Modernity and Messiah
On Parshas Noach and the human capacity for revolution
The accompanying shiur is available on the Orthodox Union's parsha learning app: All Parsha.
The land of Bavel is first introduced in the story of the flood. All of those who drowned in the flood, says the Talmud, eventually landed in the land of Bavel. It is a strange introduction to a land with such enduring associations with the Jewish people. The Talmud, studied by the Jewish people throughout the generations is called the Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud. The name “Bavel” is literally on the front cover of the Talmud. So it is somewhat strange that we are first introduced to such an auspicious land in the context of such a harrowing story.
In fact, the Midrash (Tanchuma Noach 3) spends much of our parsha extolling the virtues of the the oral traditions preserved in the Talmud Bavli. Like the oceans of the flood, the Midrash explains, so is the vastness of the Oral Torah, the spoken traditions passed down throughout each generation. In fact, the Jewish people, according to the Midrash, needed to be forced to accept the Oral Torah specifically because it was so requires so much individual effort and care.
The allusions to Bavel become far more explicit as we continue reading Parshas Noach. Following the story of the flood, we are introduced to the Tower of Bavel. Everyone, spoke one common language, until, after trying to build a tower into the heavens, God mixes up everyone’s language. No midrashic allusions necessary, the Torah explicitly states that the very name Bavel enshrined on the cover of every Talmud, derives its name from God mixing up (In Hebrew: balal) everyone’s spoken language.
Why here, why now? The first time something is mentioned in the Torah reveals its essence, explains Rav Tzadok of Lublin. So given the enduring significance of Bavel, why is this our introduction to it? It’s a strange time and place to find allusions for the Oral Torah. The Jewish people were not even given the Torah yet, so why is this the introduction to Bavel, the homeland of our Talmud? Why is here where those drowned from the flood were washed away to? Why is the Midrash building allusions to the Oral Torah here? And why does the very name Bavel derive from the story of the Tower of Bavel?
To understand all of this I would like to explore the significance of 1840—not the podcast, the calendric year. A year in which modernity and messianic hopes collided.
If there is any period one would desire to be born in—is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1837)
In the year 1840, the world began to shift.
Modernity—political, economic, technological, and social progress—began to upend traditional society. The world became smaller—more global, more cultured, and more intertwined. As Orlando Figes convincingly portrays in his work, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, the 1840s created a revolution in movement. “The railways,” writes Figes, “enabled people across Europe to see themselves as ‘Europeans’ in ways that they had not done before.” The telegraph—brought to the public’s attention in 1838—was arguably the greatest communications innovation since the printing press. The whole world could now communicate with one another.
Caroline Weber, in her New York Times book review of The Europeans, emphasizes the parallels between this period and the world we inhabit today:
Imagine a society where, within the space of a single generation, human innovation all but collapses the most formidable geographic distances, allowing individuals and information to travel the globe with unprecedented swiftness and ease. Where new platforms radically transform the ways in which news, music, books and art are created and consumed. Where media-driven celebrity trumps older modes of authority and forms new elites, endowing famous artists and performers with peerless cachet. Where audiences converge in a worldwide culture of “sharing,” and diversity and connectedness join equality and freedom as the shibboleths of Western liberalism. Where, at the same time, legislation struggles to keep pace with technological change; capitalism and consumerism destroy even as they enrich; and nationalism, racism and xenophobia poison the public discourse, threatening disaster.
It was not just the secular world that began to shift; the religious world was transformed as well. The democratic and innovative spirit that was sweeping the world turned its eye towards the sacred. Another revolution was afoot: A religious revolution.
As Dominic Green writes in his book, The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898:
Suddenly the heights of religious experience were no longer the privilege of hereditary male elites. Nor was religious joy the meager fruit of renunciation, abstinence, or retreat. Like Napoléon, who wanted to conquer India but never went there, the modern individual seeks to combine West and East, rational and sublime, personal and collective, science and spirit. As Emerson exhorted Margaret Fuller, “Write your own Bible!”
