Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

The Mahdi Scouts in Lebanon: Exploiting Youthful Idealism

One journalistic account of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon offers disturbing food for thought.The New York Times of November 21, 2008, features a front-page article by Robert F. Worth entitled “Hezbollah Seeks to Marshal the Piety of the Young.” It is “the eighth in a series of articles examining the lives of the young across the Muslim world at a time of religious revival.”[24] In an era of rampant materialism, stark economic disparities, and disenchantment among young people everywhere, religious idealism and a return to traditional values can be laudable alternatives to apathy, alienation, and hopelessness. But the adolescents portrayed in Worth’s article are not being educated to feed the hungry, help the downtrodden, or educate the illiterate. They are being trained for military action against Israel, as part of the Lebanese Shi’ite movement’s long-range agenda.

“It’s like a complete system, from primary school to university,” said Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University who has been studying Hezbollah for decades. “The goal is to prepare a generation that has deep religious faith and is also close to Hezbollah.”

Much of this activity is fueled by a broader Shiite religious resurgence in Lebanon that began after the Iranian revolution in 1979. But Hezbollah has gone further than any other organization in mobilizing this force, both to build its own support base and to immunize Shiite youths from the temptations of Lebanon’s diverse and mostly secular society…

Hezbollah and its allies have…adapted and expanded religious rituals involving children, starting at ever-earlier ages. Women, who play a more prominent role in Hezbollah than they do in most other radical Islamic groups, are especially important in creating what is often called “the jihad atmosphere” among children.

The focus for much of Worth’s article is the Mahdi Scouts program that Hezbollah founded in 1985, soon after Hezbollah itself was created. Since that time, the scout network has grown to include some 60,000 children and leaders - six times larger than any of other 29 scout groups in Lebanon. They are also the most militaristic, serving as a training facility for Hezbollah’s armed forces. Worth gained access to some of the written materials used by the scout leaders to educate (or indoctrinate) their youthful charges. He writes:

Those books, copies of which were provided to this reporter by a Hezbollah official, show an extraordinary focus on religious themes and a full-time preoccupation with Hezbollah’s struggle against Israel. The chapter titles, for the 12- to 14-year-old age group, include “Love and Hate in God,” “Know Your Enemy,” “Loyalty to the Leader,” and “Facts About Jews.” Jews are described as cruel, corrupt, cowardly and deceitful, and they are called the killers of prophets. The chapter on Jews states that “their Talmud says those outside the Jewish religion are animals.”

Worth continues:

In every chapter, the children are required to write down or recite Koranic verses that illustrate the theme in question. They are taught to venerate Ayatollah Khomeini - Iran has been a long-standing supporter of Hezbollah, providing it with money, weapons, and training - and the leaders of Hezbollah. They are told to hate Israel and to avoid people who are not devout. Questions at the end of chapters encourage the children to “watch your heart” and “assess your heart” to check wrong impulses and encourage virtuous ones. One note to the instructors reminds them that young scouts are in a sensitive phase of development that should be considered “a launching toward commitment.”

In his account of the Mahdi Scout program for girls, Worth describes a ritual calledTakleef Shara’ee , or the holy responsibility, in which close to 300 girls, 8 to 9 years old, formally don thehijab , or Islamic head scarf. This ceremony has become more common in Lebanon in recent years, Worth notes, and it signals a deepening of religious faith and commitment on the part of these Shi’ite girls.

The two-and-a-half hour ceremony that followed - in which the girls performed a play about the meaning of the hijab and a bearded Hezbollah cleric delivered a long political speech - was a concentrated dose of Hezbollah ideology, seamlessly blending millenarian Shiite doctrine with furious diatribes against Israel.

Again and again, the girls were told that the hijab was an all-important emblem of Islamic virtue and that it was the secret power that allowed Hezbollah to liberate southern Lebanon [from Israeli military occupation]. The struggle with Israel, they were told, is the same as the struggle of Shiite Islam’s founding figures, Ali and Hussein, against unjust rulers in their time.

