“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
Walter Benjamin
Way before Santa Claus and central heating, Christmas was likely about the miraculous giving of birth to hope in the midst of winter’s darkness. The Christian holiday originated in Pagan Solstice traditions that venerate the longest night of the year as the hopeful ray of sun into the spring’s bright future. Messianic meaning-making transcends seasons, cultures and religions to offer humans everywhere the possibility of something better when all around us can be gloom and doom, storms and siege. For Ezekiel, back in the volatile 6the Century BCE, visions of a messianic future were not mild or simple. They involve a bloody battle of extreme proportions that will eventually bring about better days. Some wonder if the early stages of this battle for the end of days has already begun and that the War of Gog and Magog is upon us. Let’s hope not. But meanwhile, it is instructive to learn what this ancient prophecy is all about and what we can glean from it to provide us tools to cope and hope, whatever happens. On some level it’s about how we address the visions of the future, guided by our ancestry, some to be embraced, some of it to be rejected or revised.
Ezekiel imagines the mega-war of Gog, heading a global coalition, that will attack the Judeans after they have resettled in their land, following the Babylonian exile. The war will be fierce and global, but the invaders will be defeated, with divine help. The aftermath of this battle is equally epic and the number seven keeps showing up, perhaps to lend it legendary force. The Judeans who will survive the war will set fire to the seven different types of weapons left behind by Gog’s defeated army - and the bonfires will go on for seven (!) years. It will take a dedicated team of burial squads seven months to bury all the corpses of the fallen soldiers and by doing so will honor the dead and purify the land:
וְֽיָצְא֞וּ יֹֽשְׁבֵ֣י ׀ עָרֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל וּבִעֲר֡וּ וְ֠הִשִּׂ֠יקוּ בְּנֶ֨שֶׁק וּמָגֵ֤ן וְצִנָּה֙ בְּקֶ֣שֶׁת וּבְחִצִּ֔ים וּבְמַקֵּ֥ל יָ֖ד וּבְרֹ֑מַח וּבִעֲר֥וּ בָהֶ֛ם אֵ֖שׁ שֶׁ֥בַע שָׁנִֽים וְהָיָ֣ה בַיּ֣וֹם הַה֡וּא אֶתֵּ֣ן לְגוֹג֩ ׀ מְקֽוֹם־שָׁ֨ם קֶ֜בֶר בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל גֵּ֤י הָעֹֽבְרִים֙ קִדְמַ֣ת הַיָּ֔ם וְחֹסֶ֥מֶת הִ֖יא אֶת־הָעֹֽבְרִ֑ים וְקָ֣בְרוּ שָׁ֗ם אֶת־גּוֹג֙ וְאֶת־כׇּל־הֲמוֹנֹ֔ה וְקָ֣רְא֔וּ גֵּ֖יא הֲמ֥וֹן גּֽוֹג׃ וּקְבָרוּם֙ בֵּ֣ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לְמַ֖עַן טַהֵ֣ר אֶת־הָאָ֑רֶץ שִׁבְעָ֖ה חֳדָשִֽׁים׃
“Then the inhabitants of the cities of Israel will go out and make fires and feed them with the weapons—shields and bucklers, bows and arrows, clubs and spears; they shall use them as fuel for seven years.
On that day I will assign to Gog a burial site there in Israel—the Valley of the Travelers, east of the Sea. It shall block the path of travelers, for there Gog and all his multitude will be buried. It shall be called the Valley of Gog’s Multitude.The House of Israel shall spend seven months burying them, in order to purify the land”
Ezekiel 39:9-10
What is the meaning of this unimaginable amount of weapons and corpses? What about this messianic future calls for so much carnage when most other prophetic visions go straight to the rainbow days?
Robert Alter suggests that this has to do with Ezekiel’s own history as a bitter exiled witness of history in its most cruel:
“It is worth noting that this entire vision of Israel’s triumph over its enemies is quite different from anything in the other Prophets. Only Ezekiel imagines that the people again ensconced in its land and living in tranquility will be assaulted by a fearsome invading power which, however, will be utterly destroyed. Perhaps Ezekiel, himself an exile who had witnessed the dominant forces of the Babylonian empire, and who also had in mind the earlier dominance of the Assyrians, could not easily conceive a simple peaceful national restoration. History was felt as a continuing cycle of violent imperial aggressions. In this prophetic version, an ultimate--virtually mythological--aggressor is drawn to the land of Israel where God will bring about his total destruction, at last making Israel genuinely secure.”
In his stunning commentary on this chapter, Vincent Calabrese goes further to link not just Ezkeiel’s personal biography to these apocalyptic visions but also the essential notion of history - reading it through the lenses of Walter Benjamin, a Jewish exile from more recent tragic chapters who thought and wrote about history before he too became a victim of its wrath:
“The remains of the Gog war scenes calls to mind nothing so much as the aftermath of a nuclear accident, during which the land itself becomes imbued with the presence of death — redemption as catastrophe.
Such a chilling scene in Ezekiel’s vision of redemption is hardly congenial to our finer feelings. When imagining the perfected world of the messianic age, we are more easily drawn to the peaceful and bucolic images also offered by the prophets, as in Isaiah’s statement that the wolf will lie down with the lamb and that the lion will eat straw. This tendency is even more pronounced in those currents of culture which have officially forsworn the idea of a divine redemption but are still animated by the idea.
The western philosophical and political discourse on progress has very often been but a secularized theology of redemption, and these crypto-theologies have themselves tended to emphasize sweetness and light. Thus the liberalism common to much 19th-century politics and religion tended to imagine a long process of gradual improvement leading to the new Jerusalem. Even in the Marxist theory of progress, which admits that the perfected society might be ushered in by violence, the process itself was for the most part understood to be a necessary one in which one stage unfolds inexorably into the next; fundamentally the journey to redemption is one marked by continuity.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin offered a critique of this view of history as a necessary series of events progressing towards a perfected world.
History, he insisted, was a catastrophe, and redemption cannot be understood in terms of comfort and light; we experience redemption in the form of a traumatic rupture, much closer to Ezekiel’s vision of Gog and Magog than to the secular visions of redemption through progress. He rejected the secular theories which, through viewing the journey towards redemption as a necessary and mechanical one turned “the future… into homogeneous, empty time.” Benjamin asserted that the alternative view, according to which redemption comes through rupture and even catastrophe, awakens us to the particularity of each moment, and makes “every second of time [into] the strait gate through which Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, end). “
Whatever these messianic gates are about, then, now, or next, we will often recognize them only once we’ve walked through them to to whatever waits beyond. For Ezekiel, the gates of the future summoned an elaborate vision of a future in which the temple of Jerusalem, where he once served, will be rebuilt as the sacred center. He will devote the final chapters of his book to visions of this temple - both as a ray of hope into a better future and as a paradigm of sacred space and time, an elevation from the traumatic presence and a gateway into transcendence and hope.
For those of you celebrating Christmas - may it be a portal into the rebirth of hope and healing, miracles of possible redemption in our lifetime, peace and joy for all.
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