Thoughts on the Messiah in Judaism
Isn't amazing/annoying/ridiculous how you can have an idea for a blog post that is so pervasive in your mind that if you don't have time to write it up and do it justice, it can prevent you from blogging anything else? I'm afraid that's what happened with this one, which is over a week old in its inception, but I hope to finish it now. It's more of an essay than a blog post, and perhaps I should delegate longer articles such as this to a special 'essays' blog, but then... then I have two blogs to take care of. That's dumb. I'll just try to not let the more complicated/deep posts keep me from the shorter/more mundane info. I'll shut up now and present you with the blog post I started last weekend, and just add to it without changing any of the tenses, etc. I've done some research on the subject since then, so I have included information not only from the talk I attended, but from other sources as well. This is by no means a full exegesis of the subject, and I don't quote my sources -- if you're at all interested, I'll point you in the right direction. Mostly this is just about my exploration.
This morning our temple (it feels weird that I can even say that) had a lecture in their ongoing lecture series given by the rabbi of the temple on the historical and current views of the messiah in Judaism, and on a whim I decided to attend. Being a recovering Christian, my relationship to Judaism has been interesting in its precarious ambivalence. On the one hand, everything that I have experienced about Reform Judaism (and Jewish Renewal, a more liberal offshoot) has been a positive, with themes of living in the now instead of worrying about the hereafter, and topics of social justice and personal responsibility dominating over issues of sovereign divinity -- and yet, there is a tradition in Christianity that it is the fulfillment of scores of ancient biblical prophesy, and it is undeniable that there is messianic content all over modern Judaism. References to the messiah are prevalent in its prayers, referenced in its holiday rituals... and so, for one who is considering (and re-considering) the meaning of faith and organized religion in his own life, the issue has been one that's been a sticky one for me. Am I exploring an ancient predecessor to Christianity, or am I looking at an entirely new religion that shares nothing with Christianity other than the race of their founders.
So, I attended in hope of answering some of these questions for myself, or at least get a better idea of what I might be dealing with, since I am (with my family) on the path of a Jewish life. What I discovered both about Judaism and about myself was illuminating. Firstly, I discovered that the subject isn't a simple one, and it merits a more complete investigation for a full understanding of all the nuances. The discussion can be broken into several parts: 1) What is the Messiah (and what is it not)?, 2) What is expected of the Messiah?, and 3) What is the value of the Messiah to Judaism and Jewish thought?
As it turns out (very much in conflict with the traditional Christian teachings), there are very few references to what could be construed as the messiah in the Torah, and only a few more when you consider the whole Tanahk (the equivalent of the 'old testament', or the Hebrew Bible). It turns out that messianic thinking is post-bibical, and doesn't really take off in earnest until a hundred years or so after the death of Jesus, during what is referred to as the 'Rabbinic' period, after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem. Obviously there were those who had ideas of a savior, and it was active in the Jewish imagination, and bolstered by some oblique references to a descendant of David rescuing the Jews and during the time of Roman oppression, otherwise the cult of Jesus wouldn't have arisen when it did. That being said, it seems that the cult of Jesus arose out of a misunderstanding in translation of the meaning of certain phrases in the Tanahk which refer to 'the son of god', which evidently is not to be taken literally, but is a mark of piety used to describe the favored of god, either marking the Jewish people, or its leaders. The attribution of divinity to Jesus is completely outside of the traditional jewish messianic tradition, which marks the messiah not as a literal son of God, but as the mortal leader of the Jews who would deliver the Jewish people from persecution, and in some traditions lead them to redemption (as in the End of Days). I have to say, this information was enlightening to someone that's been told the stories from a very young age that Jesus was the fulfillment of thousands of years of irrefutable prophecy and yearnings of the Jews. In the light of this new information of such a fundamental misunderstanding, it's now comprehensible how a people could turn their back on their savior in the way that is described in the gospel. Even if you take the report of the gospel as literally historically accurate (with or without the accounts of miracles), you must account that the Jews of Jesus' time were not looking for a literal avatar or incarnation of God in their messiah. Rather, they were looking for a mortal leader who was a descendant of the line of David, who would lead them out of oppression on the physical plane.
