messiah drill

Old time religion. Nothing like a fresh wave of messianic fever to stir the passions either in anticipation of the celebration that our sometimes brave, but generally old and tired world has reached its expiry date and something new is to be beholden and one can say “I was there” or, more nihilistically, the relief of finally putting an end to this unending soap opera of cosmic proportions and will the last person please turn out the lights so we can finally get an eternal sleep. Of course, there is poring over the texts, the search of discovering  some definitive unequivocal truth sealed mysteriously within an equivocal text, but it is a divine mystery, one to be handled with care, since both the search and discovery can lead to madness of which there is no known cure. Hasten the redemption, but hey, a mule can only move so fast, even if it has wings.

Through and endless series of paradoxes there is a residue of doubt about recognizable authorities as a clearly defined entity or whether the quest is merely to become master of our own phantasmagoria  and all the potential for proliferating significance into symbolic tales of a post-modern search for the messiah that will lead us all from exile back to the Promised Land.  In the meantime, the charlatans and phonies have their day, cooking up Macbeth like mixes of contorted and distorted facts, fancies, and context juggling worthy of the greatest circus acts based on the art of deception that fragilizes what has developed as the Judeo-Christian ethos road, one filled with potholes but still navigable…

…disturbing forms of Messianism within the concept of the “second coming” that, from a Judaic perspective, violates the criteria of Maimonides, which mean the identity of the Messiah is yet to be revealed in its entirety….

(see link at end) When Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri died in February 2006, somewhere between the age of 106 to possibly 117, 300,000 attended his funeral in Jerusalem.

The Baghdad-born kabbalist had gained notoriety around the world for issuing apocalyptic warnings and for saying he personally met the long-awaited Jewish Messiah in November 2003.

Before Kaduri died, he reportedly wrote the name of the Messiah on a small note, requesting it remained sealed for one year after his death. The note revealed the name of the Messiah as “Yehoshua” or “Yeshua” – or the Hebrew name Jesus.

However, complicating the story further, the note is being challenged as a forgery by his 80-year-old son Rabbi David Kaduri.

“It’s not his writing,” he is quoted as telling Israel Today.

The note, written in Hebrew and signed in the rabbi’s name, said: “Concerning the letter abbreviation of the Messiah’s name, He will lift the pe

and prove that his word and law are valid. This I have signed in the month of mercy.”

The Hebrew sentence consists of six words. The first letter of each of those words spells out the Hebrew name Yehoshua or Yeshua.

The finding has raised a combination of excitement and controversy in both Jewish and Christian circles – but scarcely any media attention. Jewish blogs and web forums are filled with skeptical analysis and puzzlement….

…In fact, many Christian discussion boards say Kaduri’s description of the Messiah – no matter what his name – doesn’t fit the biblical account of a returned Jesus of Nazareth, who, they believe, will rule and reign on Earth from Jerusalem for 1,000 years.

About his encounter with the Messiah Kaduri claimed is alive in Israel today, he reportedly told close relatives: “He is not saying, ‘I am the Messiah, give me the leadership.’ Rather the nation is pushing him to lead them, after they find [in my words] signs showing that he has the status of Messiah.”

Kaduri was also quoted as saying the imminent arrival of the Messiah will “save Jerusalem from Islam and Christianity that wish to take Jerusalem from the Jewish Nation – but they will not succeed, and they will fight each other.”

Statements like that have some Christians wondering if Kaduri might be talking about another Yeshua – perhaps even a miracle-performing “false Christ” many evangelicals believe will precede the return of Jesus.

“It is hard for many good people in society to understand the person of the Messiah,” Kaduri wrote before his death. “The leadership and order of a Messiah of flesh and blood is hard to accept for many in the nation. As leader, the Messiah will not hold any office, but will be among the people and use the media to communicate. His reign will be pure and without personal or political desire. During his dominion, only righteousness and truth will reign.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2007/05/41669/#RjG2VGZAOMP0VBz1.99

…Kaduri is said to have been one of the few known living practitioners who used his knowledge of kabbalah to affect change in the world. He would often distribute amulets intended to heal, enhance fertility and bring success. He was also believed to have been involved in the removal of 20 dybbuks, or lost souls that strayed into the hapless bodies of living people to torment them.
( ibid.)

Many well-known people have had a messianic complex, often behind which hides a martyr complex; or the use in the arts as some enabler of transcendence. It is a profound challenge to think of transcendence, let alone assume the responsibilities and reality of mystical experience,particularly in a world of mass communication and images that appears to have usurped, shaped and manipulated subjectivity and has a firm and deterministic grip over our lives. Perhaps messianic outbursts are merely a rebellious act in a society, the global village,in which it is hard to establish a critical distance from those determinisms which influence thoughts and actions, the repressive qualities of external forces. Ironically, the intellectual monumental efforts at critical analysis of determinants, like a Zizek or Chomsky and that entire industry; on a personal and social level, to surmount and transcend it through analysis of structure and effect, Hannah “Arendtisms”, means it avoids the transcendence it looks for through the medium of intellectual curiosity and end up being another deterministic theory in an endless loop that tends to discard internal necessity that may lie at a higher spiritual level.

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Each of the messianic movements described above gave rise to corrective messianic movement in its wake. A typical example of this, in response to secular Zionism, is to be found in the historical nationalist and social ideas of Martin Buber. Buber rejected the deterministic understanding of history so characteristic of secular messianism in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, and together with it he rejected what he saw as the pretentious view that absolute ideals can ever be realized. His version of corrective messianism involved a willingness to devote oneself to the realization of an ethical ideal within the defined circumstances of a particular time and place, in the hope of drawing closer–however partially–to that ideal and simultaneously, in so doing, endowing the present with purpose and meaning and charting a positive direction for the future. The religious Zionism of our day, by contrast, has produced its version of corrective messianism in the ideas of the students of Rabbi Kook. The latter seek a return to religious Zionism’s original messianic vision, from which, they claim, the historical movement has backed away, compromising it for pragmatic reasons. It is such compromise and retreat, in this view, which have led to the disappointingly incomplete achievements of Zionism. What is required, then, is a return to the sources and pursuit of the total, radical realization of the original vision. These two ways, Buber’s and that of Rav Kook’s students, thus represent opposing efforts at the conscious formulation of a corrective messianism. It would seem, however, that even opposition to messianism can turn into a kind of corrective messianism, when it consolidates itself into an ideology and takes on the urgency of an effort to stave off disaster. An anti-messianic ideology of this kind points to what can be achieved now, immediately, if only there is a general consent to relinquish absolute ideals as the greatest good–it points, that is, to an ideal whose achievement spells redemption from the disasters lurking in the wake of a radical messianism. Read More:http://theunjustmedia.com/Jewish%20Zionists/Jewish%20Messianism%20Metamorphoses%20of%20an%20Idea.htm