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Chapter Nine Pangs ofMessiah We have seen that the story of the Binding of Isaac is a myth of deliverance. By myth we do not mean a tigment of the imagination ; on the contrary, it is a true reality. It tells the story ofreligious man's odyssey through the awesome seriousness ofliving the way ofthe Law and history, into the awesome heroism ofa totally realized being in the immediacy of martyrdom and, perhaps, back. It is acted out in the vividness of biography, a living drama oflife and death, whether that of Honi the rain maker or that ofthe repentant Eleazar ben Durdaya. It is this acting out of the myth that makes it into a real myth, thus distinguishing it equally from a mere figment of the imagination and from history, which is not told as an acting out of something but rather as an acting out of itself We shall now retell the story once more, this time in a guise where acting out the myth surpasses all others in grandeur and where, therefore, the myth is most likely to hesitate into fantasy, thus neutralizing potential action rather than fostering it. The hero of this story is the messiah. In the footsteps of the Messiah insolence will burgeon, and prices will soar, I the fruit ofthe vine will be plentiful yet wine will be expensive, and the government will become an object of worship, and there will be no remonstration, the meeting-house will be for prostitution, and Galilee will be destroyed, and the Gablan will become desolate, and people [refugees1from the borderlands will wander from town to town-yet welcomed nowhere, and the wisdom of the Scribes will stagnate, and those who fear sin will be despised, and truth will be absent,2 youngsters will put the old to shame, the old will stand up before the children, "the son dishonoreth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, a man's enemies are the 189 190 The Binding ofIsaac and Messiah men of his own house" (Micah 7:6). The face of that generation is like the face of a dog, the son is not ashamed [even] before his father. On whom is there for us to lean? On our Father Who is in Heaven. (M Sotah 9:15)3 In the times when the messiah is on his way, men's respect for one another will fade; inflation will spiral despite sufficient supply, indicating a crumbling economic order; misplaced authority will be venerated; not only will evil reign but its usual counterweight in human togetherness, the feeling that misuse of power is objectionable, will not be felt by anyone; the meeting hall, where the power of togetherness is palpable, will be for whoredom; destruction, all too reminiscent of the Great Revolt where imperial power was animallike and the peoplehood of Israel was crushed, will be rampant; desolation will replace settlement; refugees will roam the country without hope of finding new homes; the very knowledge of the Law will partake of decay rather than build or sustain order; those few who still fear sin will be outcasts; truth will not be suppressed, it will disappear because ofits weakness in the prevailing atmosphere; the natural authority of age and parents will be either perversely reversed, or dissolved ; the family structure will collapse or worse, turn into a hell; trust will change to undermining. In short, the humanity ofthat generation will degenerate into the drooling, tongue-hanging gaze ofa dog and there will be no shame before anyone, let alone before God. In whom can there still be faithfulness except in Israel's heavenly Father? The Mishnah is describing a total breakdown ofeverything that crystallizes into polity. The forces that interact to make an ordered society out of the chaos of mob-viz., mutual respect, sense of value, sense of right and wrong, respect for togetherness, loathing of the rampaging power that is worse than anarchy, the drive to settle down and build, the sense of awe before a law that is beyond man, the sense oftruth, the ability to look to one's elders if only out of gratitude for having arrived at the present through the past, even love based on intimacy and warm knowledge. All the things that constitute a societal structure ofunderstandability and love of living as a human being will disintegrate. Underlying this passage is a vision of society as rooted in men...

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