So, as the idea of the messiah developed over the time between the destruction of the temple and more-or-less modern times, there have been several postulations of the meaning of the messiah, and there have been multiple claims to the Messiah title by would-be saviors over that same period. Each story is interesting and unique, and each had its effects on the Jewish people, but I won't go into that here as it is unimportant to my personal exploration (though I must say each story fascinates me and I'm liable to do some more reading on the subject) -- what is interesting is that there have evolved several differing ideas of what the coming of the messiah actually means. From the first century up through the 11th or 12 century, the idea of the messiah was the arrival of an actual individual who would assume the mantle of leader for the Jewish people, and deliver them from their woes. In specific, these are the expectations of the messiah from the perspective of the traditional view, pulled from wikipedia entry on Jewish Eschatology:
The Hebrew word Mashiach (or Moshiach) means anointed one, and refers to a mortal human being. Within Judaism, the Mashiach is a human being who will be a descendant of King David continuing the Davidic line, and who will usher in a messianic era of peace and prosperity for Israel and all the nations of the world. The job description, as such, is this:
- All of the people of Israel will come back to Torah
- The people of Israel will be gathered back to the land of Israel.
- The Holy Temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt.
- 4. Israel will live superior among the nations, and will have no need to defend herself.
- 5. War and famine will end, and an era of peace and prosperity will come upon the Earth.
Pretty basic, nice idea -- not sure I buy into it, but nowhere is there mention of being God. The second idea of the messiah comes out of the Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism, born out of 13th century Spain), which is the idea not of an individual human who comes as the savior, but of the ushering in of a messianic age in which all the happy things about what the messiah would do would just 'happen'.
This is all a gross oversimplification, and there are many nuances around modern belief of the messiah, but what strikes me as interesting are the questions of the value of messianic thinking in modern Judaism, as that is what particularly pertains to my own experience. What's interesting to note is, at least in Reform Judaism (which I am learning more and more about every day), talk of the messiah is pretty much missing from the average person's minds and perspectives as the religion tends to focus on the social activism work of the day-to-day. The idea of the messiah remains in the background, in the prayers and in the rituals for reasons I see as more practical than spiritual. For the messiah to appear, it is postulated by the rabbis and philosophers that either the Jews will be in a really really bad place, or in a really really good place (there are details to those qualitative states, but I'll spare you and tell you that either condition is asymptotical and not really a possibility) -- so I see these possibilities as incentives towards good works and an evolutionary mechanism to hold together a group in despair through the hardest of times with the carrot of divine intervention. The Jewish faith, at base, is a method for 'the good life', meaning life here and now, not after death. The questions of the afterlife are relatively unimportant to the common practitioner. Starting to sound a bit like secular humanism? I thought so too.
In doing this exploration, all sorts of other interesting information came up for me such as the nonexistence of Hell for the Jews (beyond a pergatory-like place called 'Gehenna' which the max time you can stay there is one year, and is there to help purify the soul), the non-focus on an afterlife (this is also underdescribed in the religion in practice and in text), as well as what it means to the Jews to be 'chosen' (this is a misreading -- they are not THE chosen people, but instead are A chosen people FOR a specific purpose, not precluding other chosen peoples). I'm sure I'll be filling you all in later in future blog posts, but this one has gotten too long already. I'm finding it all very fascinating, and very comforting. This is not Christian-lite, but really an entirely different animal altogether. I am down with that.
Freakin' awesome post. Something I've never really considered before. Man, did those writers get some shit WRONG or what? There's also something out there about a mistranslation leading to Mary becoming "a virgin" instead of "beloved of God" or something. Yikes.
In any case, about that salon...
As I said, there are more posts to come on this topic. I'm finding it really fascinating.
In contrast to the claims that the early Jews were not looking for a literal son of God based on the prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament), there is clear evidence that speaks contrary to this. In the 1940-1950s, an incredible discovery called the Dead Sea Scrolls were gathered that included almost all of the Hebrew Scriptures as well as other writings including early commentaries.
In the fall of 1991, many unpublished portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls were released to libraries around the world. A number of new fragments have come forth which have provided remarkable new insights regarding the Messianic beliefs of the Qumran Jews during that period (approximately 100 B.C.).
The people of the Qumran community, the apparent writers of the scrolls, have been described as "religious end time zealots" by some scholars, and as mainstream Jews by others. One thing is certain, they wrote extensively about the Messiah. Therefore, if the Messiah was believed to be the Son of God by ancient Jews, then it should not be surprising to find that belief expressed in the writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, that is exactly what we find.