As an Israeli Jew, but no less as a human being, I am dismayed by these demonizing projections onto my own people and the odious distortions of Jewish tradition. At the same time, I am aware that most Lebanese, including those I have met, have developed hostile views of Jews and Israel as a direct result of the suffering they have experienced during decades of war. Israeli airstrikes and military incursions into Lebanon, plus an eighteen-year occupation of the south ending in 2000, have served to strengthen Hezbollah and make it more appealing as the heroic resistance among Lebanese, especially Shi’ites who were, for many years, a disempowered community within that country. Hezbollah, the self-designated “Party of God,” very effectively uses the empowering symbolism of theMahdi, with its promise of transforming suffering to victory. Suffering, including martyrdom, as well as eventual victory are both constitutive elements of Shi’ite piety and of the Shi’ite understanding of redemption. Moktada al-Sadr capitalizes on the same religious symbolism with his Mahdi Army in Iraq, following decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein and then confronting Western occupation forces.

Reading Worth’s article and decrying the poisoning of young minds and hearts, I am painfully reminded of how Israeli Jewish youth in religious schools and youth movements are fed dehumanizing stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, especially radical movements like Hezbollah and Hamas. Prolonged conflict between communities inevitably creates increasing radicalization, along with increasingly demonizing projections onto the perceived enemy.[25] This is especially tragic when one sees tender-hearted, innocent, idealistic young people ideologically conditioned as part of their upbringing, sent by well-intentioned parents to paramilitary scout movements as preparation for the patriotic role of military service , which may entail the ultimate sacrifice of those precious young people.

The anti-Israel political ideology of Hezbollah interests me less, for the purposes of this study, than its warped interpretations of Islamic tradition, whose normative values emphasize mercy and compassion. When the Divine is invoked in prayer,Allah is referred to asAl-Rahman Al-Raheem , the All-Compassionate, the All-Merciful. In this account of the Mahdi Scouts, whatever mercy or compassion that may be evident is reserved for members of the Hezbollah constituency. This is a tragic reminder of how religion, any religion, is grotesquely distorted and contaminated by violent aspirations, when justice is confused with vengeance and when the legitimate struggle against oppression is corrupted by the demonizing of the perceived oppressor. Worth’s troubling account also challenges us to reclaim the positive dimensions in the Islamic tradition concerning theMahdi, the right-guided Redeemer chosen by God to lead humanity toward equity and justice.

Iran after the 1979 Revolution

A central focus of our study is what happens to eschatological piety when a powerless and oppressed religious community suddenly assumes political power. For Jews, Israel is the contemporary laboratory that embodies this challenge. In the next section, we will examine how Jewish messianism has impacted Zionist ideology and Israeli policies. For Shi’ite Muslims, post-1979 Iran is the case studypar excellence . Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the historian cited earlier, is a native Iranian who left Tehran for the United States following the Shah’s downfall and the triumphant homecoming of Ayatollah Khomeini. He reflects on how these developments have begun to influence traditional Shi’ite notions about the Imamate and theMahdi :

The Shi’ite Imam is…considered by Shi’ism as the only legitimate ruler of the Islamic community…Twelve-Imam Shi’ites therefore have rejected (until the Iranian Revolution of 1979) all existing political authority ever since the short-lived caliphate of ‘Ali came to an abrupt end with his assassination. They believe that the twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, is in occultation (ghaybah ), that is, not outwardly present in this world and yet alive. All legitimate political power must derive from him, and he will appear one day to bring justice and peace to the world as part of eschatological events that will bring human history to a close. Since 1979 and the Iranian Revolution - as a result of which Shi’ite religious figures rule directly in Iran - new interpretations of the relation between religious and governmental authority have been made, but the significance and role of the hidden Imam remains [sic ] unchanged.[26]

There have been different millennialist movements throughout Islamic history, often led by charismatic figures whose followers projected onto them the image and expectations of the eschatologicalMahdi . Nasr notes that just before and during the spread of Western colonialism in the nineteenth century, religio-political millennialist movements emerged in different parts of the Muslim world, from West Africa to India.[27]

He adds:

