The world to come starts tomorrow
The world to come starts tomorrow -
We wait -
Count down the hours till Midnight
--
There is a story of a man who has one job - for which he earns a single ruble a day -
His job is to sit on outskirts of town - he waits to greet the messiah if he or she or they ever come
His job to herald the herald of the world to come
Every day he waits for a new world
And every night he returns home to the same one
Talking to his friends, he says,
“Yes the pay is low, but the job is permanent!”
We wait for the world to come
We dream of the world to come
The world as it should be
The world that we dream of
The world that Isaiah dreamt of
Where leaders know the truth
And judges decide with equity and justice for all within the land
Where the vulnerable need not be worried
Because the wolf is dwelling with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid, the ones who hunt and the ones who graze, all at peace together
Where Lions are satiated with straw
Babies can wander off to play and no danger will reach them
A land, Isaiah says, where no evil is done
The world to come
Maimonides tells us to be rational -
That’s not actually what the world to come will look like
“Don't think that in the days of the Messiah anything in the natural order of the world will change -
Or that creation will suddenly evolve
Rather, the world will continue to behave according to the laws of the universe and the laws of creation
And what is said about that wolf and lamb, the leopard with the kid, the ones who hunt and the ones who graze,
Maimonides says all this - is just a vision ; a metaphor; a riddle, even, for us to figure out
Why Just a metaphor ?
Because that world to come is only what we can dream it to be
We can only look at our own world and hope for its opposite - lions eating straw - for example
Where there is hunger -- we dream of abundance
Where there is violence - we pray for peace
Where there is hate - we dream of kindness
Where there is waste -- we pray for conservation
We imagine and pray and dream
And our dreams are beautiful
vines and fig trees for everyone
swords beaten into plowshares
justice done through just means
a world without fear
We ask questions like -
Where will we find the Messiah?
How will we know that they are here?
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi answers with his own vision, “He is already here - at the gates to the city, amongst the poor, the sick, and the cast aside -
Binding their wounds -
Tending to the wounds of those no one wants to care for
It is a beautiful dream
We dream of oneness -
On that day - bayom hahu - God will be one, Because the world is one
United in purpose
No longer divided and preying on each other
Not a world with no heaven and no religion
But a world where no one goes to war over their own idea of heaven
The world to come is one where all merit to live in it
Maimonides again tells us what the dream looks like -
In some ways, so simple
Not an upheaval of the natural order
Rather just that we can live in peace
Practice and study and live in peace
A return to the “tov” of creation
Allowing our goodness to prevail
And when we do, Maimonides writes, “there will be neither famine or war, envy or competition for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust.”
Isaiah’s world to come is out of reach - too grand - too far away -- too perfect
But the world that we will bring is not
Because although we still do wait for the fully realized vision
We don’t have to wait for everything. We can start -
Rabbi Art Green suggests this:
Instead of bringing about the onset of redemption, messiah will herald its completion. The actual work of redeeming the world is turned to us in history, and is done by all of us, day by day. Messiah has been waiting in the wings, as it were, since the very beginning of history, ready to come forth when the time is right. …Only when redemption is about to be completed will messiah be allowed to arrive. Rather than messiah redeeming us, we redeem messiah. (Rabbi Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name)
Rather than the world to come arriving fully formed one morning when we wake up in a new year, like a figure from the dream we have spent millenia dreaming
We start
We bring the world to come
Afterall - it is starting tomorrow . And the next day. And the day after that.
And who knows, maybe if we find ourselves binding the wounds of those society has cast aside
We might even greet the messiah.
How to change -
Can we will ourselves to change -
Simone Wiel (Vial)
“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them…
Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter.
What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.
Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.”
where the will contracts the spirit, she argues, attention expands it:
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”