They Have Not Come. They Might Never Come. But They Must Come.
Kol Nidrei 5787
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
To be a Jew, tradition says, is to have a story. For generations, a singular story tied the Jewish people together. Maybe not always believed literally — religion and literalism rarely go hand in hand — but there was a shared story. This story, observes scholar Elliot Ginsburg, we often experienced more like a song — a song with several prominent bars, prominent notes, and we would often find ourselves singing parts of this song to ourselves [Ani ma’amin; Ani Ma’amin] — maybe not all the way through, maybe not even conscious of what we were singing, or where we learned it, but, as Ginsburg writes, we would carry this tune, and it would also carry us.
The notes of the classical elements, Ginsburg continues, the very traditional elements, of this story, this song, are as follows: 1) this world is created as an act of divine will: it’s not an accident that we’re here, this story says; the singular God said “Let there be light,” and the world came into being — with purpose and intention. This world is here, we are here, through the purposeful intent of the Divine, the story says.
To be a Jew, this classical story continues, 2) is to hold that we are all the heirs, whether through birth or through choice, or supporting those who are the heirs, of ancestors named Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah — flawed, imperfect human beings, and yet ones who formed a brit, a covenant, with God — they held for us an experience of mutual commitment between the people and God, a brit, a mutual commitment that we inherit.
To be a Jew, this story says, 3) is to hold that we are the heirs of those who endured and endure — a story like this serves as a map for everything else we experience — Egyptian slavery and the gifts of redemption: oppression and pressure followed by release and freedom. The perpetual possibility of redemption from constriction endures.
To be a Jew, this story says, 4) is to hold that we are the heirs of those who stand at the pivot of the revelation at Sinai, a moment when the silence between God and humanity is unambiguously pierced, when the divine call reaches us; we receive mitzvot, sacred callings, calling forth to us, letting us know we are needed — we each have sacred responsibilities in this world that help make the world more holy.
To be a Jew, this story says, 5) is to hold that we are the heirs of those who know the joys of homecoming and the enduring dislocations of exile — we know the exuberance of reaching the Promised Land after years in the wilderness, breathing its air, feeling our feet in its soil, feeling home, and yet also finding ourselves dispersed, adrift, estranged.
Those five notes comprise at least one articulation of the classical Jewish story, which, as Ginsburg writes, binds all of us “in a web of faith and fate, memory and expectation.”
And yet (one of my favorite phrases in all of rabbinic writing), there is one final note in this foundational story for Jews, which I have not yet shared, and yet which, for millennia, was perhaps the most essential part of this story, because it wasn’t about our past; it was about our future. It goes as follows: To be a Jew in the traditional setting, Ginsburg writes, is to hold that there will be a “messianic resolution to history” (which we’ll define in a moment), though, he observes, as it says in the biblical book of Habakkuk, “The Mashiah יִתְמַהְמָהּ֙, the Messiah doth tarry.” Whoever this Mashiah/Messiah is, tradition says, they sure are taking their time.
For generation upon generation, a core part of the story we carried was that, no matter where we found ourselves, no matter in which oppressive state we found ourselves, no matter the vicissitudes of our inner lives — fear, anxiety, loneliness — someday, not too far off, we prayed, something called the Mashiah would come to inaugurate a period of redemption and both outer and inner peace.
As is often the case, there is no singular clear definition in Jewish life of what it means that the Mashiah will come, what that will look like. As I’ve said before, the joke about two Jews and three opinions is not a quirk in Jewish life; it’s a feature. A core approach of our tradition is to preserve a diversity of voices, a diversity of thoughts, and our sacred literature’s approach to the topic of Mashiah is no different, with there being a multitude of different perspectives on what the coming of the Messiah even means. Some ancient rabbis thought it meant a supernatural transformation of the world: a figure would come who would inaugurate a truly different, otherworldly existence: women would give birth painlessly, hens would lay eggs endlessly, food would appear in abundance. Others thought that it meant simply that a truly righteous political leader would appear — which perhaps in these moments feels as fantastical — a leader who would inaugurate a chapter of true justice, in which nations would live side by side in peace.