This wave gradually died out in the late thirteenth/nineteenth century, only to rise again during the past few decades following the political independence of Muslim nations without corresponding cultural independence. The very subjugation of Islam, despite outward political independence, which had raised many people’s hopes, led to an atmosphere of expectation of Divine intervention in human history. This eschatological atmosphere, which characterizes Islamic millennialism, or Mahdism, was present during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It was the determining factor in 1979 in the capture of the grand mosque in Mecca by a group of Saudis whose leader claimed to be the Mahdi. It also manifested itself in a strong Mahdist movement in northern Nigeria. Nor has this atmosphere of expectation of eschatological events associated with the coming of the Mahdi disappeared. On the contrary, it is one of the important aspects of the reality of Islam in the contemporary world, as it is of Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism…[28]

Seyyed Hossain Nasr’s son, Vali Nasr, published a popular book of his own in 2006 entitledThe Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future . In this historical survey of sectarian conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’as and their import for the future, the younger Nasr offers this reflection on recent developments in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq:

…Khomeini also relied on Shia messianism to confirm his own leadership of [the 1979] revolt. Unlike Sunnism, Shiism strongly cultivates millenarian expectations, which give the religion its framework for understanding history and current politics as well as the mysteries of salvation and the end time. The Iranian revolution drew on the power of that framework, but it was not unique in that regard. In Lebanon, the disappearance of the popular Shia leader Imam Musa al-Sadr in 1978 evoked tales of miraculous occultation. After the fall of Saddam in Iraq the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr named his militia the Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi), clearly implying that his cause was that of the Twelfth Imam, and that those who fought him were the enemies of the promised Mahdi - who went into occultation over a millennium ago.[29]

Vali Nasr notes that during the Iranian revolution “Khomeini’s followers used messianic symbols and language to give him an aura of power.” He continues:

He assumed the title imam. To the Sunnis the title literally means “leader,” as in those who lead prayers in a local mosque. For the Shia, by contrast, it is a much more evocative term, conjuring up images of Ali and his eleven descendants…In Iran, references to “Imam Khomeini” not only raised him above other ayatollahs but equated him with the saints. This became all the more the case as Khomeini’s followers manipulated popular piety to enhance his religious standing…

Khomeini referred to the Shah’s regime using terminology that had been reserved in religious texts for describing the enemies of the Twelfth Imam, such as taghut (false god) and mofsidin fi’l-arz (corrupters of the earth). Many government officials were executed by the revolutionary regime on charges of fighting against the Twelfth Imam. After Khomeini assumed power, his titles became loftier still. He was referred to as Na’eb-e Imam (Deputy to the [Twelfth] Imam). On one occasion a parliamentary deputy asked him if he was the “promised Mahdi.” Khomeini did not answer. Fearing that Khomeini had not heard, the MP repeated the question. Khomeini still did not answer, astutely neither claiming nor denying that he was the Twelfth Imam.[30]

In his account of the Iran-Iraq war, Vali Nasr deepens his analysis of how messianic piety was exploited to enhance motivation on the part of young, untrained, and ill-equipped Iranian fighters: “Many nights during the war, Iranian soldiers would wake up to see a white-shrouded figure on a white horse blessing them. These apparitions of the Twelfth Imam were professional actors sent to boost morale.”[31]

The Shi’ite devotion to the martyred Imams, coupled with eschatological hope of redemption from suffering, engendered a self-sacrificial piety that enabled hundreds of thousands of Iranian young men and teenagers to drive the powerful Iraqi army from their homeland. The regime promised a place in heaven for anyone martyred in the fight against Saddam. Martyr’s Cemetery in Tehran includes a gushing fountain with red water, symbolizing the blood of the dead. The epic struggle between the “sentinels of the Twelfth Imam” and the agents of evil created a fervor that, in Vali Nasr’s eyes, “bred a cult of martyrdom in the populace and made sacrifice for the faith a central feature of revolutionary Shia politics.”[32] This fervent devotion and willingness to die spread beyond the borders of Iran:

That cult of martyrdom proved equally important to Shia politics in Lebanon, where Hezbollah used it to launch its campaign of suicide bombing against the Israeli army in the 1980s. The willingness to die for the Shia cause was a watershed in Middle East politics. It gave Iran’s revolutionary regime an edge in pursuing its domestic and international goals, and it made Islamic extremism and terrorism more lethal by encouraging what were in the 1980s called “martyrdom missions.” In the Middle Eastern context at least (the Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka have also extensively used suicide bombers), willingness to die for the cause has until fairly recently been seen as a predominantly Shia phenomenon, tied to the myths of Karbala and the Twelfth Imam.[33]

