Anointed

a bisseleh messianic history

All the way back in Exodus 28, when God was giving Moses data point after data point

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on top of Mount Sinai, we were all told that Aaron & his kids would be holding down the clergy duties as they built out their new society:

You shall bring forward your brother Aaron, with his sons, from among the Israelites, to serve Me as priests: Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, Eleazar and Itamar, the sons of Aaron. (Exodus 28:1)

Then we had to build a Tabernacle so they could have a workspace, and get a few more rules about exactly how to set up the printer and wifi password (that is, uh, how sacrifices should go)

And now, finally, eight chapters in to the book of, well, Leviticus (or Torat Kohanim/the Laws of the Priests, if you prefer), it’s time to get the House of Levi into order.

And God spoke to Moses, saying,

Take Aaron and his sons with him, and the garments, and the anointing oil, and a bull for the sin offering, and two rams, and a basket of unleavened bread; and gather all the congregation together to the door of the Tent of Meeting…And Moses brought Aaron and his sons forward and washed them with water. And he put on [Aaron all of Aaron’s complicated and fascinating priestly garments, which we will not discuss now].

And Moses took the anointing oil, and anointed the Tabernacle and all that was in it, and sanctified them. And he sprinkled of it upon the altar seven times, and anointed the altar and all its vessels, both the laver and its pedestal, to sanctify them. And he poured the anointing oil on Aaron’s head, and anointed him, to sanctify him.

There are other parts to this ordination ceremony, but this is really the crux of it, here. Aaron is anointed with oil to be sanctified—to be made holy. וַיִּמְשַׁח אֹתוֹ לְקַדְּשׁוֹ. He is made holy through this anointing. We’re turning a guy into a kohen/priest—into the Kohen Gadol/High Priest. (His sons get a slightly more lite version to become kohanim/regular priests, which is still a pretty big deal.)

In Exodus 30:23-24 we were told a little bit more about the oil—it’s made with two parts myrrh and two parts cassia (which is kind of like cinnamon, but a little stronger) to one part cinnamon and one part spices of a grass called sweet calmus, and mixed with olive oil. This is not something I would recommend doing at home—like, it’s not for us, it’s like how we shouldn’t also be making the sacred objects of the Temple or getting too cute with the Tetragrammaton. A little respect for the actual sacred and stuff. There’s even a Rabbinic tradition (eg Talmud Horayot 12a) that only this one batch of this oil was ever made, and it lasted the whole period of Aaron and his descendants until the last little bit was hidden away by the Judean King Josiah (640-609 BCE) for safekeeping. But I do love how there are recipes in Torah.

Oilllll

Anointing with oil was used throughout the Ancient Near East as a way to signify an elevation in legal status— the manumission of someone who had been enslaved, the betrothal of a bride, the deputation of a vassal or yes, the consecration of clergy or coronation of a king.

Because, yes, though we see it here as focusing on the ordination of kohanim/priests, it will manifest in other biblical texts as part of the process of both appointing kings and prophets—it’s entirely possible that the ability to anoint kings came as an extension of the Kohen Gadol/High Priest’s powers—that the royal authority is derived, if you will, from the High Priest’s authority.

But nonetheless. Priests/kohanim get anointed. And prophets and kings get anointed!

Especially kings! Hang on to that.

I want to focus on this word, “anoint with oil.” משח. Anointed, as a past tense verb: Mashakh. To anoint: Li'mshoach. (that last sound is that guttural ch/kh, like challah or hummus; transliteration is the worst.)

One who has been anointed: Mashiach.

Or, if you want to Anglicize it.. messiah.

So if the anointed-one was originally a king. Every king. Then, as things got dicey first with the Assyrians conquering the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 720 BCE and then, as things began heating up with the Babylonians (who eventually took Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE) we began to see an emerging eschatology coming out of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who lived in the time leading up to and through the Destruction.

The language of God redeeming the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity, returning them to the Land of Israel, and restoring the house of David and the Temple in Jerusalem—well, at first it wasn’t particularly otherworldly, you know? It was, basically, “Please, God, we want to have a real leader again—a decent ruler who’ll take care of things capably.”