The "Son of God" Fragment 4Q246
In a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls, called the "Son of God" fragment 4Q246, we see an astonishing reference to a supernatural Messiah who is called the Son of God:
"He shall be called the Son of the God; they will call him the Son of the Most High...He will judge the earth in righteousness...and every nation will bow down to him...with (God's) help he will make war, and...[God] will give all the peoples into his power." The passage is filled with undeniable Messianic images. The writer of this text believed that the Messiah would "judge the earth in righteousness" and that the nations "will bow down to him." The text speaks not of multiple Messiah figures but of a single individual. This Messiah figure is triumphant and exalted and specifically referred to as the "Son of God...Son of the Most High!" His strength, accomplishments and character clearly reveal that he is not an ordinary man, but he was believed by these people to be a supernatural being.
To find a Messianic figure being called "the Son of God," the "Son of the Most High," by the Jewish believers in Qumran, is astonishing and conclusive! To them, the Messiah would be the Son of God!
In another recently published Dead Sea Scroll text, fragment 4Q521, we find another reference to a single Messiah figure who also possesses supernatural "god-like" traits. It describes the resurrection of the dead occurring as a result of the Messiah's work. It contains language which parallels the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke.
The 4Q521 text reads as follows:
"The heavens and the earth will obey his Messiah, the sea and all that is in them. He will not turn aside from the commandment of the Holy Ones. Take strength in his mighty work all ye who seek the Lord. Will ye not find the Lord in this, all ye who wait for him with hope in your hearts? Surely the Lord will seek out the pious, and will call the righteous by name. His spirit will hover over the poor; by his might will he restore the faithful. He will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal kingdom. He will release the captives, make the blind see, raise up the down trodden. Forever I will cleave to him against the powerful and I will trust in his loving kindness and in his goodness forever. His holy Messiah will not be slow in coming. And as for the wonders that are not the work of the Lord, when he, that is the Messiah, comes then he will heal the sick, resurrect the dead, and to the poor announce glad tidings. He will lead the holy ones, he will shepherd them. He will do all of it."
In this fascinating text we see a remarkable similarity to the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity regarding the Messiah. The Jews at Qumran believed that the Messiah would be the Son of God, that he would be a supernatural being, that he would raise the dead, heal the sick and announce glad tidings to the poor. Clearly no ordinary man could do such work. These two scroll fragments are believed by scholars to be as old as 100 B.C.!
Most modern rabbis and Jewish Bible scholars claim that the belief that the Messiah would be a supernatural Son of God is a Christian doctrine and not a rabbinical one. Clearly, however, the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls now nullifies that allegation. The Christian Messianic beliefs regarding the "Sonship" and supernatural character of the Messiah are doctrines that were espoused by the Jews at Qumran. The evidence speaks for itself. According to the views of ancient Judaism, the Messiah is the Son of God!
Jesus willingly sacrificed Himself on a cross, in fulfillment of prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures, to pay the debt for our sins. As Jesus said, "Whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." That gift of salvation is made available to you. To receive it, willingly acknowledge to God that you are a sinner, believe in what Jesus did on the cross to pay the debt of your sins, ask God to forgive you of your sins and for Jesus to be your Savior and Lord. My hope and prayer is that you'll come to that decision.
I appreciate your concern and your input, Jeff, but I must respectfully disagree with your findings that one of many interpretations of the writings of a single group of Essene Jews captures the belief system of the entire Jewish population, either at the time of Jesus, or afterwards. I know it does not represent the beliefs of modern Jewish thought. However, assertaining the authenticity of the scrolls as records of the beliefs of the jews of the age is not important to me. For me, the myth of Jesus being the incarnate actual son of God is not meaningful -- I find the belief that the life of Christ is a metaphor for a philosophical/mystical code of ethics holds much more meaning. "There is no way to the father save through me" has much more meaning to me as a metaphorical statement about ethical action than it does about direct worship of a singular entity. But each must find their own path to peace in this world -- mine does not include damnation and salvation. To me, we are not born sinners, but are born as divine beings. We must remember our own divinity and bring that forth -- to fear a hell is to live in it. Continue to pray for me, as it is what makes your own belief meaningful. I will accept your prayers as an expression of your own authentic love and concern for me. However, I am afraid I am lost to the Christian myth for the time being.
