Mashiach Now!:: only You can prevent false messiahsWhen my younger sister, Grace, took up Israeli dancing a few years ago, I was thrilled. What could be better than the blending of Jewish culture with exercise and socializing? She initially encountered and took her first lessons during a summer session at BCI, and upon returning home, immediately began dancing two nights a week with David Dassa and a motley Jew crew. Her new friends had names like Orly and Lior, and if I'm not mistaken, there were a handful of Sara(h)s and Rachels and even an Ezra. Grace regularly demonstrated her newly learned moves to me, dancing to burned CDs of her favorite songs in our shared living room. "Yemenite left and pivot turn together," she'd chant as she danced, still something of a novice. One day, in the course of a conversation about the latest goings on with her "dance" friends, she mentioned that a girl she'd become especially friendly with--one of the Sarahs--had said something befuddling while the two were shooting hoops. For the past few months, they'd been attending Friday Night Live together. Now Sarah wanted to know where else my sister attended services.

"At our family temple," Grace had replied. "Temple Israel of Hollywood. What about you?"

Sarah had clammed up, slightly, and then brought herself to say, "Ahavat Zion. It's a Messianic shul. You should come with me, sometime."

"Oh," said Grace, because she didn't know what else to do.

***

When my sister told me about Sarah's revelation and invitation, I responded by taking an immediate and thoroughly defensive stance. Clearly this girl was trying to convert my sister! The months she'd spent nurturing a friendship with Grace had been solely for the purpose of convincing her to invite Jesus into her heart!

Understand, please, that as a teenager, I was sent on regular religious retreats through Dor Hadash, Havurat Noar, and Halutz. One of the few lessons I actually remember (mainly because it was so intensely drilled into our heads) was that Jesus was off limits. I vividly recall the role-playing sessions we went through, during which various counselors presented the methods that proselytizers might employ to convert us. Jews for Jesus were not Jews, our counselors insisted, and they were to be avoided at all costs. Though it had been taught to me nearly fifteen years prior, the cautionary rule, learned during a high school, weekend retreat, surfaced with a vengeance.

"Are you going to go with her?" I asked hysterically. "You can't go with her!" Part of me was sincerely afraid that my sister would turn Messianic.

"I don't know," Grace said in a maddeningly emotionless tone. "Maybe."

***

Grace did indeed attend a few services with Sarah at Ahavat Zion. She was--and still is--Sarah's friend, after all. She didn't become a Messianic Jew, however. She didn't accept Yeshua as her savior, and she continued Israeli dancing, and attending Friday Night Live, and shooting hoops with Sarah right up until Sarah departed for Eretz Israel to make aliyah. Yup.

What Grace did do was raise some serious questions for me about Messianic Judaism--and not just the Jesus kind. The neighborhood that we lived in at the time, the Orthodox Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, teems with countless shuls, kosher markets and restaurants, girls in long skirts and boys in tzitzit, and posters, banners, and signs calling for "Mashiach Now!" The messianic heart of Lubavitch Hasidism beats loudly there, defining--and even sustaining--the life of the community, but I had never given it much thought. Now I found myself wondering what--and who--my religious neighbors were waiting for, and why this yet-to-be-revealed "Anointed One" was cool, but Jesus was not.

The more that I watched our Orthodox neighbors going about their isolated and anachronistic lives and waiting, all the while, to be delivered by some messiah, the more frustrated I became. Over the centuries, everyone from Rabbi Akiba to Maimonides to Gershom Scholem has sought the Messiah: the Anointed One who will save us from ourselves. Jews have been offered, and have blindly followed, false messiahs ranging from the militant Bar Kokhba to the "man of pain," Isaac Luria, to the psychotic Sabbatai Tzvi (who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah, and then converted to Islam) and today, with minions just a few blocks from my home--over ten years after his death--the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Why, after so many disappointing, devastating, destructive encounters with failed messiahs, are we still waiting?

In his 2003 book, There is No Messiah and You're It, Rabbi Robert N. Levine acknowledges the allure of messianic ideas, but suggests that rather than some future, God-sent savior, each and every one of us is the messiah.

God didn't create us to simply sit back and wait for life to happen. God didn't establish a covenant with us so we would become silent of passive partners.

Judaism's teaching here, its strong emphasis, is clear. Ultimately it's not what you feel that counts; it's not even what you believe. You are what you do. And you don't have to wait for anyone else.

You can break the chains of bondage.

You can feed those hungry for food or human contact.

You can pray for people who are sick, then go and visit them.

You can save a life. Maybe your own.

It seems to me that conceptually, Jesus was no more dangerous a messianic candidate than Bar Kokhba or Schneerson. They're all bad, see, because they create fear and divisions among friends, but mostly because they cloud our (already hazy) perception of reality, and allow us to be lazy when it comes to Tikkun Olam. If we recognize this as the messianic age, and each of us behaves as a messiah, we'll no longer need to wait for one.

Mashiach now: Tag, you're it!