You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if—if we're the generation that's going to see that come about. I don't know if you've noted any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we're going through. (President Ronald Reagan, in a phone conversation with Tom Dine of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group on Capitol Hill, before the bombing attack on U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut.)
As American resolve was being tested by Syrian and Soviet responses to the Marine deployment in Beirut, the leader of the free world used a public telephone call to unburden himself of some dire apprehensions (as reported by Wolf Blitzer in The Jerusalem Post, October 28, 1983). If any other person had referred to prophetic scripture as the grounding for an apocalyptic scenario, we could dismiss such foreboding as a symptom of melancholy brought on by the cruel realities of our time—perhaps mitigated by the "consoling" expectation that much of this sinful world will soon meet its deserved destruction.
An increasing number of Christian preachers and lay people, some of them professing great love for Israel, are today quoting passages in Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, along with Gospel texts and the book of Revelation in the New Testament, to support their belief in an imminent global cataclysm.
This kind of Christian eschatology is unsettling to most Jews, and to a great many Christians, for it reflects an otherworldly escapism and a dualistic cosmology that anticipates with pious rapture the final, violent denouement between the forces of good and evil. In Christian tradition, Armageddon represents the cosmic triumph of God over Satan, light over darkness, Christ over the Antichrist.
When an evangelical preacher uses this end-of-days symbolism, Jews and less enraptured Christians can understand it as part of his vocation to reassure the faithful. But when an incumbent president of the United States uses such imagery in referring to the power struggles in the Middle East, one has good reason to be concerned, even alarmed. For he is one of the two human beings on this earth with the power to turn such apocalyptic fantasies into reality by unleashing an arsenal of doomsday weapons.
In Jewish tradition, biblical prophecy is not a foretelling of inevitable doom or destruction. Rather, it is a timely warning combined with a promise based on the covenantal bond between God and his people. The prophet chastises his own community, above all the corrupt establishment, for the sins which have estranged the people from the Almighty.
Prophecy is not synonymous with prediction. When the future is foreseen and foretold, it is not an unconditional, inevitable future. The outcome, whether redemptive or destructive, is always conditional—for it is dependent on human behavior in response to God's Word.
The prophetic appeal can only be understood within the framework of the covenant, that central biblical idea which applies not only to the bond between the Jewish people and God, but also to the more inclusive relationship between the Creator and all of humanity (symbolized by the rainbow shown to Noah and his family after the flood). Whatever punishment, whatever suffering, whatever calamities God's people may undergo, the covenant is everlasting, and redemption will finally blossom to bless all nations.
Apocalyptic thinking breaks this redemptive chain running throughout history, and makes a mockery of any notion of salvation.
It is true that Judaism—especially during the time of the Second Temple, the immediate antecedent of Christianity—has its own messianic midrashim that include cataclysmic visions of the end of days. The Qumran scrolls demonstrate that the first century of the Common Era was rife with such apocalyptic hopes and dreams, as the Jews suffered increasingly under Roman oppression. And there are several cryptic passages in earlier prophetic literature—particularly Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah—which can be interpreted in such a light if one chooses. Over the two millennia of exile and persecution, such visions of cosmic upheaval often served to comfort the Jews as they awaited the messianic redemption that would bring them home to the Land of Israel as a self-governing and free people.
President Reagan referred to "the times we're going through." What do the events of the past generation suggest in the light of biblical prophecy? To which prophetic vision should we look for inspiration and guidance—the few cryptic passages in Scripture that mention God's wrath against the enemies of Israel, or the far more frequent exhortations against callousness and corruption by these lonely champions of justice and righteousness?
It is no doubt consoling to a political leader to identify himself and his nation with the people of God, and to demonize his political adversary so that the other becomes not only the obstacle to furthering the national interest but also Satan incarnate; the children of darkness versus the children of light.
In an age of ultimate weaponry capable of annihilating the entire human family, such dualistic ideologies and apocalyptic fantasies are understandable—and terribly dangerous. They are symptoms of a mental disease that threatens to spread and become terminal. All of us would then fall victim to self-fulfilled nightmares, not prophecies.
Biblical psychology acknowledges the sinfulness of all human beings, including the prophets themselves. When we project evil onto our enemies and ignore our own sins, we are fueling the polarization which has bred countless wars and helped to make humanity an endangered species.
The history of our time includes not only the Holocaust, the most demonic drama ever enacted on the human stage, but also the resurrection of the "dry bones" of Israel in the Jewish homeland. Is this not a "sign of the times" in the direction of historical continuity and promise, a sign of prophetic hope as the Israeli national anthem "Hatikva" ("the hope") expresses? But even this miraculous restoration is conditioned on the implementation of justice and righteousness, as the prophet Isaiah declares (Isaiah 1:27): "Zion will be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through righteousness."
We cannot count on some divine insurance plan to protect us whatever our actions—just as we cannot afford to be fatalistic about the future. We need to remember always that the choice between good and evil, blessing and curse, life and death on this fragile planet is in our hands.
A president of the United States, or a prime minister of Israel, ought to engage in some prophetic self-criticism in the exercise of political power. At the same time that Soviet or Syrian aggression is deterred by military means, a faithful defender of democracy and biblical values should also seek ways in which limited resources may not be devoured by armaments while the root causes of most conflicts—poverty, hunger, and political oppression—continue to fester. It is these conditions of human misery and degradation throughout the world which provide fertile ground for Soviet, Cuban, or Syrian adventurism in the name of the deprived masses—whether they be Salvadorans, Africans, or Palestinians.
The true prophetic spirit today would address these root conditions of injustice instead of branding the Eastern bloc nations, or the Syrians, or the Iranians as the "children of darkness" who will be vanquished at Armageddon by the virtuous defenders of the true faith executing God's wrath. As a devout Catholic friend observes, such a political theology boils down to this perverse parody of John 3:16: "God so loved the world that He sent it World War III."
A faithful prophetic witness from the last world war, one who can inspire all biblical believers, was the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis after he joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Writing at the end of 1942, just a few months before he would be arrested and jailed, Bonhoeffer composed the following lines, which include a reference to the faith of Jeremiah, tested at a time when the prophet himself was imprisoned:
For most people, the compulsory abandonment of planning for the future means that they are forced back into living just for the moment, irresponsibly, frivolously, or resignedly; some few dream longingly of better times to come, and try to forget the present.
We find both these courses equally impossible, and there remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land," proclaims Jeremiah (32:15), in paradoxical contrast to his prophecies of woe, just before the destruction of the Holy City. It is a sign from God and a pledge of afresh start and a great future, just when all seems black.
Thinking and acting for the sake of the coming generation, but being ready to go any day without fear or anxiety—that, in practice, is the spirit in which we are forced to live. It is not easy to be brave and keep that spirit alive, but it is imperative.
Yehezkel Landau was active in the religious Zionist peace movement, Oz VeShalom, and was a lecturer on Judaism and Jewish-Christian relations at the time this article appeared. This article appeared in The Jerusalem Post and is reprinted with the author's permission.
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