Hi again. I appreciate your honesty in your response, and I hope you're doing well. To follow-up on what I previously mentioned, there is so much more regarding messianic expections that are parallel to what is detailed in the gospels, mentioned in other early writings before the birth of Christ, other than what I already mentioned. If you have an interest to investigate more, here are two links to MP3 recordings of presentations relating to the subject: http://marshill.org/audio/Search%20for%20Messiah%20Part%201.mp3 , and http://marshill.org/audio/Search%20for%20Messiah%20Part%202.mp3 . I will certainly continue to pray for you with the hope that someday, you'll come to salvation through Jesus Christ. Over the years, God's hand in my life has been absolutely incredible, and I could share so many stories of what He has done with me and for me that it would just blow your mind. I hope that's something that you'll experience for yourself through Jesus Christ someday.
Iam joiniong this post kind of late but I agree with Jeff. Modern Judaism is just that, it has forsaken a lot of tradition and teachings and adopted a lot of "new-age" thinking.
Due to the above MP3 links no longer being available, here's a link to a book posted online called "The Search For Messiah" that gives more details on early Jewish writings confirming their interpretation of prophetic Hebrew Scriptures addressing the coming of Messiah (chapter 6 is especially an interesting read):
http://blueletterbible.org/Comm/mark_eastman/messiah/index.html
While I appreciate your link, it must be recognized that the site is a Christian site, and takes its interpretations with the presupposition that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in the books of the prophets, and it takes a very particular point of view about the nature of the Messiah which is very Christian. It should be acknowledged that the non-Christian Jewish perspective is very different both as to the nature of the Messiah, and to the meaning of the word and the timing.
As for my own perspective, I view the books of the prophets not as messages to come true or not, but warnings and guideposts very specifically intended for the people at the time of the prophecies, to help them make decisions about their lives and their actions. I also take a historical view and not an inspirational view of the holy books, and see them as texts written and revised over time by many hands (and historical analysis bears out evidence of this reality), so that prophecies written and recorded are subject to scrutiny, as they may have been modified to be more true or in accord with events of history. In fact, all of the books of the bible, the Jewish bible, and the Christian New Testament, show evidence of alteration over time. A really fascinating read for you in regards to this topic is a book called 'Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the bible and why' by Bart D. Ehrman': http://books.google.com/books?id=kXdXKaJWs2UC&dq=misquoting+jesus&pg=PP1&ots=a-sOdQnn5_&sig=4hZa73iIwY44XQl1ZU82Ml-yljE&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26q%3Dmisquoting%2Bjesus%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail
Books and words are human responses to the Divine, and are not spoken from the mouth of a personal, anthropomorphic God. Prophecies are responses of particular inspired men to the events of their times, but are not foretellings of future events.
And, at base, I'm not interested in
The main problem with the view that words are only human responses to the Divine (i.e. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) is that these writings are very specific as to declaring what the Lord says. Furthermore, literal fulfillments of prophecies in those books such as regarding the lands of Babylon, Samaria, and especially Tyre, confirm that these prophets simply spoke what the Lord Himself declared, including the Messiah to come.
This is a problem for you more than it is a problem for me. My world view allows people to speak from their heart and to believe they are speaking the word of God and still not actually be transcribing word for word what comes from the mouth of a manifested diety. As for literal fulfillment of prophecy, historical analysis bears out that most if not all of these predictions were either corrected / written / transcribed after the event took place, or were vague enough to be fulfilled by many acts through history. This is why we've had so many people believe they were on the cusp of the end of days because they could point to prophecy in scripture and point to the world around them and say the prophecy was being fulfilled. Let us just look as recently to the Late Great Planet Earth for example. Also, logically speaking, if I say something that comes true, it does not automatically guarantee that everything I say will come true. Nostrodamus has been credited with many correct predictions in his aphorisms, but one would not call him a prophet.
At base, my faith does not require a God that speaks directly to his/her/its people literally from a divine mouth to human ears. It doesn't correspond to the world's laws, and isn't necessary for a deep spiritual understanding of our place in the universe. If anything, such a God causes more problems than it solves, and sets us up in a world where we must have historical proof of the validity of supernatural acts, or our faith will fall like a house of cards. Creationism, direct revelation, and redemption through the birth of a divine but mortal diety are not in my spiritual vocabulary. I've learned too much about the world, about history, and about the roots of Judaism to require or accept them. I do not mean to demean anyone else's faith, but it's just not something that I share.
