I had an idea. It was while daydreaming at the sink doing the washing up, but I’m not sure the degree to which location portends to veracity. I was certainly very excited when garbling it out to my wife, but now, facing the commitment of getting it down in writing, I’d feel more confident if instead I’d been bonked on the head by some fruit. But here goes. The messianic era is only possible once the world has finally learnt to stop abusing its Jews.
Quite a fair bit to unpack there! First, I don’t even know if what I’m positing is an original idea. Partly because I’m still trying to define it, and partly because there were and are a lot of much smarter Jews, who have pontificated and argued and written about exactly this kind of stuff, stretching back for a very, very long time. Is it even possible anymore in Judaism to come up with a new idea? I’m probably not the first Jew to say that either.
I should also speak to my state of mind when the idea occurred, to add a bit of flavour. You see, I wasn’t wistfully daydreaming, I was angrily daydreaming. I was taking out my frustration on the dishes, partially peeved with my wife for not rinsing out the Weetabix, but mostly exasperated by a particularly crappy week of antisemitism.
Above the usual background noise, you had newspapers wilfully misrepresenting multiple terrorist attacks in Israel, my old university hosting groups which ban Jews, and then there was BBC News obfuscating and downright misleading about the attack on the Chabad teenagers on Oxford Street.
That incident itself was bad enough, but literally every element of the BBC’s involvement after has been shameful. And now with their fingers in ears ignoring actual proof, and cynically hoping for us to just drop it, it’s like they’re channelling 2018 Labour headquarters.
Needless to say, the dishes got very clean.
It was in that red funk that I started thinking about a world where this kind of thing didn’t happen. It seems that recently Judaism hasn’t tended to bang on too much about the Mashiach. At least my denomination doesn’t. It may be because after 2,000 years of heavily running with our idea, now the whole concept seems kind of a bit Christiany.
It may be because the idea of a perfect world being solely wrought by an individual, diminishes the concept of personal and collective agency which have become central to our community. But regardless of how it can be achieved, or how a culture might label it, for Jews the concept has been the messianic era, a better world based on compassion, equality and peace. The endgame though, has always been that once we get there, the rest of the world will be alright with Jews. I’m suggesting that for the world to get there, it must first learn how to be alright with Jews.
Twenty-five years ago, it really felt like we might be on the home straight. Oslo Accords pointing towards a brighter future, Schindler’s List in the cinema acknowledging the past, Seinfeld the ideal present, of Jews just being allowed to be Jews. Lessons learnt, the wheel of violence and prejudice that had been turning on a 50-year cycle since antiquity seemingly broken. Turns out the wheel was just a bit stuck.
People just love quoting “First they came…”, but what’s not appreciated is that for most of written history, they could only come for the Jews, and they did. We’re the original ‘other’. Our survival has never been predicated on utilising violence or assimilation to force other cultures to adopt our own. We’re the only other that has stayed an other, that has by some anthropological miracle managed to maintain and develop a unique culture whilst remaining a coherent ethnic group across millennia and continents. Whether in Belgium or Bahrain, Iran or Italy, the reaction of the majority, their level of acceptance or how threatened they are by difference, correlates to their own sense of security and peace.
To paraphrase something I read on Twitter, the lessons of our persecution aren’t for Jews to learn from, it’s for the world.
Our job is to continue to exist, to take a stand, and do our part to make a future happen where difference is celebrated and embraced.
It’s tempting to see this as somehow God’s plan. That by scattering us out into the world, the world might learn tolerance. Eventually.
But I’m uncomfortable with the idea of somehow justifying the suffering of our ancestors. The whole idea might be silly.
It might just be me, rigidly standing at a sink, desperately trying to grapple with some kind of meaning for what’s going on.