Not everyone in Iran was pleased with these developments:

Many in the religious establishment found these appeals to messianism disconcerting. Just as ultraorthodox Jews may oppose Zionism for presuming to do the messiah’s special work, ultraconservative Shias were unhappy with Khomeini’s messianic aura. Members of a powerful messianic society dedicated to the Twelfth Imam and named after him as the Hojjatieh were opposed to the Pahlavi monarchy and supported the goals of the revolution, but were uncomfortable with Khomeini’s insinuation that he was or represented the Twelfth Imam. The Hojjatieh were disbanded after the revolution, but many members joined the revolutionary regime and some, like the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, became prominent figures in it. Reflecting Hojjatieh’s dedication to the Twelfth Imam but also seeking to recapture Khomeini’s power over the masses, Ahmadinejad declared soon after he became president that the real ruler of Iran was the Twelfth Imam and that government policy should be guided by the goal of hastening his return. He even instructed his cabinet to sign a symbolic pledge of allegiance to the Twelfth Imam. Most Iranians were not eager to recognize Khomeini as the messiah, but messianism continued to have appeal in many circles.[34]

How influential is Mahdist belief and sentiment for the present Iranian leadership? The picture remains unclear, with reports of friction between President Ahmadinejad and the ruling Shi’ite clerics. Even if there are no charismatic leaders with the mass appeal of Ayatollah Khomeini, the mystique of the Twelfth Imam and the yearning for his return are powerful forces that may be used to justify irrational and irresponsible policies. Religious leaders in Iran have the serious burden of channeling popular yearnings for redemption in a constructive direction that squares with the fundamental Islamic values of justice and compassion.

Jewish Messianism, Zionism, and Israel

To put our analysis of Shi’ite piety and politics in comparative perspective, it is instructive to look at how Jewish messianism has influenced, and has been influenced by, the establishment of the state of Israel and the aftermath of the Six-Day War of June, 1967. A detailed treatment of this subject is not possible here, but some historical, spiritual, and political ideas can be extracted and examined.

A cogent overview of Jewish messianism is Gershom Scholem’s essay “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.”[35] Scholem’s primary aim in this reflection is to explore “the special tensions in the Messianic idea and their understanding in Rabbinic Judaism.” At the outset he identifies three primary forces in the Rabbinic tradition: conservative, restorative, and utopian. The normative tradition developed by legal scholars, he argues, reflects the conservative tendency, especially as the people struggled to survive under conditions of exile, including marginalized status and political powerlessness in Christian and Muslim societies. As a spiritual counterpoint, Scholem sees Jewish messianism as a combination of the restorative and utopian impulses, combining an idealized memory of past glories (e.g., the Exodus and the Davidic Kingdom) with anticipation of restored glory in a redeemed future (a Messianic Kingdom). The origins of the messianic idea are in the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophetic visions of an End of Days (acharit hayamim ), as in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4.

To be sure, the predictions of the [Hebrew] prophets do not yet give us any kind of well-defined conception of Messianism. Rather we have a variety of different motifs in which the much emphasized utopian impulse - the vision of a better humanity at the End of Days - is interpenetrated with restorative impulses like the reinstitution of an ideally conceived Davidic kingdom.[36]

Throughout Jewish history, beginning in the Talmud[37] , there have been arguments over whether the messianic era would come suddenly in an apocalyptic upheaval or slowly through an evolutionary process of human betterment. For Scholem, the messianic idea, at least in its most intense or “acute” form, is strongly linked to apocalypticism, a historical orientation different from the idealism in Isaiah or Micah or Amos.[38] For these biblical prophets, as for the rationalist Maimonides in the Middle Ages, history will be messianically transformed through Divine agency as a consequence of God’s covenantal faithfulness toward humanity, and toward the Jewish people in particular. Repentance by human beings may hasten the process, but it is inherently part of God’s plan for the Creation.

