The Messianism

The Messianic Consciousness

There is not one of our rabbis, the sages of Israel, who called himself the mashiach. However, the Arizal called himself the mashiach, as is brought in the book Shivchei HaArizal:

One day, the rabbi went with his companions to Gush Chalav, near the grave of Shemayah and Avtalyon, and he performed a yichud. And when he finished, he said to the companions on behalf of them (Shemayah and Avtalyon) that they should pray that mashiach ben Yosef not die in their days. But because of his great humility, he didn’t reveal that he himself was the mashiach until the day he died.

Unsurprisingly, his teachings in his writings also reflect the idea of Messianism. Gili Haskin writes the same in his article On False Messiahs in Israel (part 2):

Two generations after the Expulsion, the Arizal’s kabbalah flourished … and it was a messianic kabbalah. … Two generations after the Arizal, when his teaching captured hearts in all the Jewish diaspora, his kabbalah received a messianic figure named Shabbetai Tzevi.

The most well-known and famous false mashiach is indeed Shabbetai Tzevi, who was born in 1626 in Izmir, Turkey, and passed away fifty tumultuous years later. When Shabbetai Tzevi was caught and he converted to Islam, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Turkey and Italy to Russia and Lithuania experienced a great crisis. Consequently, limits were imposed on studying kabbalah in Eastern Europe, and Shabbetai Tzevi became a shameful name.

Based on the Arizal’s kabbalah, many false messiahs, and even various messianic movements, arose.

In addition to this, when we speak of the kabbalistic literature of the Sages, we can see the amazing and systematic breadth of writing, which the Ramak inherited. However, it is distinct from the way of the Arizal, whose words were written by his students, not by way of back-and-forth dialectic but by declaring facts and recounting stories.

Is this the way of the Torah, to believe in and rely on sayings and stories?

Thus we have proven that the Arizal’s kabbalah promotes the messianic phenomena which harm the belief in the true and just mashiach, and produces false meshichim, which brings harsh difficulties to the nation of Israel.