Don't You Worry, Never Fear

The Anointed One Will Soon Be Here

It’s a common practice in my community to call for the “coming of the Moschiach”— “Moshiach” being Hebrew for “Messiah”—“speedily in our days.” You’ll often hear this line, for example, at the end of a sermon. What it basically means is that, hopefully soon, all our problems will be solved with the arrival of God’s special representative on Earth.

But it’s not just in sermons. It’s part of the lingua franca of my community. Thus, sometimes, when planning for the future, a person might say, “God willing, we’ll all be in Israel by then,” meaning that the Moshiach will have arrived and brought with him the Messianic Age, which includes the return of every Jew to Israel.

Belief in Moshiach is a basic tenet of Judaism. It is one of the Thirteen Articles of Faith that the great Jewish philosophy Moses Maimonides said were essential principles of the religion. It is, in fact, the penultimate¹ article, just before the belief in the resurrection of the dead.

Who or what is the Moshiach? Literally, he is “the anointed one.” That’s what “messiah” means, anointed, as in sprinkled with olive oil, an ancient practice once used to designate a king. King David, for example, was Moshiach, the annointed one.

According to Jewish belief, a new Moshiach descended of King David will someday² arrive and usher in an era of peace and plenty that will include, among other things, the return of the Jews to Israel, universal acceptance of the Jewish religion by non-Jews, and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. All that plus the resurrection of the dead.

There’s all kinds of crazy stuff that midrash—Jewish commentary—adds to the idea, everything from Jews rolling to Israel through undersea tunnels to grapes the size of basketballs.³ And, of course, getting to see grandma and grandpa again.

But for a lot of adults, what the Messianic Age really signifies is the end of “gallus”—the Jewish exile—along with all its attendant pains, most especially a few thousand years of antisemitism and a feeling of distance from God. And so, when Jews are especially troubled, they may speak with hope for the coming of the Moshiach.

Indeed, some are downright impatient for his coming and chant, “We want Moshiach now!” (This is a distinctly Chabad thing, as far as I know.)⁴

For me, “the coming of Moshiach” is both literal and metaphorical. It represents an unlikely time, somewhere in the future, when all the intractable bad stuff will go away. So, for example, once, in the wake of rising antisemitism, a reporter once asked me what could be done to end the hatred of the Jews. She wanted me to say something like, “more Holocaust education,” but I said the only thing that could bring about its end would be the coming of the Moshiach.

And by that, I meant both that it would take Divine intervention to end Jew hatred and that it might never end. Because, despite it being one of the Thirteen Articles of Faith and even though in my community it’s a center-stage belief, I sometimes have my doubts about the Moshiach and his age.

In that sense, I feel like my old friend Bugs Bunny in “Rabbit Hood.”

In that Looney Tunes episode, our favorite wise-cracking Bronx hare finds himself in Sherwood Forest in the days of King Richard the Lion-Hearted when the evil Sheriff of Nottingham was running the show. Bugs finds himself teamed up with a not-very-bright, but optimistic, Little John, who, whenever times get tough, assures Bugs, “Don’t you worry. Never fear. Robin Hood will soon be here.”

But, of course, he never is. Bugs has to use his rascally rabbit wit to avoid being shot with an arrow and throttled by the Sherrif. And by the end of the cartoon, Bugs loses his patience with Little John.

“Yeah, I know,” Bugs says. “Robin hood’ll soon be here.” And then prances about mockingly. “He robs from the rich and he gives to the poor. Yo-Ho, we go skipping tra-La through Sherwood Forest. Helping the needy and the oppressed.”

Robin Hood is the Moshiach of Sherwood, reigning over an age of fairness to all and defeat of evil, and Little John is a true believer. But Bugs, not so much.

After hearing for the umpteenth time that “Robin Hood will soon be here,” he raises his gloved hands in exasperation. “Ah, you’ve been sayin’ that through the whole picture. Well? Where is he?”

That’s how I feel sometimes. I mean, Deuteronomy suggested some 3,000 years ago he was coming. A certain rabbi of Nazareth said 2,000 years ago, “the Kingdom of Heaven would soon be at hand.” Rabbi Schneerson, the last Rebbe of Chabad, said, back in the 1980s, something like, “Any day now.”

So, well, where is he?

And yet, I don’t exactly disbelieve. I mean, it’s not so hard to imagine that someday we’ll have world peace, that eventually all the Jews will find their way back to Israel and even rebuild the Temple. And maybe, in some way, non Jews will acknowledge the truth of Judaism.

Resurrection of the dead? Who knows what those nutty professors will manage to do with DNA? If Steven Spielberg’s imaginary scientists can bring back the dinosaurs, why can’t Judaism’s bring back Saba and Safta?

But, for me, it’s all way, way off in the future. I don’t do the whole “we want Moshiach now” thing because it feels unlikely to me, at least in my lifetime.

Of course, so did Bugs. And then what happens?

Little John admonishes him. “Oh, you should not talk mean like that,” he says, “Because there he is.”

And sure enough, a live-action Errol Flynn swings into the cartoon and declares to a shocked Bugs, “Welcome to Sherwood!”

I keep thinking, maybe one day just when I’m at my most fed up, I’ll lose my cool and dance around mockingly shouting, “Moshiach now! Moshiach now!” and then yell at some rabbi or Chabbadnik, “You’ve been saying that all through the picture. Well, where is he?”

And from somewhere off-stage, a striking and charismatic figure will appear to welcome me to the Messianic Age.

May he come speedily in our days.

1. This is one of two “fancy” words that I love for its strange specificity. The other is “defenestrate.”

2. Of course, if you’re Christian, He has already come. I remember as a Christian thinking, “Those poor Jews are waiting thousands of years for guy who’se already been here.” But it’s not as though the Christians haven’t also been waiting for millennia. They’re just waiting for Him to come back. And, as the old joke goes—one I’ve told in posts before—we’ll know who’s right eventually because either he’ll say, “Nice to see you” or “Nice to see you, again.”

3. Some Orthodox parents like to paint a Big Rock Candy Mountain picture of the Messianic Age.

4. For those unfamiliar with it, Chabad is a “chassidic” sect of Orthodox Judaism. Chassidic Jews are a branch of Orthodoxy that traces its understanding of Judaism to the Bal Shem Tov, a 17th-century itinerant rabbi and miracle worker who emphasized joy and the holiness of even the most common, uneducated Jew. His followers split into several different streams, prominent among which is Chabad, also known as Lubavitch.

One thing I’m not doing in this article, as some of you may have noticed, is addressing the issue of the belief among some—some would say all—Chabad that their Rebbe was/is the Moshiach. I have thoughts and strong feelings on that matter, but that is a whole kettle of fish I don’t care to open in this post, and I don’t think it’s necessary to do so to address the more fundamental issue of belief in Moshiach.