mentalblog.com comments:
Ephraim,
As I posted in reply to this comment in the other thread:
You're right.
That's why, in the political realm, what we in America call conservatism (what in Western Europe is called liberalism) stresses the facts that people aren't perfect, their world isn't perfect, and the best society is one which acknowledges those facts and allows individuals to make their own choices and their own decisions, to find the solutions that are best for them.
That is the opposite of the totalitarian vision.
In current Israel, the govt is perfect (Perfect Peres is President, for crying out loud!) and the people are fools who can't be trusted. Here the gov't decides where housing can be built, what type and by whom. Which other country today has housing dictated ENTIRELY by the central government?
(Today's scandal: IDF soldier complains of stomach pains, sent instead for psychiatric treatment by IDF doctors who think he's just faking, found to truly have stomach pains, had part of intestines removed. Doctors treat patients like idiots who don't really know if they are in pain or not. People complain to doctors of pains and are ignored. In a separate incident, yet another doctor was stabbed by an unhappy patient. This story repeats every so often here.)
Israel is headed for self-destruction, big-time. See what Frank Gaffney says.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/n...aels-staticide/
Is it just Israel or is the larger Jewish Oilam trying to kill itself?
Tzemach,
In your title for my commentary, "Who Took Messiah Out of Messianic Solution?" you seem to assume that this "Messianic solution" without Messiah is an oxymoron. Well, it is not. Without taking sides on this issue (because I am not competent enough), there is a totally legitimate approach in mainstream Judaism of old that Messiah is an era, a global phenomenon, not a person.
Actually, the personification of the Messianic Utopian times with a person dates back "only" to the end of First Temple (or even maybe - Second Temple, depending on whether certain excerpts in Isaiah were originally written or inserted later on, a totally legitimate discussion in Talmud). We don't hear about Messiah being an identifiable person before that.
Even in Kabbalah, there are different takes on it.
Some reconcile it by saying that Moshiach ben Yosef is a social-spiritual-anthropological-political phenomenon, and Moshiach ben David is a person.
But even if this is true, if you read Rambam carefully, you see that Moshiach just institutes certain regime (not very clear what kind of a regime - constitutional monarchy, or presidential republic, depending on whether a king is an dynastic inherited position, or a person is voted into becoming a king as a lifetime position, without power to confer it to his successor, whereas after the king's death the authority to confer monarchy goes back to the Supreme Court, which is Sanhedrin), gain certain political, military, social and spiritual accomplishments, and then he would follow the path of all mortals. In any case, according to Rambam, Messiah is about Jewish sovereignty and spiritual revival being restored, arranged around a restoration of Jewish self-determination (political or other, as I debated), and the presence of Messiah is important as one who led the path and served this cause, not as a singular mythical figure on whom all spiritual aspirations of Jewish history would be focused.
Commenting by HaloScan