I prayed something like that a lot during a very recent presidential administration, I dunno about you. And it wasn’t because I thought I could only live free of the terror about nuclear codes being in the hands of an immature, impulsive, racist kleptocrat Russian puppet with the moral compass of Sauron after I was dead, or after the world had already ended—even though, when things were particularly bleak and frightening, having a stable government again did seem sometimes like a bit of a distant hope. (That’s not to say that I don’t have what to say about how things are now. But we are not, at the moment, living in an authoritarian state, and if we forgot not to take that for granted, perhaps the events of the weekend are a good reminder.)

So yeah. mashiach/messiah was very much originally a hope to get back to how things should be soon in the current historical timeline, if you will.

But the prospect of a real king began feeling increasingly far away—and it's likely that a shift in the meaning of mashiach started even over the span of the time of exile itself, but by the middle of the Second Temple era, after first Yehud was a vassal state of the Persian Achaemenid Empire

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, and then, after Alex the Great came galloping into town, they were under the Hellenistic thumb. When the prospect of an earthly king who's going to come bail us out of this any minute starts to feel farther and farther away, well--beginning to invest, emotionally, in the idea that someone from the royal line of David will come back later *wink wink* starts to appeal. As such, a moshiach—an anointed one—became The Moshiach—the messiah who would herald the World-to-Come, as we put it.

I suspect that this historical context may be challenging to some of the excellent Christian folks who are reading this, and in other ways, I imagine some of y’all will say things like that your faith is stronger than mere history, and etc., so.. anyway, I’m not here to make the news, just to deliver it, I think. You are all big kids and I imagine you can figure out what to do with the information I’m sharing just fine.

ANYWAY. By the time we have texts from the Rabbinic era, we were already in the wake of the failed, devastating Bar Kochba revolt (ended 135 CE)— it’s recorded that Rabbi Akiva, one of the great sages of the Tannaitic era (which lasted from ~10CE-250CE maybe? 200?) believed, as did many Jews at the time that Simon Bar Kosiba, the leader of the revolt, was the messiah; Akiva even renamed him Bar Kochba (son of a star). So when that didn’t work out, the Rabbis were definitely done with this-worldly messianic talk.

Instead, we see kinda metal stuff like:

And Rabbi Yoḥanan says: The son of David will come only in a generation that is entirely innocent, in which case they will be deserving of redemption, or in a generation that is entirely guilty, in which case there will be no alternative to redemption. (Talmud Sanhedrin 98a)

and poignant, beautiful statements that live in the dreamscape of midrash, like:

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said to Elijah: When will the Messiah come? Elijah said to him: Go ask him. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi asked: And where is he sitting? Elijah said to him: At the entrance of the city of Rome. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi asked him: And what is his identifying sign by means of which I can recognize him? Elijah answered: He sits among the poor who suffer from illnesses. And all of them untie their bandages and tie them all at once, but the Messiah unties one bandage and ties one at a time. He says: Perhaps I will be needed to serve to bring about the redemption. Therefore, I will never tie more than one bandage, so that I will not be delayed. (also Sanhedrin 98a)

Then, by the 12th c. you get Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Wars—yep, that’s a thing—11:4-5) who a very “well, if the dude doesn’t bring the World-to-Come, he’s definitely not the Messiah” approach to the whole thing:

If a king will arise from the House of David who diligently contemplates the Torah and observes its mitzvot as prescribed by the Written Law and the Oral Law as David, his ancestor, will compel all of Israel to walk in (the way of the Torah) and rectify the breaches in its observance, and fight the wars of God, we may, with assurance, consider him Mashiach. If he succeeds in the above, builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is definitely the Mashiach. If he did not succeed to this degree or was killed, he surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah.

“If this next date makes me happy and brings me joy, they could be the love of my life. If they are a jerk and mean, they are not the love of my life.” You show ‘em with your stone cold logic, Rambam. (Yes, I’m aware that it’s a mean anti-Christian polemic, but let me just play with the plain meaning of the text for a second.)

