The Left Behind Series, by Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins
Planet of the Jews, by Philip Graubart
Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann
More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann
Say you’re an evangelical Christian, and it’s a sweltering day in the Bible Belt. You and the family decide to beat the heat by heading down the shore. You pack a blanket, a few sandwiches, and a case of Mr. Pibb. You’ll want to bring along some juicy beach reading too—but what to take? In addition to the scores of titles available at Armageddonbooks.com, “The World’s Largest Prophesy Bookstore,” you can always turn to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ popular series of apocalyptic thrillers, Left Behind. The thirteen-and-counting books in the series, which have sold upwards of 63 million copies, offer blow-by-blow accounts of the Tribulation taking place in today’s world, as seen through the eyes of the zestfully-named heroes Rayford Steele and Buck Williams. In these wide-margined page-turners, you’ll get your fill of salvation and damnation, sinister goings-on at the UN, handsome European Antichrists, and Hummers tear-assing around the Middle East.
Jews in the market for a little eschatological reading face far more limited options. Up until a few years ago, a search for a modern Jewish literary take on Armageddon might have turned up only one source: the Yiddish song Vos vet zayn ven meshiekh vet kumen, or “What Will Happen When the Messiah Comes.” It’s a good song, but if you compare its vision of messianic redemption to the one presented in Left Behind, it comes off as a little wan. In Book Twelve of Left Behind, Glorious Appearing, the Messiah returns–and it is an event: “With every word, more and more enemies of God dropped dead, torn to pieces. Horses panicked and bolted. The living screamed in terror and ran about like madmen—some escaping for a time, others falling at the words of Lord Christ.” Compare this to the opening of Vos vet zayn ven meshiekh vet kumen: “‘Tell us rabbi, what will be when the Messiah comes?’/ ‘When the Messiah comes, we will have a little feast.’”
In recent decades, some of Jewish America’s best and worst speculative writers have picked up the slack, contributing to a growing body of Jewish eschatological fiction. In the mid-1970’s and early 1980’s, Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars, two anthologies of Jewish fantasy and science fiction, were published, each containing a healthy sprinkling of apocalyptic visions. In 1999, Rabbi Philip Graubart published Planet of the Jews, a feverish story-within-a-story that describes one comic book writer’s encounter with a text foretelling a band of Jews’ escape from earth.
An ominous current runs through most of this Jewish eschatological fiction: unlike Left Behind, which treats the apocalypse with a literal-minded prophetic fervor, most of these Jewish writers use the End of Days as a metaphor for current conflicts. The stories in Planet of the Jews, Wandering Stars, and More Wandering Stars are haunted by anti-Semitism, issues of Jewish continuity, and the specter of the Holocaust; they use fantasy to expand these problems to their extremes.
In “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV,” an irresistibly-titled tale from Wandering Stars, Israelis flee from a ruined Holy Land and set up a New Israel on a distant planet. The story could be subtitled “Labor Zionists in Space.” It features the internal and external conflicts of today’s state of Israel played out in a futuristic setting–the planet Mazel Tov IV: “It was certainly never our idea to bring Hassidim with us when we fled the smouldering ruins of the Land of Israel,” explains the narrator. “Our intention was to leave Earth and all of its sorrows far behind, to start anew on another world where we could at last build an enduring Jewish homeland, free for once of our eternal Gentile enemies and free, also, of the religious fanatics among our own kind.”
Beyond imagining a continued animosity between religious and secular Israelis, “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” posits a future where anti-Semitism on Earth is intractable, and where the only reasonable response is radical Jewish separatist sovereignty. In another of the stories in Wandering Stars, “Paradise Last,” Earth’s totalitarian leaders send Jews out to space colonies, recalling Stalin’s efforts to promote the settlement of his “Jewish Autonomous Region” in remote Birobizhan. Planet of the Jews, with its depiction of an anti-Semitic genocide put into motion by a Ukrainian government, conjures up memories of both the Holocaust and more distant Ukrainian pogroms like the Khmelnitsky massacres.
Further anxiety about Jewish continuity can be found in the short story “Tauf Aleph,” from More Wandering Stars. Written by Phyllis Gottleib, the tale portrays Samuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman, a prickly old man preparing for his death on a planet far from an uninhabited Earth. Begelman asks Galactic Federation Central to send someone to his planet to say Kaddish for him when he dies. Unfortunately, Begelman turns out to be the last Jew in the known universe, so they are forced to send a Kaddish-reciting robot instead. Combined with the dispersive effects of space exploration, intermarriage has finally killed off the Jewish people. Looks like Dershowitz was right after all.
Stories that air out contemporary Jewish insecurities can be exhausting to read. Some, like “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV,” are well written, but none have the dopey, exhilarating triumphalism of Christian apocalypse lit. In Left Behind, readers can be hungry spectators to the End of Days, satisfied that ultimately, they are saved. But where Christian literature treats the apocalypse as an expression of ultimate justice, the Jewish apocalypse becomes a repository for fear and ultimate injustice. Far from something to look forward to, the apocalypse is something that, in many Jews’ minds, has already transpired or remains a constant threat. Nowhere is this more evident than in Planet of the Jews, a discomfitingly neurotic fantasy where chapters alternate between the tale of space-age genocide and the tale of the narrator’s uncle’s survival during the Holocaust.
After making it through Planet of the Jews, one begins to pine for the scenario laid out in Vos vet zayn ven meshiekh vet kumen: just a nice, simple Armageddon. Only one story comes close to capturing the Yiddish folksong’s tone. It is a short piece in More Wandering Stars, by Gardner Dozois, entitled “Disciples.” In it, the Messiah has arrived. His name is Murray Kupferberg, and he’s a plumber from Pittsburgh. Sure, the sky opens up. Sure, Jews find salvation. But in “Disciples,” it’s no great to-do. There’s no burden of Jewish history or Christian grandiosity, and it’s all over in nine pages. Now that’s beach reading.