Jewish apocalypticism, by contrast, sees this world as a battleground between the forces of darkness and light, with the ultimate triumph of light realized through a cosmic upheaval. In both eschatological scenarios, the Jewish people will be restored from exile to the Land of Israel, with a messianic ruler based in Jerusalem heading a global government. For the apocalypticists, this historic transformation will be brought about through cataclysmic battles, with many casualties. A more peaceful messianic vision was expressed by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Chief Rabbi in Palestine under the British Mandate from 1921 until his death in 1935:

The brotherly love of Esau and Jacob [Christians and Jews in Rabbinic mythic

typology], of Isaac and Ishmael [Jews and Muslims], will assert itself above all the

confusion that the evil brought on by our bodily nature has engendered. It will

overcome them and transform them to eternal light and compassion. This broad

concept, sweetened by the enlightenment of the true teaching of the Torah, must

be our guide on all our ways in the end of days, to seal our understanding of the Torah

with the imprint of the Messiah by turning the bitter to sweet, and darkness to light.[39]

Maimonides argued against supernatural messianism[40] because he knew that it lent itself to zealous and dangerous extremes. Jewish history has confirmed his apprehensions. The zealots who fought against Rome in 66-70 C.E. and invited the destruction of the Second Temple, the warriors of Bar Kokhba (who was considered the Messiah by no less an authority than Rabbi Akiva) who fought the same Roman Empire some sixty years later, and the followers of the false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi (who ended up converting to Islam under threat of execution) in 1665 and later - all of these messianists were devout Jews who fervently believed in the imminent inauguration of a radically new era of history. Like faithful Shi’ites, they were strengthened by a deep trust in God’s transcendent power to reverse an existential condition of communal degradation. And like faithful Shi’ites, that trust led them to embrace causes that seemed futile, even unto martyrdom. The common denominator is a readiness to live in two realities simultaneously: actual history with its political impotence, painful tragedies, and incessant struggles; and messianic meta-history with its Divine promise of political empowerment, redemptive healing, and spiritual fulfillment. The profound tension of this paradoxical existence, with its latent power and creativity, is captured in this passage from Scholem’s essay:

The magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plan of world history. There’s something preliminary, something provisional about Jewish history; hence its inability to give of itself entirely. For the Messianic idea is not only consolation and hope. Every attempt to realize it tears open the abysses which lead each of its manifestations ad absurdum. There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. This in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished. One may say, perhaps, the Messianic idea is the real anti-existentialist idea. Precisely understood, there is nothing concrete which can be accomplished by the unredeemed. This makes for the greatness of Messianism, but also for its constitutional weakness.[41]

Is 20th-century Zionism, which gave birth to a Jewish state in the aftermath of the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Jewish people, a response to this unrealistic “life lived in deferment”? To Scholem it is, but also in a Jewishly paradoxical way:

Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. It is a readiness which no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history…Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up - that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.[42]

Just eight years after Scholem delivered the lecture which formed the basis for this essay, history took a swift and ambivalent turn - can one say paradoxical? In June, 1967, the state of Israel - founded on a combination of prophetic promise, messianic hope, and political realism, as exemplified by Ben Gurion and his generation of Zionist leaders - underwent a radical transformation. Facing a perceived threat to its existence in the rhetoric and policies of Egyptian President Nasser, the leaders of Israel opted for war to safeguard its security and enhance the prospects for lasting peace. They hoped to trade the territories conquered in those six days of fighting for peace treaties with the neighboring Arab countries. But Jewish messianists from the ranks of religious Zionism perceived the new situation differently. They interpreted as miraculous and Divinely ordained the swift military victory which left Israel in control of four times more land than it ruled before the war, including holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron/Al-Khalil, Shechem/Nablus, and elsewhere. The seeds of the settlement movement known asGush Emunim (the “Bloc of the Faithful”) were sown; and as the settlement enterprise grew, so did the power of the militant messianism that accompanied it. Some extremist fringe groups embraced an apocalyptic ideology that anticipates an all-out war with the Muslim world, ending in victory and vindication for their self-referencing agenda. A small religious Zionist peace movement,Oz veShalom-Netivot Shalom , has joined forces with the largely secular Israeli peace camp to decry the settlers’ religious ideology as dangerous pseudo-messianism, combining absolutist thinking with an uncritical intoxication with power.[43] Out of this dovish religious constituency emerged theMeimad Party, led by Knesset Member Rabbi Michael Melchior.Meimad was allied with the Labor Party until the present election season, when it joined forces with the Greens. The religious peace movement has attracted only modest support over the past thirty years, whileGush Emunim drew hundreds of thousands of followers, including many Jews who are not religiously observant but who found this militant messianism appealing for various reasons, including its nationalistic fervor and its heroic-sounding rhetoric that echoed the idealism of the early Zionist pioneers. More significantly, the settlers found many supporters in government circles, including among the secular Labor and Likud parties. Until the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (engineered ironically by Ariel Sharon, who had been the settlers’ major political patron), the territorialist vision of redemption promulgated byGush Emunim was largely unchecked. Characterized by a religiously-grounded historical determinism, it saw Jewish rule over the whole of Greater Israel as a messianic imperative, sanctioned by God and overruling any Palestinian national claims[44] The dangers latent in this religious chauvinism became apparent to many Israelis only when Jewish terrorists emerged from the ranks of the settlers and their supporters, including the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

