Harold Camping, President of Family Stations, Inc., predicted that Judgment Day would occur on Friday, October 21, 2011. Needless to say, the day passed without any readily apparent existential threats. While many would call Camping crazy or insane, his belief is no less plausible than Moses’ splitting the Red Sea, Jesus’ walking on water or any other miraculous events recorded in religious texts. No one can confirm whether these events occurred, for they figure in the area of faith, which, by definition, requires belief in something incapable of confirmation by proof. Clearly though, the idea of the eschaton and the Messianic Age figures as prominently in today’s society as it did in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which biblical scholars almost universally consider the most extraordinary archaeological find of the 21st century. That the corpus of texts discovered at Qumran provides the clearest picture of the development of a set liturgy during the Second Temple Period proves most important for this post.
Texts from Qumran such as “The Blessing of the Faithful” (1QSb-1Q28b) speak of the Messianic Age. While experts remain unsure of whether this particular blessing played a part in the daily liturgy at Qumran, it seems likely that it did. Hope for the Mashiach made it into the the Amidah where it appears as the fifteenth “blessing,” the Y’shuah, bolstering support for the idea of 1QSb-1Q28b playing a part in the liturgy. Works such as The War Scroll and The Damascus Document, among countless others, make it clear that the Yahad saw the eschaton in the near future, and it makes perfect sense, then, that they would pray for its swift arrival.
Now, for more traditional streams of Judaism such as Orthodox and Conservative, prayer for the coming of the Messiah agrees with the movements’ general theology. Yet its appearance in the Reform siddur, Mishkan T’filah, seems a bit more problematic – but not because Reform Judaism refutes the idea of the Messianic age. Indeed, part of “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” adopted at the 1999 Pittsburgh Convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), reads:
Partners with God in
( tikkun olam), repairing the world, we are called to help bring nearer the messianic age.
( tikkun olam), repairing the world, we are called to help bring nearer the messianic age.What the “messianic age” means, though, requires clarification, for the English translation of the Y’shuah in Mishkan T’filah softens the meaning inherent to the original Hebrew. One would think that the Messiah would play an important role in the World to Come, yet such a character seems completely absent in the English rendering. If the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) envisions the Messianic Age as a time of mostly peace, achieved through cooperation of all people without a specific individual sent by God to lead the charge, then they need to state that belief explicitly, instead of translating the Hebrew to elicit that idea without saying so in the first place.
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, David Bloom attends Indiana University Bloomington where he majors in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies. His column, J-Studs, appears here on alternating Saturdays.