Regardless of the specifics, this yearning, this knowing that the Mashiah would come, was a central force, not just for our ancient ancestors but even for our recent forebears. Take, for example, the masses of Eastern European Jews in the 19th century before waves of migration from there began. Jews who experienced the constant expectation of external attack, writes scholar Irving Howe. This “condition of permanent precariousness was paired,” he observes, with the conscious sense that “the Messiah was not a useful myth;” “it was real. And [that] each passing day brought one nearer to redemption” — to a time when fear and heartache and pain would dissipate. To a time of safety, redemption, and peace.
“The most urgent force in Jewish tradition,” he wrote, “the force that could send a quiescent, [a tranquil] people into moments of transport and even collective frenzy, was the idea of messianism. The Messiah had not come, the Messiah might never come, but the Messiah must come!”
This messianic fervor flamed in the immigrant world to these shores, too, he writes, including among many of our own great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents, and in part became a blazing secular passion. Many may not have held the beliefs their parents held in a “real” Messiah, but they translated that messianic yearning into yearnings for transformations of this world: some through socialism, the belief that human beings can transform an unjust economic order through collective action; some through Zionism, the belief that Jewish people can transform their condition by returning to collective national life in the Land of Israel; and for some, the two together: we can rebuild Jewish national life while creating a new kind of society based on labor, cooperation, equality, and collective responsibility, the vision for much of the first chapter of the State of Israel’s history.
These instincts among the Jewish people, many feel, were the inherited messianic spirit translated into modern times.
Modern Jewish movements still reflect upon and grapple with this legacy of the Messiah in different ways. According to the scholar David Ariel, in the Reform Jewish world, the idea of the personal Messiah was reinterpreted as the longing for “universal brotherhood” within the context of the belief in one God who calls all people to live ethically together.
The Conservative movement has written that these teachings are “elaborate metaphors generated by deep-seated human and communal needs.” Through the doctrine of a messianic figure, it continues, “Judaism teaches us that every individual human being must live as if he or she, individually, has the responsibility to bring about the messianic age.”
For most of us Jews, this messianic star in the constellation of Jewish narrative moments has largely receded from view. We modern Jews are far more comfortable with the empirical than the transcendent: we want to talk about what is objectively verifiable; we’re much more comfortable asking, “Did this or that event really happen?” rather than asking, “What if?” What if we were to imagine this legendary past, present, or future?
That being said, we do know how to do that; we do know how to allow an alternative depiction of reality to transport us to worlds unknown. We can gaze upon van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” for example: we can picture its swirling night sky, its glowing orbs, its stars and crescent moon, and we don’t say, “Is this what the sky really looks like?” We say, “Woah. What is coming up for me as I gaze at these swirling lights? In what way does this depiction move me?” Or we say nothing at all; we’re in a post-cognitive state, transcended by the experience.
In some ways, this is how, I believe, religious narrative is meant to work. Not: “What evidence is there for the notion that, had we had a video camera poised above the Sea of Reeds at that epic moment, it would have captured its splitting?” And more: “What might that salty sea have tasted like had we managed to pass through with slavery behind us and the wilderness before us; and what does that mean for us now?” Not: “Did the Israelites literally hear God’s voice at the base of Mount Sinai?” But: “What would it have been like to stand there as the mountain trembled, and the lightning sounded and the thunder flashed, and how would it move us to enact aseret hadibrot, the Ten Commandments, the mitzvot (commandments) incumbent upon us in that moment and this one?”
Now transfer this approach to the Mashiah. We hope, we wait, we yearn for Mashiah someday, a yearning which is part of the Jewish experience, a yearning that has a healing quality to it in its own right — we yearn for Mashiahto someday come to resolve the strife in our heart and in our world. What would this mean to experience this yearning, this longing, this sense that the Messiah has not come, might never come, but must come?