One could argue that there were always tensions in Zionist ideology and practice between ethnocentrism or chauvinism, on the one hand, and humanism or socialism on the other. As early as 1922, Ahad Ha’am[45] , responding to reports of Jewish counter-terrorism against Arabs, wrote: “If that is the ‘messiah,’ may he not come in my time.”

For him, it was a moral and spiritual contradiction for the return to Zion to be realized through the shedding of innocent blood.[46]

While these internal tensions coexisted from the beginning of the Zionist movement, it was only after the Six-Day War and the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (along with the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem), that the messianic impulse latent in the Jewish homecoming project came to the fore. And as we saw with Shi’ite Mahdism, there is a particularist and a universalist dimension to Jewish messianism. On the one hand, Jewish empowerment and territorial control reverses a condition of exile, historical marginalization, and vulnerability. (One should add that decades of Arab/Muslim hostility to Zionism, from well before 1967, contributed to the nationalistic myopia that too often characterizes Israeli perceptions and consciousness). At the same time, a messianic era of global peace has traditionally been envisioned as accompanying the Jewish restoration to Zion.[47] For theGush Emunim settlers, the particularist aspect of Jewish messianism trumped the universalist vision of world peace, generating a religious ideology that I would call “territorialotry.” Such a worldview elevates control of the land above moral imperatives like inclusive justice and peaceful coexistence. Land becomes holier than human life in such a skewed “hierarchy of holiness,” and the practical result is to turn Jewish Israelis into oppressive occupiers of another people’s land. In the settlers’ mythical understanding of history and geography, the West Bank is referred to by the biblical names Judea and Samaria. The occupied territories are viewed as messianically liberated or redeemed, part of the Jewish people’s Divinely granted birthright. The settler lexicon included, at least until recently, an acronym formed from the first letters of the Hebrew terms for “Judea, Samaria, and Gaza”:Yesha’ , connoting redemption.[48]

Historian David Biale, in his provocative studyPower and Powerless in Jewish History , situates theGush Emunim movement within the wider context of Jewish messianism:

Gush bases its Zionism on a nationalist interpretation of traditional Judaism. Zionism is the fulfillment of biblical promises, a theme that had always been present in Zionist ideology, but not with the same degree of Orthodox conviction. In this religious-nationalist hybrid, Zionism becomes the realization of traditional messianism rather than a revolution against tradition, and the religion of Judaism is turned into a political ideology.

Although the activist messianism of Gush Emunim departs from the more cautious nationalism of older religious Zionists, it represents the logical culmination of the tradition of political messianism discussed [earlier in Biale’s book and alluded to in our own discussion of Scholem’s essay]. This type of messianism, originating in the Talmud but articulated most cogently by Maimonides in the twelfth century, claimed that human action can precipitate the coming of the Messiah. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of Orthodox authorities developed this doctrine further. The circle around the Vilna Gaon argued that a Messiah son of Joseph (a figure mentioned in the Talmud) would reestablish the Jewish community in the Land of Israel and prepare the ground for the coming of the Messiah son of David. They considered this first Messiah to be a military leader and associated him with the war of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39). Some of these messianists emigrated from Lithuania to Palestine, where they were involved in a millenarian movement around the year 1840. At about the same time, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, an important Polish rabbi, called for the renewal of some of the ancient [Temple] sacrifices in Jerusalem as a prelude to the coming of the Messiah.