And in the Jewish world, an even more radical revolution was brewing.
Modernity eroded much of the traditional ties within the Jewish world—the Reform movement was born in the 1820s—but it also brought unity to a quickly splintering Jewish world.
In February of 1840, the Jewish community of Damascus was accused of murdering a Christian monk and using his blood to bake their matzos, a classic blood libel. For arguably the first time, the worldwide Jewish community was galvanized for support. As Abraham Karp writes in his Jewish Continuity in America: Creative Survival in a Free Society:
Participation in a common cause that so excited the emotions brought the scattered and disparate elements of the American Jewish community together in a communion of spirit and concern. It has been suggested that modern Jewish history dates from the Damascus affair. Certainly the American Jewish community had its beginning as a self-conscious entity in the activity precipitated by “the massacre of Damascus.”
1840 is also the year 5600 on the Jewish calendar—the end of the sixth century of the sixth millennia.
“In the sixth century of the sixth millennia,” the kabalistic work known as the Zohar writes, “the gates of wisdom above and the wellsprings of wisdom below will open up. and the rainbow in the cloud will illuminate.” With imagery explicitly evoking the story of the flood of Noach, the Zohar predicted a messianic revolution in the year 1840. “As we approach the days of Messiah, even children will be able to discover the secrets of the Torah,” the Zohar writes.
If Jewish history has taught us anything, messianic predictions rarely bring what they promise.
So how did the Jewish community react to the seeming absence of messianic presence that the year 1840 had portended?
Here, the Jewish community split into different camps, many of which are still familiar today. As outlined in Israel Bartel’s article, Messianism and Nationalism: Liberal Optimism vs. Orthodox Anxiety, the reaction of the Jewish community was split into three camps: traditionalists, liberals, and nationalists.
Rav Yaakov Lifschutz (1838-1921) served as the secretary for the most prominent rabbi in the world at the time, Rav Yitzchok Elchonan Spector. But he also had a personality and strong views of his own. In his memoir, Zichron Yaakov, he cites the messianic prediction of the Zohar. He acknowledges the technological advancement that the year 1840/5600 brought but bemoans the erosion of traditional Jewish values. he writes:
Starting in the year 5600, the vision of the holy Zohar—that at that date the gates of wisdom would be opened, ... was realized. The construction of railroads and steamships proliferated from that epoch, along with the invention of matches, the telegraph, gaslights, and electricity, and later the telephone and phonograph, as well as many other inventions in every branch of technology and scientific disciplines. ... In our country, too, which was then in a wild state, the government began to pave the first highway from Petersburg to Warsaw in the year 5600. Many associated this with a biblical verse: “Build up, build up the highway” etc. (Isa. 62:10). The construction of this road was a great marvel for many.
“The beginning of the new age of technology,” Bartel writes, “of which the author was well aware and which he associated in his book with the vast social and economic changes that took place in the Russian Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century, also marked the inception of the two great evils that would chart the course of the Jews in the modern age: the birth of Haskalah and the rise of modern anti-Semitism.” Lifschutz continues:
The year 5600 was the start of a new age of harsh servitude for our people, both inwardly and outwardly. Many and incessant troubles beset the Jews, terrible decrees and persecutions, wreaked by our enemies without, along with the material and spiritual assault and decline instigated by our “beneficiaries” within, those who followed the path of the Berlin Haskalah. These two sources of damage depressed our people, both materially and spiritually.
More liberal Jewish leaders, particularly within the Reform movement, embraced the modernity that the more traditional community bemoaned. As Bartel explains:
They were responding to what they saw as the progress of the human spirit and the Jews’ advancement toward integration among the nations. At the rabbinical conferences in Frankfurt and Breslav, Reform Rabbi David Einhorn described the Jews as a priestly nation with a messianic mission. Later, he called for re-making the Ninth of Av into a joyous festival. As he saw it, rather than a disaster, the destruction of the Temple, which this date commemorated, was an event of messianic importance, a cause for celebration. The Temple’s destruction inaugurated the Jews’ dispersal among the nations, and it allowed them to fulfill their vocation of disseminating the divine Torah to the entire world: “The day of sorrow and fasting has become a day of gladness,” a time for renewed dedication to the building of the New Jerusalem that would embrace all humanity.