This was a faith the Jewish people have held onto in even our darkest moments. In a packed cattle car on the train to the infamous death camp of Treblinka, as one legend has it, adapted from a telling by Yitzhak Dorfman, Reb Azriel Dovid Fastag of Poland made his way over to his neighbor, and asked him to remind him of the tune of Mareh Kohen, a liturgical prayer about the appearance of the priest, sung on Yom Kippur by their rabbi.
“Now? Now, what you want to hear is niggunim? Melodies?” answered the other, with a hard look at the man, thinking that maybe all the suffering had caused him to lose his mind.
But this Hassid was no longer paying attention to his friend, or to anyone else on the train. In his mind, he was at the prayer stand next to his Rebbe on Yom Kippur, and he who was leading the prayer before the Rebbe and all the Hassidim.
Suddenly, there appeared before his eyes the words of this singular principle of Jewish faith: Ani Ma’amin: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Mashiah; and even though the Moshiah may tarry, nevertheless, I wait each day for this coming.”
Closing his eyes, he meditated on these words and thought, “It is for moments like these that these words are composed.”
It was not long before he began to hum a quiet tune to these words. Yai dai dai-dai-dai, yai dai dai-dai-dai, yai dai dai dai dai dai dai. There, amidst the death and despair on the train to Treblinka, the Hassid was transformed into a pillar of song, bringing forth out of his lungs the song of the eternity of the Jewish people [Ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin]. He was unaware of the silence in the cattle car, and of the hundreds of ears listening attentively in amazement. He also didn’t hear the voices as they gradually joined his song, at first quietly, but soon growing louder and louder. [Be’emunah sh’lemah b’vi’at hamashiah, b’vi’at hamashiah ani ma’amin].
The song spread from car to car. Every mouth that could still draw a breath joined in Reb Azriel Dovid’s Ani Ma’amin.
As if waking from a dream, Reb Azriel Dovid opened his eyes to the sight of the singing train. Legend has it that, following this moment, a fellow captive jumped out of the train and escaped, so while it is believed that Reb Azriel Dovid and many others on that train perished in Treblinka, the tune was eventually transmitted to the Modzitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Shaul Yedidya Elazar, who brought this tune to the rest of us.
To this day, no song is more associated with Yom Hashoah, with commemoration of the Holocaust, than this song, Ani Ma’amin. Ani Ma’amin, I believe. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Mashiah; and even though the Mashiah may tarry, nevertheless, I wait each day for this coming.
For some of us, it was the Holocaust itself, or echoes of it, that shattered our relationship to this faith; for some, to all forms of faith.
And yet the tune that has carried us for millennia as the Jewish people has included notes like this: notes of yearning, notes of hope, notes of belief, ani ma’amin.
Once again, I ask us to consider: What would this mean to experience this yearning? What would it mean to immerse ourselves in the experience that the Messiah has not come, might never come, but must come?
One of the Jewish traditions surrounding the coming of the Mashiah is that, prior to their arrival, a different figure in Jewish life will let us know that they are near at hand, and that figure is Eliyahu hanavi, Elijah the Prophet. It’s because of this messianic linkage with Elijah, writes scholar Danny Matt, that we open the door for Elijah at each Passover seder, which commemorates the liberation from Egyptian slavery and which includes the hope for ultimate redemption. Similarly, every Saturday night around the world, as Shabbat departs, traditional Jews chant: “Eliyahu hanavi, Eliyahu hatishbi, Eliyahu, Eliyahu, Eliyahu hagiladi. Bimherah b’yameinu yavo eleinu im Mashiah ben David, im Mashiah ben David.”
Im Mashiah ben David. Eliyahu hanavi, the prophet, the Tishbite, the Gileadite; bimherah b’yameinu. May he soon (in our days) come to us, with the Mashiah son of David.
This association between Elijah and the Mashiah is elaborated upon at the end of the Sefer Malakhi, the biblical book of the prophet Malakhi, when God says הִנֵּ֤ה Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of GOD of redemption.
