10/10/2021 - Messianic Age

*Spoiler alerts for:
    The Paper Menagerie
    Project Hail Mary 

During the 12JQ's class on 10/4/2021, Rabbi Miller explained something interesting about the coming of a messiah. To paraphrase, he said that a messiah does not come to clean up our mess, but a messiah appears at the end when we have come together as one and clean up the best we can.

That certainly hit me out of the blue for I had always had the opposite interpretation-that a messiah would come in our darkest hours. After some thought throughout the week, it began to make sense once I broke it down to metaphors that I could comprehend.

It's like the notion that one cannot be helped unless they admit they need help or begin to help themselves for their greater good. While we can involuntarily be put in situations of darkness and dismay, the concept of free will is far more powerful than we believe. But sometimes, maybe oftentimes, free will and the willingness to change won't immediately, if at all, help us out of a situation we want to escape. However, free will can grant us a voice that can inspire others to make the change with us, whether we are present or not. 

Reminiscing on a book I read a few months back, The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, helped me rearrange the syntax of my jumbled thoughts regarding this. 

In of the many short stories in the Paper Menagerie, there is the fictitious story called The Litigation Master and the Monkey King. While much more complex than my quick synopsis, it is about a man who uses his convincing trickery to help those in need from those that seek to harm them. But he is influenced to do by a voice in his head called the Monkey King. He is asked by a woman to harbor a fugitive who holds the last text that details a brutal genocide of the Yangzhou province. The event was erased from history in an attempt to hide it, but the fugitive has the last remaining proof. The man is captured by the army when they discover he is harboring the fugitive, but only after the man helps the refugee escape. The man is tortured as they attempt to get him to admit where the fugitive with the text is, but he refuses to answer. The day before his execution for treason, the man looks out of his cell window and sees a group of children playing, he calls them over and teaches them a cryptic song he created that details the events of the hidden genocide. During his execution, he can hear the children gleefully reciting the song. 

In the end, during his execution, he tells the voice of the Monkey King in his head that he has, "--accomplished nothing except fighting for a hopeless cause." The voice of the Monkey King responds,

"Not at all. Li Xiaojing [refugee] is safe in Japan, and the children's songs will be passed on until the whole county, the whole province, the whole country fills with their voices. Someday, perhaps not now, perhaps not in another hundred years, but someday the book will come back from Japan, or a clever scholar will finally see through the disguise in your songs [-] And then the spark of truth will set this country aflame, and this people will awaken from their torpor. You have preserved the memories of the men and women of Yangzhou."

 I believe that we are impatient beings; we want to see the immediate results of our choices and our battles. But perhaps that is our biggest flaw, perhaps our impatience can prevent us from making decisions that can influence those around us. I am certainly one of those guilty of impatience. A single voice spoken from the lips of free will not only preserve the events that lead to the desire for change but catapults, no matter how small, the actions of change. Every painting starts with an outline, and the mere scratches of graphite on the canvas birth a masterpiece that started with those simple, measly scratches. Oil paint takes quite some time to dry, but that didn't discourage some of the greatest artists from creating masterpieces.

With the dominance of turmoil in our history and current world, it may seem impossible to ever create the change we wish to see. I think that is one of our more selfish qualities, that we can be unwilling to fight for a cause because we know that perhaps we will not live to see the fruition of the results.

So how does a story that is maybe 20 pages long accurately detail one of our common doubts, that we are fighting a hopeless cause? Or our most common flaw of impatience? How is the voice of the Monkey King any different than God's voice?

But as Rabbi Miller mentioned, a messiah will not come when our world is consumed by man-made darkness, a messiah will come when we have all come together to banish that man-made darkness as best we can. I believe that some of us sit idly by and wait for the Messianic Age to begin without realizing that we are responsible for creating the basis of such a utopia. So why are some of us only focused on the future when there is a world around us that requires our attention? I can envision my dream home all day, but that dream home will not be built when the hammer I am holding is broken.

We are, in theory, the beings that do not admit they need help or the beings that do not begin to help themselves for their greater good and the good of those around us. The familiarity of darkness can be comforting to some because they have not experienced it otherwise. But changes are not created until we step out of our comfort zone. When we seek help, we rely on our neighbors to help us become illuminated in the darkness. When we begin to help ourselves and create our own illumination, we are showing our neighbors that it is possible.

