IB World Religions 6.4.3. Eschatology: the Messianic Age and Olam Ha-ba Notes

6.4.3. Eschatology: The Messianic Age and Olam Ha-Ba

The shape of Jewish hope

1. Eschatology means teaching about last things. Jewish eschatology is deliberately less developed than that of Christianity or Islam, and rabbinic sources treat that restraint as a virtue.
2. The Torah itself says almost nothing explicit about life after death. Its promises are land, descendants, rain in season and long life on the earth.
3. Later tradition affirms a world to come but declines to describe it. The Talmud applies Isaiah's line that no eye has seen what God has prepared for those who wait for him.
4. The weight falls instead on what is done now, because Jews hold that mitzvot can only be performed in this life. Pirkei Avot 4:17 says one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world is worth more than all the life of the world to come.
5. Two hopes have to be kept apart. The Messianic Age is a transformed but still historical world, while Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come, is a fundamentally new order beyond it.
6. Sources disagree about how the two relate. Most rabbinic authorities place Olam Ha-Ba after the Messianic Age, though some read the two terms as names for one thing.

Mashiach, the anointed one

1. Mashiach means anointed one, from the verb mashach, to anoint. Kings and high priests in ancient Israel were anointed with oil, so the title is a royal one before it is anything else.
2. In Jewish belief the Mashiach is a human being, not a divine figure and not God incarnate. He is expected to be a descendant of King David, born of ordinary parents.
3. The prophetic sources are read as describing him. Isaiah 11 speaks of a shoot from the stump of Jesse, Jeremiah 23:5 of a righteous branch raised up for David, and Ezekiel 37 of one shepherd over a reunited people.
4. Maimonides gives the standard Orthodox account in the Mishneh Torah. The Messiah will be a king of David's line who studies Torah, keeps the mitzvot, brings Israel to walk in them, fights God's battles, rebuilds the Temple and gathers the exiles.
5. Maimonides also supplies a test. If a candidate does all this and succeeds, he is presumed to be the Messiah, and if he fails or is killed before completing it, he was not.
6. Notably, Maimonides requires no miracles. The world continues in its ordinary course, which is why he insists nobody should expect signs and wonders as proof.
7. Elijah is expected first as herald, on the strength of Malachi 3:23. This is why unresolved legal disputes in the Talmud are sometimes left to await him and why a cup is poured for him at the Pesach table.

The Messianic Age

1. Yemot ha-Mashiach, the days of the Messiah, is an age of peace and justice in this world rather than in another one.
2. Isaiah 2:4 supplies its best known image, nations beating swords into ploughshares and learning war no more, repeated in Micah 4.
3. Isaiah 11:6 adds the wolf dwelling with the lamb, and closes with the earth full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
4. Two concrete expectations recur: kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem with the Temple restored.
5. Maimonides reads all of this soberly, holding that the natural order will be unchanged and that the difference will be political and moral, so that Israel is free to study Torah without interference.
6. Other authorities expect a genuinely transformed creation. Nachmanides and later kabbalists read the prophetic images far more literally than Maimonides did.
7. Tradition discourages predicting the date. Sanhedrin 97b curses those who calculate the end, while Sanhedrin 98a holds that the age could come today if Israel listens to God's voice, which makes human conduct part of the timetable.

Olam Ha-Ba and resurrection

1. Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come, is a fundamentally new age rather than a continuation of history. Jewish sources describe it far more sparingly than they describe the Messianic Age.
2. Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 opens with the statement that all Israel has a share in the world to come, words read at the start of Pirkei Avot study.
3. Techiyat ha-metim, the resurrection of the dead, is the thirteenth of Maimonides' principles. The second blessing of the Amidah praises God as mechayei ha-metim, the one who gives life to the dead.
4. Alongside resurrection the sources speak of the soul's survival, of Gan Eden as the reward of the righteous and of Gehinnom as a place of cleansing.
5. Gehinnom is not generally taught as everlasting. Tradition limits it to twelve months, which is why mourners recite Kaddish for a parent for eleven, so as not to imply the parent needed the full term.
6. Even the pictures offered are restrained. Berakhot 17a imagines the righteous seated with crowns on their heads, enjoying the radiance of the divine presence, with no eating and no drinking.
7. Judaism does not restrict this hope to Jews. The Tosefta records the ruling that the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come, which is one reason the tradition does not seek converts.

Messianism across the movements

1. Orthodox Judaism holds to an individual, human, anointed Messiah who will usher in the Messianic Age. The belief stands in Maimonides' principles and is repeated daily in the liturgy.
2. Some Hasidic communities have gone further and identified a living candidate. Among a section of Chabad-Lubavitch, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is held to be the Messiah, a claim that other Orthodox authorities reject.
3. Conservative Judaism, called Masorti outside North America, generally retains messianic language while emphasising the age over the individual. Its prayer books vary on how the wording is handled.
4. Reform Judaism made the sharpest break. The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 rejected the return to Zion, a personal Messiah and bodily resurrection, and spoke instead of a messianic age advanced by human effort.
5. Liberal and Reconstructionist prayer books commonly replace the blessing of God who gives life to the dead with God who gives life to all, keeping the form of the prayer while changing its claim.
6. Later Reform statements moved again. Recent American Reform prayer books restore some traditional wording and offer alternatives on the page, so the movement's position is not fixed.

Hope in the liturgy

1. Because the beliefs are rarely set out as doctrine, they are most reliably found in prayer, which is where a Jew meets them daily.
2. Aleinu, said at the close of every service, looks to a world put right under God's kingship, using the phrase l'takken olam b'malkhut Shaddai.
3. Kaddish is said by mourners, yet its words never mention the dead. They ask that God's kingdom come speedily, in your lifetime and in your days.
4. At a funeral and at Yizkor memorial prayers the hope expressed is life in God's presence, stated without the detailed descriptions found in some other traditions.
5. At the Pesach table the door is opened for Elijah and the evening ends with the words next year in Jerusalem, which state the hope as an expectation rather than a doctrine.
6. Taken together, Jewish eschatology functions less as a forecast than as a claim about the direction history is going and about what that requires of a person now.