A contrary point of view doesn't demean my faith. Literal fulfillment of prophecies of Scripture speak for themselves at face value. And as to the view of certain prophecies being written after their fulfillment, that would be difficult to argue in many cases. For example, in the very book that outlines God's instructions of the sacrificial system to the Jews before they went into their own land (Leviticus), Leviticus 26 is very clear as to what God told them would happen if they were to go into idolatry and if they didn't let their land rest every Sabbath year: They would be taken captive by their enemies and scattered among the nations. Centuries later, the fulfillment of this began when King Nebuchadnezzar invaded Israel and took the Jews as captives. And yet the very book that outlined their sacrificial system told them in advance what would happen in their disobedience. Around the time of their captivity, the people of Tyre attempted to loot the land, thus resulting in a series of prophecies against Tyre in Ezekiel 26, including the fulfillment of the prophecy of the land being a place to spread nets (the land became a fishing village well over 2000 years later). In Daniel 9:24-26, years after Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem, the Lord revealed to Daniel the timeline until the coming of the Messiah, and the timeline began with the command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2:1-8). The end of that timeline was at the period of time when Jesus was on the Earth. They had the Hebrew Scriptures, including the Septuagint (a Greek translation), when Jesus' ministry took place. The prophecy in Daniel 9 would go on to say that the Messiah would be cut off. This was fulfilled when Jesus was crucified. It then goes on to foretell about the destruction of the city and the sanctuary. They had these Scriptures when the soldiers of Titus, a Roman general, destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in 70 A.D.
Personal faith and personal interpretations of Scripture from myself or anyone else are irrelevant to what the Scriptures say at face value, including that of Messiah.
The problem is, the archeology and study of scriptural authenticity and historical origins corroborates my position that texts were altered after the fact. In fact, in most cases we don't have access to the original texts, and what we do have are the 5th or 6th generation copies of originals, which themselves are suspect to modifications. The truth is, our oldest documents (Nash, Dead Sea Scrolls) only date back to around the first or second century C.E. or in the most generous carbon dating, perhaps 150 B.C.E., and those texts are damaged and incomplete. The next oldest documents are the Masoretic texts dating to the 9th century C.E. Even in those ancient texts, we have no guarantee of their authenticity, as the dates of the events recorded are older than the documents.
However, my point is not to debate the authenticity of the scriptural texts due to age or their ability / record to have predicted a future. My points are dual - first, the ability for a person / text to predict the future is not sufficient evidence to claim those texts were the word of God, as we've had positive evidence of predictive texts in the past from non-theological sources (Nostradamus) and secondly, my particular tradition doesn't require the texts to be authentic or predictive in order for them to have meaning. Modern Reform Judaism focuses not on what the texts meant to our ancestors, but what they mean to us today. It's not important to us about the predictive powers of the prophets, but what the prophets can say to us today, in the 21st century. For the Jew, there is no second covenant, and so the covenant is still in tact -- the cooperative relationship between God and mankind. What was written in the Tanak is supposed to hold meaning for us today as well as in ancient days, so our practice is to be interpretive in our readings, not literal. We no longer deal with the same realities in the modern world, but each has their modern-day correlative. My faith isn't reliant on whether or not I can read the original word of God, but if I can find God in the words that I read.
You really should take a look at 'Misquoting Jesus' - It's a fascinating historical analysis about the authenticity of scriptural texts, and is extremely illuminative to the reality that we don't have access to the original texts and much change has been evidenced in what we do have today. And I speak not only about the tanak, but especially to the Christian New Testament texts. If historical authenticity is important to you, it's important that you explore this book and have a dialog with what it has to say. I know it was extremely eye-opening for me.
However, as I said, my faith does not rely on the authenticity of the texts I study, but only that I approach the tradition with an openness and a willingness to find divine purpose in the recorded writings of those pursuers of truth that came before me.
Regarding the issue of the reliability of the Masoretic texts, keep in mind the method of transmission of the texts up to that point.
From 100-500 A.D., the Talmudists were responsible for transcribing the Hebrew Scriptures. The painstaking process by which they did this is rather unique. The Scriptures were written on the skins of clean animals. Each skin was fastened together with strings that also came from clean animals. Each skin was required to have a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire codex. Black was the only color of ink that could be used, and it needed to be prepared through a special recipe. The transcriber was to write a copy that was without fault. Absolutely nothing was to be written from memory. Specific spacing was required between every consonant, section and book. Upon completion, the Talmudists considered their finished work to be an exact copy of the Scriptures and considered it to be equal with other copies (even if the transcription was much newer than others).
