Having written about my ill-fated attempt to write a doctoral dissertation, a deeply painful topic even after all these years, I find myself returning to that dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. I am going to attempt to edit selections from the dissertation, stripped of their footnotes, to be used as blog posts. I readily acknowledge that this was not a suitable topic for a dissertation. That being said, I still strongly believe in the ideas presented in the dissertation. As such, I wish to present them to my readers. Hopefully, you will find what I have to say useful for understanding the underlying logic of messianism in its political and spiritual forms. Perhaps one of my readers will turn out to be a university administrator, who is so impressed with me as to wish to offer me a doctorate. This is a dissertation about messianism, the willingness to hope against all evidence that history will suddenly and miraculously turn out in one's favor so a failed doctoral student has the right to dream.
The problem that drew me to this topic of political messianism is that there are two basic kinds of messianism, the political and the spiritual and they are fundamentally at odds with each other. What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish when he comes? Perhaps he is supposed to bring back the not so golden biblical age of David and Solomon on the assumption that this time we are going to get things right. In this political messianism, the natural order of things, particularly the existence of politics remains intact. This is essential as this will finally allow us Jews to rule over the gentiles as we were always "meant" to. Alternatively, we can imagine the Messiah ushering in a spiritual era that will transcend the physical world, leaving no room for politics. When Jews, for thousands of years have prayed for the Messiah, it seems that they were simultaneously asking for political power and for the end of politics. Keep in mind that political power is something deeply materialistic, the sort of thing that pious people should abhor. How could such contradictory impulses have survived in one religion without tearing it into factions?
My essential argument is that both political and spiritual messianisms should be understood as the product of a discourse between three different models for a religion to relate to the political. The military model relies on community and ritual. Opposing the military model are two anti-community models, which rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking outside converts to create a new purer community. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. One thinks of Leo Strauss style philosophers, but this can apply to conventional believers as well. Understand that most people, operating within the military model with its focus on lived experience, do not even think in terms of trying to put together a coherent theology.
Judaism is primarily military in its orientation. That being said, it has taken on the esoteric and missionary models, despite the theological difficulties, as a response to certain political realities. This mixture created a certain level of tension as the different models contain contradictory principles. Messianic doctrines serve both as a reflection of this tension within Judaism and as an attempted solution. Messianism has thus served an important role in Judaism in that it is precisely its contradictory political and spiritual poles that have allowed Judaism to mediate the conflict between the three ideological factions.
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