(I always found this position of his curious given that he also taught that we had evolved from sacrifices to prayer and one day would evolve from prayer to pure contemplation. (I am far from the only one who has found this strange, and it seems as though everyone who’s tried to resolve this apparent contradiction has needed to do some serious intellectual gymnastics. I, for one, remain unconvinced.))

Needless to say, we Yidden have had our fair share of messianic issues over the years, from people thinking privately whatever they want to think to big false messianic movements—most famously Shabbtai Tzvi, the 17th c. Turkish Kabbalist who claimed to be the Messiah, whipped up quite the international fervor. Needless to say, it is always very awkward when your so-called “messiah” decides to convert to a whole entire other religion.

There are other stories to tell, here—Jacob Frank, the 18th c. Polish self-proclaimed messiah, the last Chabad rebbe—but ultimately, I think, that’s not the point.

One of my favorite messianic texts gets closer to it—this is by now-Rabbi Arthur Waskow, written in The Jewish Catalog—first published in 1973 as a DIY guide in the vein of The Whole Earth Catalog. If you’re into Jewy things and you’ve never seen, you must track down a copy. Some of the materials—the resources, the gender stuff-didn’t age well, but a bunch of the content really does, and it’s delightful and creative and is just a whole vibe. And more than that, it is the cultural ancestor to so much of what is vital and exciting about Judaism today. Worth tracking down.

Anyway, so R. Waskow (who wasn’t a rabbi then) wrote on How To Bring Moshiach, and it’s perfect (and YES YOU LOVE THE ILLUSTRATIONS).

“Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai used to say: If you have a sapling in your hand and are planting it, and someone should say to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and only then go to greet the Messiah.” (Avot d'Rabbi Natan 31b)

“THEREFORE: Plant a tree somewhere as a small tikkun olam—act of fixing the world—wherever the olam most needs it. Plant a tree in Vietnam in a defoliated former forest. Go there to plant if possible (even if difficult); if not, send money to… “

Right? The message here is: Bring the more perfected world closer to us. Act by act. Day by day. Choice by choice.

And for me, that’s the point of the messianic framework. I know that for some Jews, the talk of the messiah is very literal, and I respect that in the same sense that I respect other religious beliefs

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—not how I see it, that’s OK, guess we’ll all get the answer sheet someday.

For me, the work is about doing what I can, every day, between a person and another person, a person or group of people and a society, a system, an institution, a nation, a planet to get all of our voices heard, addressed, engaged towards creating a world that is more whole now, more just now, more complete now.

I believe that I must live every single day assuming that Moshiach isn’t coming anytime soon, and my job now is to do my small part towards the project of working towards a world that we can all stand to live in a little more easily.

I believe that the coming of the Messiah is us.

And maybe there’s another Moshiach coming, too, but in the meantime I, for one, can’t stand to live in a world that is entirely guilty—there’s already so much heartache and suffering and pain in the world, even with so many of us trying our damn best. So that isn’t it. Shouldn’t we all just be trying our best, then?

I mean, do you have something better to do with your time, besides strive every day to create less suffering and more justice, more joy, more love in the world? I don’t.

As long as we’re here, we may as well, no?

And if it takes a minute, eh, nu? We’re still here. We’re still working.

There’s an old story that involves a Russian Jew who was paid a ruble a month by the community council to stand at the outskirts of town so that he could be the first person to greet the Messiah upon his arrival. When a friend said to him, "But the pay is so low," the man replied: "True, but the job is permanent."

1. Um, excuse me, but would it be possible to get a copy of the slide deck after the presentation? PDF is great. Yeah. Thank you so much.

2. A vassal state that generally had a lot of independence, to be sure—it was often a theocracy run by the High Priest, getting back to That Guy, with a Persian-appointed governor overseeing things whose main job was to make sure order was maintained and that money kept flowing in the direction of the empire.

3. I didn’t say actions. We’re still responsible for not harming others.