From 500-900 A.D., the Massoretes continued the work of transmitting the Hebrew text. They were responsible for editing and standardizing the text. This included adding vowel points to insure proper pronunciation. Also, to verify the accuracy of the text, they logged statistical data of the text that a computer nowadays could instantly calculate. Some of these disciplined calculations included counting the number of times each letter of the alphabet appears in each book, counting the number of words and letters in each book, enumerating sentences which contained either all of the letters of the alphabet or a certain number of them, and many other detailed calculations. The end result of this process was a system to test the accuracy of a transcription of the Hebrew text.
When you put together the copying methods of both the Talmudists and Massoretes over a span of eight centuries, you come up with a very reliable transmission of the Hebrew text.
And regarding the view of fulfilled prophecies not confirming the Scriptures being the Word of God, considering how specific those prophecies were, who was specifically addressed in those prophecies, and how they were fulfilled (like the prophecies I mentioned of Tyre and Daniel 9), I disagree on that point. And again, in the examples I mentioned, they had those Scriptures already in existence when they were fulfilled. Even in the last 60 years, considering the happenings regarding Jerusalem, and the Jews returning to Jerusalem after it became a nation again in 1948, the things foretold in Zechariah 12:2-6 are starting to take shape (i.e. "Behold, I will make Jerusalem a bowl of reeling for the peoples all around. Judah shall be caught up in the siege upon Jerusalem, when all the nations of the earth gather against her. In that day, I will make Jerusalem a stone for all the peoples to lift; all who lift it shall injure themselves." and "They shall devour all the besieging peoples right and left; and Jerusalem shall continue on its site, in Jerusalem.")
Of course, you're taking on faith that the act of transcription was apolitical, and that the description you gave is actually true, or just what was reported. The oldest complete texts we have are only 1100 years old, and before that it's pure faith that they were identical to what we have today. Also, the whole of the Tanak didn't exist until after the destruction of the temple, and was complied by the Pharasees along with the myth of the revelation on Sinai, and even at that point, the Rabbis indicated that the Torah was not to be taken literally, but needed to be seen through the interpretive and educating lense of the Rabbinical order. Leviticus, though supposedly dating back to the days of Moses, really only completely existed in one form after the destruction of the second temple. During the Temple cult, there was no Torah, no Jewish bible, only collected scrolls and teachings that were only read and copied by the few, and were often modified and revised. The book 'Who Wrote the Bible' by Richard Freidman gives a very cogent analysis of the four identified sources of the Jewish bible, and this research is regarded not only as serious scholarship, but is the dominant theory of the authorship of the text. The truth resembles a story of different peoples from different times and areas bringing together their own traditions and their own stories of events, and that a redactor during the post-temple period wove all the stories together in order to save a faith from certain demise after the center of their religious activity was destroyed.
As for the fulfillment of prophecy, I still stand that we have had hundreds of biblical scholars and true believes call forth the truth that they lived in the end of days, pointing to the same passages as you and pointing to the times before them and declaring they were reading all of the signs correctly, and each generation is as sorely disappointed as the last. I think we will have to agree to disagree on these fine points, as I've done too much looking and thinking on these points to be swayed that the prophecies are uniquely coming true today. To me, 'tis hopeful thinking on the part of the faithful. And more power to them, if it helps them live better and more meaningful lives. I think there is the potential for grave danger in end-of-days thinking, as we can choose to ignore our real apocalyptic future in global warming and an ecosystem out of control. We may see the end of the world, but at our own hands, if we don't wake up and do something to save this planet we live on. Of course, I digress. My main point is, I don't base the strength of my faith or the meaning of my life on the fulfillment of prophecy or on the concept of my sins being redeemed by the death of another, be he divine or mortal. I believe we create our own heaven and our own hell right here on Earth, and how we choose to live determines the reality we live in. It's important for us to live right, in the here-and-now, and not spend time worrying about the reality or non-reality of a hereafter. I have no evidence for a live beyond or a world to come, but I have plenty of reason to protect the world I live in right now, and to make it a better place. We Jews believe in Tikkun Olam -- repairing the world, and that is done through our deeds to one another, to ourselves, and to the planet. I engage in good works, and in thoughtful prayer, and with faith God will take care of the rest.