A final approach mentioned by Bartel were those channeled the Zohar’s messianic fervor into a newfound spirit of Jewish national, the emerging Zionist movement. Enter Rav Yehudah Alkelai.
Rav Yehudah Alkelai could not ignore the year 1840/5600. He was an outspoken Zionist and hoped the promises of the Zohar would materialize into the redemption of the Jewish people. The pain of the Damascus Affair weighed on him, yet he prayed that the bloodshed in Damascus would usher in redemption. As he writes in his work Minchas Yehudah:
And somewhat unexpectedly I said that because the same prophecy speaks of the consolation of the land and the salvation of the blood and the redemption of Israel, just as we merited through your [i.e., Western philanthropists’] efforts to be saved from the blood libel, so shall we merit the consolation of the land and redemption of Israel.
Rabbi Alkalai was a lonely figure in many ways—he was frustrated with his traditional colleagues for not placing more hope in the redemptive potential of 5600 and he chastised reform rabbinic leaders who looked towards redemption within Diaspora, ignoring the redemptive potential of moving to Israel.
Still, his dreams did not go unfulfilled. One of his congregants listened intently and purchased his printed works. He would travel to his family and share the dreams of Rav Alkalai with his children and grandchildren. His grandson was named Theodor Herzl.
The spirit of Talmud Bavli hovers over Parshas Noach.
Oral Law, as opposed to the written law, requires the initiative and interpretation of the Jewish people. As opposed to the revelation of the Written Torah, which is top-down, the Oral Torah is bottom-up—God’s Torah as revealed through the hearts and minds of the collective Jewish People.
“How could those who built the Tower of Bavel,” asks Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlop, “think they could fight God in heaven?”
They sensed, he explains, the unfolding of Talmud Bavli wherein we can argue with God and emerge victorious.
And this idea—the collective power and spirit of the Jewish people to, so to speak, conquer the Divine—underlies the Messianic spirit of the entire parsha. One man, Noach, can rebuild worlds.
And this spirit resides in each of us.
Rav Mordechai Yosef of Izhbitz, began his own hassidic court, after famously breaking away from the Rebbe of Kotzk, in the year 5600. His Hassidic court was animated by the redemptive spirit of these ideas—the collective capacity of the Jewish People to find and create divinity, even absent open revelation.
He, too, read the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of Noach. His approach was different from all of the others mentioned. Redemption for the Rebbe of Izhbitz was not about political emancipation or diasporic freedom; it was the capacity for all to see divinity and purpose within their own lives.
“The words of Torah will become near to everyone’s grasp and understanding,” his grandson Rav Gershon Henoch Leiner wrote.
Modernity brought the capacity for a redemption from within.
Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned
The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, Orlando Feiges
How Modernity Came to Europe, Caroline Weber
The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898, Dominic Green
Jewish Continuity in America: Creative Survival in a Free Society, Abraham Karp
Messianism and Nationalism: Liberal Optimism vs. Orthodox Anxiety, Israel Bartel
Zichron Yaakov, Rav Yaakov Lifschutz (Hebrew)
Minchas Yehudah, Rav Yehudah Alkalai (Hebrew)
1840 is near and dear to my heart. It is the year that inspired the name for our 18Forty podcast. I have some more materials on the significance of this year including a source sheet and a podcast episode, as well as an article reflecting on how the spirit of 1840 is emerging again in the 2020s.
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Reading Jewish History in the Parsha has been generously sponsored by my dearest friends Janet and Lior Hod and family with immense gratitude to Hashem.