c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ If, for Jews, Jesus was not the Messiah, then who is?

Is the Messiah a being, a divine hero coming to redeem us from alienation and mortality?

This illusion is the corollary of an even more fundamental illusion: Someone out there has it all planned out. Maybe, as mystics and some prominent physicists believe, there is a cosmic intelligence or consciousness. If so, it’s not any more”out there”than it is right here, not separate from who we are, or what we think and dream. By evolving through us, it becomes aware of itself.

No single person _ past, present or future _ is the Messiah. But we can help shape a messianic figure by realizing that each of us is one limb of the organism of humanity. The kabbalist Abraham Abulafia saw the messianic age as a”new reality,”a time when”each person regards every single human being as a close friend, as one regards each limb of one’s body.” Perhaps, through our work of tikkun, through ethical and spiritual activity, we are fashioning Messiah, bit by bit. This kabbalistic perspective resonates with one of Franz Kafka’s paradoxical sayings:”The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival.”The world is redeemed by justice, by transformative human action. A supernatural Messiah is unnecessary, mere icing on the cake.

Supernatural messiahs and predictions of a messianic age captivate the imagination because the world is so unfair and history so fickle. Most messianic scenarios spell the end of history in which everything will finally be set right. When the Messiah arrives, it is told, good will triumph and evil will be vanquished. That would be nice, but it’s not how things work and we shouldn’t fool ourselves. The world will never be perfect; society will never be completely just.

Is the universe open or closed?

How will the universe end? It depends if it is closed or open. If it is open, the universe will expand forever _ and die a slow, cold death. Eventually, all the stars will go out, one by one. Black holes will merge with one another, swallowing everything in their path.

Or, the universe may turn out very differently, if it contains enough matter: If the average density is at least one hydrogen atom per ten cubic feet, the universe is closed.

This means that the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter will be strong enough to halt the expansion of the universe and cause it to begin to contract. Distances between galaxies will start to decrease, gravitational attraction will increase, and eventually, all matter and energy will contract to an infinitely dense point in what is known as the”big crunch.” If we live in what cosmologists call an oscillating universe, then the singularity of the big crunch could give birth to another big bang. Extensive descriptions of such creation-destruction cycles appear in Kabbalah as well as Hinduism. In either case _ open or closed, eternal expansion or oscillation _ our own planet is doomed.

Our sun is about five billion years old _ middle-aged and reliable. But in another five billion years, the hydrogen fuel in the sun’s core will run out and its continuous nuclear reactions will cease. Thermal pressure from within the sun will disappear and nothing will be left to buoy it up. Its core will sag under its own weight and heat escaping in all directions will make its atmosphere mushroom, engulfing several nearby planets, probably including Earth. Gradually, most of the sun’s atmosphere will fall away, leaving a hot, dense ball of inert matter, which will slowly turn into a cold, dark sphere the size of Earth, but one million times denser.

Life will not necessarily come to an end. By then, human beings, or whatever type of intelligent life evolves from us, will have developed the technology to move to another, safer solar system. One prominent theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, has suggested that if the universe is open and expanding infinitely, life will adapt and evolve, matching its metabolism to the falling temperature of its surroundings:”The pulse of life will beat more slowly as the temperature falls but will never stop.”Even if all matter disappears into energy, Dyson theorizes, consciousness may be transferable to a different medium, perhaps resolving itself into light.

This is it

Meanwhile, here we are. We still have quite a while until the year five billion, until the end of days and nights in our local neighborhood. There will be no absolute tikkun, no final perfection. No one has arranged it all ahead of time. Chance will play a leading role in how things unfold, as it always has. We should learn to negotiate with chance and work for a gradual, partial tikkun, mending our own brokenness, our social fabric, our planet as best we can.

Confronted by the here and now, the actual situation is more compelling than any messianic utopia. The interrelatedness of all beings is a sheer fact of life: a mystical insight, but also good common sense. The variety-in-oneness that surrounds and includes us demands a flexible approach. We need to learn all we can from the Torah of the past, yet be open to the revelation that is available in this irreplaceable moment. As we translate ancient wisdom into a new idiom, as we improvise with tradition, Torah ripens.

The metaphor of Father in Heaven no longer works. God is not a cosmic parent watching over us, so we have to care all the more about each other, the various limbs of humanity.

Is there a God we can believe in? The Hebrew word emunah,”belief,”originally meant trust and faithfulness, both human and divine. Without trusting another person, we cannot love; without trusting others, we cannot build and sustain community. But can we trust the cosmos? Can we trust the God of oneness?

We can trust that we are part of something greater: a vast web of existence constantly expanding and evolving. When we gaze at the nighttime sky, we can ponder that we are made of elements forged within stars, out of particles born in the big bang. We can sense that we are looking back home. The further we gaze into space, the further we see back into time. If we see a galaxy ten million light years away, we are seeing that galaxy as it was ten million years ago: It has taken that long for its ancient light to arrive here.

Beyond any star we will ever identify, beyond any quasar, lies the horizon of spacetime, 15 billion light years away. But neither God nor the big bang is that far away. The big bang didn’t happen somewhere out there, outside of us. Rather, we began inside the big bang; we now embody its primordial energy. In a sense, the big bang never stopped.

And what about God? We can begin to know God by unlearning what we think about God. One of the kabbalistic names for the Infinite is Nishayon,”forgetting.”One knows God through unknowing, through shedding inadequate conceptions, just as a sculptor cuts away everything that obscures the clarity of the hidden form.

But there is no guaranteed method to find God. God is not an object or a fixed destination. No set of practices, precisely followed, ensures access. There is no definite way to reach God. But then again, you don’t need to reach something that’s everywhere.

God is not somewhere else, hidden from us. God is right here, hidden from us. We are enslaved by routines. Rushing from event to event, from one chore to another, we rarely let ourselves pause and notice the splendor right in front of us. Our sense of wonder has shriveled, victimized by our pace of life.

How, then, can we find God? A clue is provided by one of the many names of Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God, the divine presence. She is called”ocean,””well,””garden,””apple orchard.”She is also called zot, which simply means”this.”God is right here, in this very moment, fresh and unexpected, taking you by surprise. God is this.

MJP END MATT