat Yisrael, the love of the Jewish people for the Jewish people, must always be radiating outwards from Jerusalem into the world. It has been famously shining since 1970, in the village of Wahat al-Salam-Neve Shalom, the Arabic and Hebrew name for Oasis of Peace where Arab and Jewish Israeli children are coeducated. Here, friendship between a Jewish child and a Palestinian child anticipates neighbourly peace between all peoples in the generations to come.

More recently, others, like Tag Meir, a meta-denominational coalition of Jewish organisations combating racism in Israel, have been “doing” the messianic since they began to take young olive trees in pots to Palestinians or Christians whose sacred places have been attacked by far-right anti-Arab Jewish groups. These Jews pay their calls of sympathy or condolence in the hope of saying that they are sorry and ashamed for the attack, and in the hope of being invited to sit down and drink coffee with their hosts.

I know that faith in the transformative power of a cup of coffee or a little tree growing in a pot seems almost laughable in the face of Hamas’ knives, Iran’s drones and missiles and the heavy weaponry of the IDF. But the point is that the messianic has always arrived quietly, not so much through the wide gate of big diplomacy or warfare, as through the narrow gate of small ethics.

It has often been said that every second of time is the strait or narrow gate through which the Messiah might come. We all have a narrow messianic gate in our lives: the door to our homes.

And at any one of them, there might be a welcome doormat like the one that was found in a burnt-out home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza where, on October 7 over 60 Jews were murdered and 18 abducted as hostages. The doormat read, in Arabic, “welcome”. The owner has now returned to his home to Kfar Aza. I hope his doormat is still there.

And surely the messianic will be with us when, just over the border from a Jewish home in Israel, is an Arab home in Palestine that has one with “Shalom”, in Hebrew letters, at its door.

This is an abbreviated version given earlier this month by Professor Raphael at a UN Academic-sponsored conference on Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation at the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University