Messianism and the second coming of the Donald

Some years ago, I was visiting one of the shteibls dotted around Golders Green. The service had reached the point when the Torah was about to be returned to the ark when a number of congregants filed out to resume in an adjacent room. It wasn’t until the end that I found out what had prompted the separatists to leave: they had objected to a prayer being said for the “state of Israel” and insisted on using the formula “dwellers of the Land of Israel”.

For them, the state was an illegitimate enterprise that had sought to pre-empt the Messiah rather than waiting patiently for divine deliverance. But it is not the only variation in the wording of the Prayer for Israel that signals theological differences.

The version in the Singer’s Siddur that is commonly recited in the United Synagogue and other central Orthodox communities in the UK varies from that in Israel. The Israeli prayer refers to the state as “reishit tzemichat geulateinu” (“the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption”) but this is notably omitted from its British equivalent. With the caution perhaps characteristic of British Jewry, the local prayer hedges bets on the religious significance of the state and eschews any messianic connotations.

Explaining the logic, Chief Rabbi Jakobovits said there was a difference between expressing the “hope” for redemption and making assumptions based on “expectations” of it.

It could be said that a messianic streak has run through Zionism since its inception, since it drew on the prophetic promise of the return of the exiles to Zion. However, this was held in check by the secularism of many of the builders of the state, who rejected any idea of a providential hand in their work.

But a more explicit messianic spirit began to gather strength in Israel after its extraordinary victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, which brought the ancient areas of Judea and Samaria back under Jewish control. For some, this was a sign from heaven that another stage on the road to redemption had been reached and the reclamation of these territories was an essential act of faith necessary to move further along it. Not every settler was messianic, nor every religious settler. But messianism proved a driving force in the settlement project.

This messianic territorialism, however, was not shared by Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, who was troubled by its rise. Citing episodes from Jewish history, from the 2nd-century revolt of Bar Kochba against Rome to the 17th-century pretensions of Shabbetai Zvi – who ended up ignominiously converting to Islam – he warned of the dangers.

Messianism could be seductive. The Talmud records that even the great Rabbi Akiva succumbed by endorsing the claims of Bar Kochba, whose resistance may have been heroic but ended in disaster, with Jews ultimately banned from Jerusalem.

Jakobovits feared that messianic enthusiasm was not a sound basis for political action and could lead to the abandonment of realism. “The pages of Jewish history are littered with the debris, sometimes the lethal shrapnel, left behind by the explosion of pseudo-Messianic movements,” he wrote in his book on Israel, If Only My People.

Jakobovits was, of course, a Zionist and a man of deep faith; but he did not believe that acquisition of land was a key religious priority.

When we speak about messianism, we invariably call to mind Isaiah’s visions of harmony, of leopards frolicking with lambs and children stroking vipers. But a rich vein of apocalyptic imagery runs through the prophetic books, where the adversaries of Israel are trampled underfoot like grapes and the bodies of the slain are so numerous that it will take seven months to bury them. Salvation springs from the womb of conflict.

In his book My Promised Land, the liberal Zionist Ari Shavit records his conversations with some of the leading figures in Ofra, one of the early settlements in the West Bank which was founded in 1975. His impressions were stark. The only way to believe in its future, he wrote, was “to believe in cataclysm or divine intervention, or both”. The hearts of his interviewees harboured “a great belief in a great war, which will be the only solution”.

The second coming of Donald Trump is likely to embolden messianic hardliners within Israel, who must feel that destiny is unfolding and the dream of securing Jewish sovereignty over the ancestral homeland within their grasp. But the warnings of Rabbi Jakobovits remain as salient as they were when they were first written nearly half-a-century ago.