Al Ha veDa על הא ודא

Tonight, which is the first night after the end of the period of saying Kaddish for my late mother, Gwen Montagu נעמי בת אברהם ושרה נ”ע, I was meditating and had the following insight. I hope I will be able to write it down as clearly as it appeared to me.

כִּי עִמְּךָ מְקוֹר חַיִּים בְּאוֹרְךָ נִרְאֶה אוֹר (תהלים ל”ו י’)

For with You is the source of life; by Your light we see light. (Psalm 36, 10)

Most people today other than the ultra-Orthodox think of mourning practices in general, and Kaddish in particular, as being for the benefit of the living, as a process in which the bereaved reaffirm their belief in God and God’s justice over the course of eleven months, to aid themselves in gradually coming to terms with their loss.

Classical Jewish sources give a completely different perspective: of Kaddish as for the benefit of the dead, as something which alleviates the judgment of the wicked and helps the souls of the righteous ascend from level to level in the Garden of Eden.

My insight tonight was that there is no contradiction. If the bereaved relatives are full of grief and unable to move on in their lives, their parent’s soul will be unable to move on in the next world, because it will be too concerned for them and will be searching for ways to pass down comfort to them. By finding comfort through the mourning process, the children are relieving the parent’s soul of that responsibility and allowing it to move on to its own next destination.

I don’t know quite what to make of the fact that at much the same time I was having these thoughts, a dear friend was posting to me a pointer to the last paragraph of this article, which says almost exactly the same thing from a Catholic perspective.

<glazou>   smontagu: btw, you think you'll update your blog before the Armageddon ?
<smontagu> glazou: funny you should ask that
<smontagu> I was just asking myself the same question

What makes it especially funny is that I was considering blogging about the Armageddon! Specifically about the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which I have been working my way through recently.

These are the first examples I have come across of what you might call Christian Science Fiction. They take place in the not too distant future, at a time when true believers have been taken to heaven in the Rapture, the world is ruled by the Antichrist (a Romanian politician who has made his way up the ladder to become Secretary-General of the United Nations and then Potentate of the Global Community), and, in Israel, a distinguished scholar called Tsion Ben-Judah presents the result of his research on the identity of the Messiah.

Rather disappointingly, Ben-Judah’s conclusions (in the second book of the series, Tribulation Force) are no more than a recycling of the same arguments that Christian missionaries have been using for centuries to prove that all the Messianic prophecies in the Bible refer to Jesus. Just to take one example (and I am quoting from memory since I have already returned that volume to the library), he says that Isaiah prophesies that the Messiah will be “born to a virgin”. Well, no. The reference is to Isaiah 7, 14, as quoted in Matthew 1, 23, but how could Ben-Judah, who is described as an expert linguist, be unaware that the original Hebrew talks about עלמה, a young woman, and not a virgin?

The way I see it, the definitive Jewish teaching on the Messiah comes from Yeshayahu Leibowitz (my translation below):

הגאולה מופיעה כמציאות שהיא תמיד מעבר למה שיש, שלעולם אין מגיעים אליה, אך לעולם יש להתאמץ להגיע אליה … המשיח הוא לעולם בגדר מי שבכל יום אחכה לו שיבוא, ואילו המשיח הבא בפועל — תמיד הוא משיח-שקר.

Redemption is always one step ahead of reality. We can never reach it, but we can always aim towards it. The Messiah that we believe in is the one who we wait for every day and hope that he will come. A Messiah who has already come can only ever be a false Messiah