Waiting for the Messiah. Boris Gulko

Waiting for the Messiah.

Boris Gulko

Judaism gives clear life instructions what Jew can eat, when and how, when and where to pray, the rules of intimate life. But information how to organize public life is not implemented. In the Torah, God allows, if we want: When you have entered the land ADONAI your God is giving you, have taken possession of it and are living there, you may say, 'I want to have a king over me, like all the other nations around me.'" (Deuteronomy 17:14 -15). But when the Jews came to the Prophet Shmuel asking about the King, Almighty condemned us for it. He explained: "Not you Shmuel got denied but they rejected Me from the reign over them" (8:8).
Lack of instructions on "proper organization of society” means one can guess that a "proper" one simply doesn’t exist. Rather, it exists, but only upon the coming of the Messiah. In other words, if we notice that our society is organized in a perfect way it’s a sign of those Messianic times, and  the Messiah is among us.
The belief in the coming of the Messiah is one of the 13 faith principles formulated by Rambam[A1] . In general, it is the belief in the coming of a brighter future. No other particular doctrine caused so much trouble to Jews.
At the beginning of our era Jews of Judea firmly believed that the time of Messiah had come.  Some mistook took this carpenter from Nazareth, who promised bright future immediately: "Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” A generation has passed (if it to considered that the crucifixion of Jesus happened in 33 years), and the Jews, hopeful that the Messianic time had come, staged a revolt against Rome (68-70 A.C. ), which cost us the Temple of Jerusalem and 18 centuries of dispersion. The next serious candidate for the role of Messiah was a Turkish Jew Shabbataj Zvi; he has inspired Jewish world with promises, but disappointed everyone in 1666 by converting to Islam.
After such failures in mystical messianic movements, Jews created rational messianic movement. The grandson of a Rabbi, Karl Marx made up a detailed secular instruction how to build a brighter future. The main innovation of Marx was the international nature of his “messiahship” as relating to all peoples.
The Jews of the world enthusiastically adopted a messianic project of Marx. The first attempt to implement it was the Russian experiment. Leon Trotsky, a Jew, successfully organized the October revolution in 1917, created the Red Army, led it to victory in the Civil War and handed over the power to two Messiahs (the concept of two messiahs exists in Judaism. In Christianity there are two comings of one Messiah.). Messiahs of Marxism were Lenin and Stalin; Jews from Europe and America, even from Palestine came over to help build a bright future in the USSR. Others enthusiastically watched over the success of this enterprise.
The end of Jewish participation in building a better future in the USSR was the year 1937, when Stalin simply killed off messianic Jews-Socialists. In the United States secular Jews remained committed to Marx version of socialist messianship.
Recently, one of them almost became the President. Only scamming of the Democratic Party who wanted to see the Black Messiah, a woman or someone out of sex minorities, but not the Jew, did not permit socialist Bernie Sanders to lead the country to the bright future of Marxism.
The views of American Jews are reflected in the sociological survey held by my 9-year-old granddaughter Nessa. She informed me that her schoolmates at Jewish school (it means their parents) believe that the best President for the United States wouldn’t be Trump or Hillary, but Sanders.
However, you should not assume that all American Jews are impervious to experience. In 70-is Irving Kristol[A2]  has formulated a new ideology, calling it “neo-conservatism”, as he described the views of "liberals, returning from the world of dreams to reality". In the book "Two cheers for capitalism" Kristol acknowledged that capitalism deserves praise, because it works in a simple, tangible sense of the word, "and that it corresponds to the notion of personal liberty”. But capitalism of "neo-conservative” by Kristol also  needed  a moral message. Kristol insisted that to maintain modern democracies any economic philosophy needs to be expanded by "political philosophy, moral philosophy and even religious thought."
Golden time neo-conservatism marked 8 years of Reagan's Presidency, who also adopted a new ideology. Economic success of United States was added by an ideological triumph of democracy abroad over the doctrine of socialism and by the liberation of the Eastern European countries from the bondage of Marxism. The success was so resounding that Reagan successor Bush Sr. declared the coming of "new world order" and the triumph of democracy and capitalism in the world, and Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about “The end of History”. It seemed the Messianic times have arrived.
