When some compare current affairs as heralding the predictions of ancient prophecies, I get apprehensive. You know there will be bloodshed, especially when discussing the “battles at the end of times”.
War Will Usher in Israel's Redemption? Messianic Fervor Is Gaining Popularity Beyond Religious Fanatics -Haaretz
Subtitle: Disasters are a fertile ground for purveyors of apocalyptic prophecies
Israel's national missions minister isn't alone in thinking that we are living in a miraculous time. Increasing numbers in right-wing circles have lately joined Orit Strock in identifying the war in the Gaza Strip with the War of Gog and Magog, and the ongoing disaster of October 7 with the birth pangs of the Messiah and the advent of redemption. Some, like Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, from the Bnei David yeshiva in the Eli settlement in the West Bank, draw on the words of the founder of religious Zionism, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who said, "When there is a great war in the world, the power of the Messiah awakens." War has a purifying power, Rabbi Kook maintains, because it arouses the divine in humanity and helps overcome the selfish instinct. "The greater the destruction and the more systems that have fallen part… the greater the anticipation of the Messiah's footsteps."
The bolding is mine, this is a terrifying view of war, as someone who regards war as a crime against humanity its elevation to a sacred status beggars belief. WWII was a good thing, the holocaust as far as I know went unnoticed by anything approaching the divine. Where does this death wish, and need for carnage of the Abramahic religions come from, deep in the reptilian brain? This belief in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that humanity needs to die “en masse” to be saved explains a great deal and is why I rejected this faith group altogether.
Social media is flooded with clips of rabbis calculating the end times and intoxicated with salvation as they declare that we are poised at the onset of the flowering of our redemption. Rabbi Naftali Nissim, a YouTube star in-the-making, waxed poetic: "There has never been a beautiful period like this… What happened on Simhat Torah [October 7] is a prelude to redemption." Rabbi Yaakov Maor explained that "Rafah [in Gaza] refers to '288 sparks' [the numerological value of the word 'RFH," and a concept in kabbalistic literature]. The redemption is near!" And Rabbi Eliezer Berland, head of the Shuvu Banim group in the Breslav Hasidic sect, promised: "This is the last war before the Messiah. After this war, Messiah Son of David will come."
Now I see why our fundamentalist Christians are so keen to contribute to this war. Are they only content when bloodshed starts?
The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of "pangs of the Messiah," characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments. This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythic light, as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality. According to this approach, the birth of Israel and the Zionist enterprise, particularly since the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, are manifestations of emerging redemptive reality. This reading of events is based in part on tractate Berakhot in the Talmud, according to which between this world and the time of the Messiah there is only "servitude to the [foreign] kingdoms.
It is a long article, so I’ll finish with this paragraph:
The denial of God's shadow and of the unrequited longing of the human psyche for the absolute are the root of the blindness of secular culture in our time, and the source of its weakness in the light of the messianic sentiment. Under the guise of post-ideological pragmatism and economical rationalism, secular liberalism has completely forsaken the psycho-religious needs of the current generation in favor of material utilitarianism, narcissistic individualism and consumerist escapism, and has abandoned the possibility of bringing into being a life of a spiritual and cultural character capable of providing a response to the basic need for meaning and self-transcendence. Secular culture may perhaps allow freedom of choice (and that's not a little), but in itself it does not offer another positive meta-narrative, guiding idea or existential meaning in an era of consumer and technological alienation. Into this vacuum political messianism has penetrated, as it offers an answer for spiritual longings and existential anxieties.
The Zionists [Ben Gurion] sought to harness this need for state-building and mix secularism with some form of benign form of religion. Similar to the founding of the United States. This constituted some declaration of religious freedom that in turn, has been so abused by the “moral majority”.
Life is hard enough as it is.
Why the need for more suffering?
For your narcissistic benefit?
To excuse yourself from what you are about to do in the name of religion?
All I will say, as a non-theist Buddhist is: “Be careful what you wish for”.
There is no beauty in War.
A morning muse
~A
