5 - Revisiting the Second Coming

Summary

AT THIS POINT, the imperative of thematic coherence compels me to interrupt the chronology of the narrative by turning to a critical article that appeared more than two years after this rejoinder. Jacob Immanuel Schochet, a Lubavitch rabbi and academic who has written widely on theological topics, responded not to my arguments but to an essay by Rabbi Chaim Dov Keller that I will have occasion to discuss in its proper time. Rabbi Schochet is a non-messianist who nonetheless affirms the essential legitimacy of the messianist position; precisely because he is not a believer himself, the messianists take special satisfaction in his arguments. Some of those arguments are familiar, but others raise new issues that require us to extend our discussion of the return of a resurrected Messiah from a redemptive mission interrupted by an untimely death.

Rabbi Schochet vehemently criticized Rabbi Keller for ‘an obscene analogy’ between the belief that the resurrected Rebbe will be the Messiah and the similar Christian belief in a dead and risen redeemer. The critique included the standard argument that belief in a resurrected Messiah ‘does not violate normative Judaism or valid Halachah one iota’ since this possibility is estalished by such sources as Sanhedrin 98b and Abarbanel as well as an additional text that we shall examine in due course. But there is also a more original slant. We are presented with a somewhat ambiguous formulation distinguishing Christian and Sabbatian doctrine from that of Lubavitch messianists by the degree of fulfilment allegedly achieved by the interrupted messianic mission.

‘Christians (as well as the Sabbateans)’, writes Rabbi Schochet, differ from the messianists because

they believe that their savior was already the Messiah in actu, and that the Messianic redemption is already an established fact, though yet to move to a new stage with the ‘second coming’. This is not a matter of semantics but fraught with practical implications: that belief caused them to abrogate Torah and mitzvot (even as the Sabbateans too changed Halachah because of their belief).

Messianists, however, remain punctiliously observant.

Let us try to unpack this argument. Rabbi Schochet apparently maintains that Judaism has no objection to the belief that the Messiah will appear on what I called ‘the eschatological stage’ and die before completing his mission.