All these ideas belong much more to the history of Jewish messianism than they do the prehistory of political Zionism, but they were to have an important impact on religious Zionists in the twentieth century. Rabbinical authorities such as Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi of Palestine from 1921 to 1935, and Menachem Kasher, a noted Israeli Talmudic scholar, revived this tradition by interpreting the Zionist settlement in Palestine as a fulfillment of messianic theory. Kook held that the secular pioneers unwittingly served God’s messianic plan by settling the land and that after they accomplished their mission, the Orthodox would inherit political power. Kasher argued that the Six Day War (and, later, the Yom Kippur War) was the War of Gog and Magog prophesied in the Bible. The Gush itself, which regards Kook and Kasher as its foremost teachers, relies heavily on the messianic tradition that these authorities have emphasized. It sees the wars of Israel as messianic wars and the politics of the state of Israel as preparations for the coming of the Messiah.[49]

The dangers in such an interpretation of history are easily apparent. Imposing a mystical messianism on ordinary events in a self-serving manner easily engenders an ends-justify-the-means group ethic that condones injustices against others for the greater “messianic” good. As with Shi’ites in Iran and Lebanon, we see that when a historically oppressed community - in this case the Jews - assumes political power, it can couch its self-interested claims and policies in “messianic” rhetoric. The ideology created can make compensation or retaliation for past victimhood into a “redemptive” agenda that ends up victimizing others.

Conclusion: Is Shi’ite-Jewish Solidarity Possible?

We have seen how end-time scenarios can motivate the faithful to self-referencing idealism and acts of heroic self-sacrifice, including martyrdom. We have also acknowledged the toll in human suffering that too often accompanies this chauvinistic interpretation of religion. Narrow conceptions of holiness in history or of God’s redemptive plan for humanity are invoked by militants to justify hatred and violence. So we return to the questions posed at the outset of this essay: In the face of these challenges, how can Shi’ite Muslims and religious Jews prevent the misuse of their respective eschatologies? How can they counter the actions of coreligionists who invoke these traditions in the service of self-serving political aims? And might Shi’ites and Jews who are dismayed by this kind of spiritual corruption join forces to redeem their sacred traditions from the would-be “redeemers”? The last question is posed mainly because, in contemporary Middle East politics, Iranian leaders and Hezbollah representatives tend to demonize Israel, while many Jewish Israelis project demonic stereotypes onto these Shi’ite adversaries in return. Can alternative spiritual wisdom be tapped to combat the forces of hatred and revenge acting in the name of theMahdi or the Messiah?

Learning about each other’s faith traditions is one essential and urgent requirement. Religious educators and media professionals need to help educate the wider publics about the people and tradition being negatively caricatured. If they would sponsor honest explorations of the positive and negative elements in each community’s religious heritage, such pro-active leadership would help reduce the mutual demonization. Unbiased studies might find commonalities that could become bridges to greater understanding, even solidarity; for example, how historic suffering was endured through steadfast faithfulness and eschatological hope. Mutual appreciation might then replace mutual denigration.

Ultimately, both communities need to undergo a process of self-criticism that elicits repentance, one of the highest virtues in both traditions and a capacity inherent in the human conscience.[50] Evoking this innate capacity for repentance -tawba in Arabic,teshuvah in Hebrew - requires strong and courageous spiritual leadership. Recognized religious authorities need to commit themselves to this process of mutual healing, so that past trauma does not become an excuse for future violence. For these leaders to take on this daunting task, given the majority sentiments in their religious communities, they need to meet each other (initially, perhaps, under trusted third-party sponsorship), to become friends and allies, and then to demonstrate to their coreligionists that faith and spirituality can be forces for peace and not only fuel for continued enmity. In this way, the destructive misuses of our respective eschatologies can be countered by alternative Mahdist and Messianic visions. It is my hope that this essay can contribute towards a religious peacebuilding agenda based on more inclusive, just, and nonviolent understandings of messianic fulfillment.

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Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 98a-99a.

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