Messianic Hope

He can picture me, W. says, working at my desk, or attempt to work, or at least what I call working, covered in crumbs from the packed lunch I eat four hours early, surrounded by books by Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and by other books that explain Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and then by still other books with titles like The Idiots Guide to Jewish Messianism and Rosenzweig in Sixty Minutes …

He can picture me, he says, hungover as usual, bleary-eyed as usual but full of a vague, stupid hope, with the sense that this time, despite its resemblance to all other times, will be different. This time it'll be okay. This time it'll come good. That's my Messianism, W. says, and it's all I'll ever know or understand about Messianism, that vague sense that things will be different this time, even as everyone else knows it will be exactly the same.

Even you feel it, don't you, that Messianic hope? Even you, like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but excited. But do you actually think you're going to be redeemed?

W. himself can't shake it free, that hope, that springtime of the spirit. One day, he feels, he will be able to think. One day, his thoughts will rise as high as Messianism, the sun in the sky of the future. Oh he knows it's impossible, he says, he knows he'll never have an idea, but that's what the coming of the Messiah must mean: the impossible, which is to say, an idea, an idea that would belong to W.

Is that why he writes?, W. wonders. Is that why he accepts invitations to speak? Is that why the hope is reborn eternally in him that it will be different this time? In the end, that's what we share, W. decides. A sense that the apocalypse isn't quite complete, and that there are still grounds for hope.