In an excerpt from Every Man's Talmud, The Hereafter, it is said:

"Ten things will the Holy One, blessed be He, renew in the Hereafter: (i) He will illumine the world; as it is said, 'The sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.'''

The concept of eternal light seems so out of this world that it is almost justifiable to believe it to be impossible. How can light exist if there is no darkness to compare it to? One can even argue that this is impossible as it directly contradicts that during the Creation, God created light and darkness. While that is literally correct, perhaps there is a double meaning. It first says, "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness." It goes on to say, in a separate sentence, that there was evening and there was morning. 

It first says that He saw the light to be good and separated it from the darkness, and then it says there was evening and there was morning. Light and darkness are polar opposites that fight to dominate the other. Right now we are dominated by the darkness and fighting for the dominance of light. I believe once we come together to push the light into the majority, then will He come and help us with the final push. This is a completely separate notion from the creation of evening and morning.

In the past month, I read another book, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (the same guy that wrote The Martian) that immediately came to mind as I continued to ponder the concept of light in relation to a Messianic Age.

Bear with me on this synopsis. It's a fictitious story that our world begins to notice that the sun is dimming. It is discovered that there is a new cell in space, astrophage, that is absorbing the light from the sun and preventing it from illuminating Earth, thus putting our population in a fatal countdown for life. The equivalent of NASA locates a sun, Tau, light years away, that is unaffected by astrophage. A search team of 3 is deployed to investigate but only 1 person from the team survives the journey and he is left alone to find the solution. Slightly unrelated, he encounters an alien lifeform that is searching for the same solution for their own planet. Together, they finally locate a very small group of cells, that they name taumoeba, that is capable of destroying astrophage and can release the absorbed light. The taumoeba are initially weak against astrophage but they begin to strengthen the taumoeba, through vast experiments, to evolve into a cell that can fully eliminate astrophage. A lot of things happen in between, but the main character ends up sending the solution of taumoeba back to Earth, a years-long journey, as he stays behind to help his new alien friend save his planet. More things happen but in the end, it is confirmed that Earth has managed to eliminate astrophage with the man's discovery of taumoeba and the sun is shining brighter than ever.

I highly recommend the book.

Right now, we're surrounded by astrophage that is consuming the light of God. The astrophage threatens us with an eventual consumption of darkness. But what are we doing to find a solution? It would be very easy to consider a solution to be not worth the effort when it would take light years to discover when we want immediate results. In the process of finding the solution, some of us will not live to see it be so. But why should that negative consideration have to be forced upon those that will live to see it? Why should others not live to see the glory of the Messianic Age because some won't?

A team of 1 risks his life to find a solution that will save the entire Earth from eternal darkness. His perseverance, with the help of his alien friend, work to their wit's end to find a solution to the most severe of situations. But they do not find the solution within a day. In fact, each step in their experiments takes months until they can move to the next step, but they didn't give up. In the end, the main character must decide to deliver the taumoeba directly to Earth, or turn around and save his alien friend (from a subplot within the book). He chooses to send the solution to Earth via an autopiloted mini ship knowing that he will not return to see it save Earth. He could've chosen to selfishly not send it, he could've chosen to return with the taumoeba and experience the glory of the sun's light again, but he chooses to stay and help his friend.

His selflessness saved an entire planet and illuminated it once again. In simple terms, darkness is astrophage, change is taumoeba, and we are the man in space with an alien diligently working to strengthen the change we desire to consume the darkness. They start with the smallest group of cells that seem impossible to use due to their small number, but through incredible perseverance, the group of cells infinitely multiply and destroy that which absorbs light from the sun. We work together with those we do not know (the alien) to restore that which gives us life. 

Perhaps in this strange metaphor, God is the sun that will powerfully illuminate our world again once we come together to strengthen taumoeba to eliminate light-consuming astrophage. Once we work together with the smallest population of taumoeba (desire to change) to an undefeatable population that will destroy astrophage (darkness) will God accept our perseverance and bless us once again with eternal light.

Through endless reading, both fictitious and sacred, Rabbi Miller's one sentence opened my eyes to what would bring the Messianic Age. 

It's not going to come until we action it into existence. God will help us when we make the effort to help not only ourselves, but our neighbors. Then can we tangibly dream of the Messianic Age. We have to fix the hammer before we build the house.