The Messiah who Refuses to Redeem
Recently, my research on Jewish messianism has led me to revisit Gates of the Forest by Elie Wiesel. This is a novel which includes a fascinating parable about the messiah who arrives in the world but does not save it. Gates of the Forest begins with a teenage boy, Gregor, hiding from Nazi persecution in the forest in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania—the region where Wiesel was raised, and also a home (if not the origin) of Hasidism, the Jewish mystical renewal movement that began in the 18th century. Gregor is approached by an unnamed stranger, whom he gives his own Hebrew name to and refers to as Gavriel.
In the dialogue between the two characters in hiding, Gavriel describes a conversation he had with the prophet Elijah, presumably during contemplative meditation. In that conversation, Elijah says to Gavriel:
“The Messiah is not coming. He’s not coming because he has already come. This is unknown, but he’s neither at the gates of Rome nor in heaven. Everybody is wrong. The Messiah is everywhere. Ever present, he gives each passing moment its taste of drunkenness, desolation, and ashes. He has a name, a face, and a destiny. On the day when his name and face and destiny are one, all masks will fall, time will be freed of its chains, and he will link it to God, as he will link to God drunkenness and desolation and ashes.”
Later, as Gavriel narrates further, the prophecy he received from Elijah is confirmed. Gavriel finds the messiah, and he is nothing but a beadle, a synagogue attendant, a somewhat lowly role in the social hierarchy of the shtetl. Gavriel asks him, “is it you,” and the messiah, named Moshe, responds “yes, it is me.”
However, Moshe the messiah reveals that he has no intention of bringing about redemption. Gavriel attempts to convince him, citing Talmud and midrash, demonstrating that the world is badly suffering and deserving of redemption. But the messiah refuses. Gavriel says, “He who had started out to overturn the laws now submitted to them. The earth-shaking had been called off.” Then, Gavriel tells us, the Holocaust begins and arrives in their shtetl. Soldiers began rounding up Jews, bringing them to the forest, and immolating them in large groups. In this final moment, when it may already be too late to save the world, Gavriel finds Moshe, the messiah, and insists one last time. Moshe responds by saying,
‘Forgive me, there’s nothing I can do, God’s will has taken over ours. Before him we are helpless and panic-stricken.”
The first questions that arise reading this parable are: who is the messiah if he does not save the world? Can the messiah abdicate his definitional role as savior? Furthermore, insofar as the messiah does not save the world because it is not possible for him to do so, what law is he observing, what law dictates the messiah’s ability? If we assume that the messiah’s role is to annul the law, or to usher in redemption that fundamentally transforms the law, then what prior law dictates his decision to fulfill that redemption or not? When the messiah apologizes–Sorry, not sorry, I cannot redeem you–what is the reason he must apologize, the “not sorry,” “this is simply what is possible and the way things must be?”
According to Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith,” one central principle of Judaism is the belief in the arrival of Messiah and the messianic era. We orient ourselves to the messiah as we orient to the future; the messiah is the one who has not yet arrived. But in Elijah’s prophecy to Gavriel in Gates of the Forest, Elijah claims that “The Messiah is not coming. He’s not coming because he has already come.”
This prophecy already includes several counterintuitive statements that seem to contradict the very definition of the messiah. The first two sentences negate his futurity: the messiah is not coming; he’s not coming because he has already come. Insofar as the messiah is defined in Judaism as a future leader, who will arrive to bring about redemption, configuring him as the one who already came is a fundamental transformation in his relationship to us in the present, indeed such that messianism no longer operates chronologically. A few sentences later, Elijah’s prophecy states that the messiah “is everywhere, ever present,” and associated with “drunkenness, desolation, and ashes.” Messiah’s quality of arising in unexpected, dark and immoral places, is also an unexpected characterization for a figure of light who emerges to liberate people from their suffering; in a sense, he reveals the light by concealing it, hiding within these allegedly dark places. This is a trope in Yiddish literature in the early-mid 20th century, even prior to the Holocaust, when some Jews believed that Eastern European Jewish life would be lost not to state violence, but merely moral turpitude.
The Messiah who apologizes is already a contradiction when he is prophesied. Later on, when Gavriel meets him urges him to cry out, to do something instead of doing nothing in the face of unimaginable catastrophe as all the Jews of their town are massacred, the messiah responds “Forgive me, there’s nothing I can do, God’s will has taken over ours.” This apology itself contains several unexpected and apparently self-contradictory statements: first, “there’s nothing I can do” connotes limitation; the messiah, who we imagine as the very one who unites with the infinite and allows human beings to connect with the divine by transcending their physical limitations, is in fact subject to the very constriction that he would upend.
Next, he says “God’s will has taken over ours,” which pledges the messiah’s will as part of a collective—what he can do is what our will is capable of—rather than making the messiah the exception, the sovereign who decides and redeems, or is simply on the side of the Other, the other who the Jews will encounter in redemption. Finally, two statements included in that apology indicate that the speaker is separating or distinguishing himself from God. First, he separates “God’s will” from “ours,” and then he says “Before him,” referring to God. In this self-other distinction, which, for example, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber explore in their work, the messiah is now aligned with the self, not the other one faces.
While it may at first seem that Wiesel’s parable is a betrayal or a rejection of the messianic idea, my research indicates to me that the very contradictions inherent to messianism are part of its message and internal philosophy. The messiah is both coming and has already come, because his arrival signals the end of chronological time. This is a topic I plan to continue to discuss in future newsletter columns.