Natan Sharansky [A3] in his book "in defense of democracy", too, invited to resolve all the world's problems by matrix of neo-conservatism. It made a great impression on Bush Jr.  "Democracies don’t attack each other", repeated Sharansky in his numerous interviews on American TV.
It is so, when it comes to Belgium with Netherlands. But when America tried to solve the problems of Afghanistan and Iraq in accordance with the newly found secret of neo-conservatism, it turned out that democracy for Islamic countries is the same as preaching vegetarianism to a pack of wolves.
Equally doomed was  President Obama’s attempt to breathe life into the idea of Islamic democracy, aiding to replace United States ally Mubarak in Egypt with "Democratic" Muslim Brotherhood. Generous Obama supported the "brothers" with one and a half billion of American money, but Egyptians overthrew Obama’s "Democrats". It became apparent that the ideology of neo-conservatism for Muslim countries has failed.
The formal completion of the neo-conservatism was the victory at the last election, Donald Trump, who rejected this “messiahship” for the foreign policy of the United States and proclaimed the country’s national interests as a priority.
Neo-conservatives panicked. The editor of the Weekly Standard, William, the  son of Irving Kristol, Chief foreign policy columnist of Wall Street Journal  Brett Stevens and their associates created Republican movement ”Never Trump”  and announced that they prefer to have Hillary for the President.  This means they would prefer that the United States would opt for the way of Venezuela, but did not relinquish idealism in their foreign policy. Intellectual Jewish magazine “Commentary” took anti-Trump position. The most popular American columnist Charles Krauthammer in two weekly columns reported before the election that he wouldn’t vote for either one of the principal candidates, which means, in fact, that he supported Hillary, who was winning polls at the time.  Political analyst David Goldman described this position as "one of the most bizarre and stupid episodes in the political history of the Jews". He quoted Irving Kristol: «the Jews to this day continue to combine almost pathologically intense interest in politics with a seemingly equally intense penchant for political stupidity, often passing into the realm of political suicide.”
President Trump is the friendliest to Israel American leader in the history of the Jewish State. Now, if the Israelis do not throw off their petty squabbling Government about Netanyahu couple drinking pink champagne and smoking cigars and won’t get entangled in the next elections, they will be able to give up the deadly idea of "two States for two peoples," to extend Israeli sovereignty on the "zone S" in Judea and Samaria, i.e. to lands not occupied by Arab towns and villages and to have the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.
Is President Trump the Messiah? Because the Messiah doesn’t necessarily have to be a Jew. The Prophet Isaiah (45:1) predicted the Messiah as Koresh (also called by Kir). King Koresh, gaining Babylon, actually allowed the Jews to return from exile in the land of Israel and commanded them to rebuild the Temple destroyed by King of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar -- quite impressive for non-Jewish Messiah.
Trump is a Christian, a follower of the optimistic teachings of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, contained in his book “The power of positive thinking". Having Jewish daughter and grandchildren, he is a natural bridge between American Zionism (it was the name Puritans, the founders of this country, called it) and Jews, between, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "almost chosen people," and the chosen ones.
Trump promises to do much for America. If at the same time it will help us to incorporate our hereditary lands of Judea and Samaria into the Jewish state, returns the status of Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jews to the world, ready for construction of the third Temple, he will deserve an honor to be considered Jewish Messiah, as was the Persian King of 6^th century B.C. Koresh.
If this does not happen, we will continue to expect the Messiah, because faith in his coming is one of the 13 principles of our Faith.
                                                                       Translated by Alla Axelrod 02/02/2017

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 [A1]Rabbi Moses ben Maimon  commonly known as Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym   Rambam,   was a medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.

 [A2]Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism." 

 [A3]Natan Sharansky is an Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who, as a refusnik in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, spent nine years in Soviet prisons.