And what comes next signals to us the kind of healing that is in store for us, according to this teaching: וְהֵשִׁ֤יב לֵב־אָבוֹת֙ עַל־בָּנִ֔ים וְלֵ֥ב בָּנִ֖ים עַל־אֲבוֹתָ֑ם Elijah shall turn the hearts of parents toward their children and children toward their parents. Elijah will reunite the generations.
I’ve shared thoughts on this passage before because it’s telling to me that in Jewish tradition, the relationship that is imagined to be in need of healing, the paradigmatic expression of the fact that the fabric of humanity is torn, that there is a yearning for repair, is the torn nature of the relationship between parents and children, relationships that have been torn through disagreement, through disengagement, and of course, through death.
Most of you know that it doesn’t take a leap of imagination for me to engage with this when I think about each of my parents. Most of you know that my own father died suddenly when he was 35 of an apparent heart attack, leaving behind my mother, my two sisters and me: I was seven, my sister Sophie was four, my sister Henya was one month old. That was a rending in the fabric of our lives, and there are still torn threads. My mother and I have a loving relationship, but not always an easy one.
Most people in this room have experienced some facet of intergenerational strain. Many of us in this room have lost parents, and some in this room have lost children, who will be remembered tomorrow during Yizkor, the service of remembrance.
And even those who haven’t experienced the death of a parent or child may be holding ways in which those relationships are feeling torn, in need of repair.
The messianic ideal in Judaism, in emphasizing the healing between parents and children, the healing between the generations, that will ultimately, on some plane of existence, occur, recognizes that these intergenerational ruptures are present in our communities. It also recognizes that sometimes it is possible to repair those relationships in this lifetime, and sometimes it is not. By including messianic redemption as part of the paradigmatic story, Jewish tradition is telling us there are some tearings that will not be made whole on this plane of existence, that they need to be grieved, and yet also signaling that healing is at hand, that life finds a way.
My teacher and friend, Rabbi Avi Winokur, likes to observe that all three members of the clergy at Society Hill Synagogue, Rabbi Winokur, Hazzan Jessi Roemer, and I, had parents who were also members of the clergy, and he likes to imagine those three parents — even if he’s not sure he theologically believes this is what happens — he likes to imagine these three parents davening (praying) together in parallel to their children.
There are similar imaginings we could all invite ourselves to participate in with respect to our own family or communities, which are not possible in this life — and yet which Judaism seems to suggest, sure, have not happened, might never happen, but must happen. I imagine, for example, my father’s father, my Grandpa Armon, gushing over meeting my wife Caroline; I know they would have gotten along. I imagine my mom and her mom connecting in a next life in ways they never could in this one. I imagine my father meeting his grandchildren — including my daughters, Lila and Nina — all of whom carry some part of him with them.
Of course, these healings within families that I touched on during Rosh Hashanah, as well, are in some ways microcosms of the broader healings our world needs: healing the brokenness manifest in war and conflict, hunger and poverty, inequality and injustice.
Judaism has its own version of the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, which says:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Judaism’s version is from Pirkei Avot, which says: לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.
We are not at liberty to say, “The Mashiah is going to come and resolve everything, so I’m good. I don’t need to work to repair the brokenness within me, around me, and beyond me.” We are very much responsible for working to repair that brokenness, our own, and the world’s. And Yom Kippur is a day which calls upon us to pay attention to the missed opportunities to heal brokenness in our lives and in our broader world.
At the same time, there are some pieces to life shattered beyond repair. People who will never come back, estrangement that will not be resolved. At least in this life. Mashiah is the container for that sadness, that yearning, that redemption — the teaching in Jewish life that to yearn is to heal, to hope is to uplift, to believe is to endure.
To believe.
Ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin, be’emunah shlemah b’vi’at hamashiah, b’vi’at hamashiah ani ma’amin; b’vi’at hamashiah, b’vi’at hamoshiah ani ma’amin.
“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Mashiah; and even though the Mashiah doth tarry, nevertheless, I wait each day for that coming.”
G’mar hatimah tovah. May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life. Shanah tovah.
