Cartoons have come a long way since I was young. I don’t know how they do it, but today they can make cartoons seem so life-like. It can almost fool you and in some cases it just might. But, for the most part, a cartoon is still just a cartoon.
Likewise, no matter how cartoon-like people may act, they’re don’t fooling anyone. The actors are real even if the plot is not. The line between animation and reality may be shrinking, but it is still quite definite. It will be a scary day if they ever manage to make it go away altogether.
It feels the same way when it comes to Tanach and current history. For a believer, Tanach seems so mythical. For a non-believer, it is. As believers, it is hard to get our modern heads around ancient Torah history, which wouldn’t be a problem if OUR ending wasn’t based upon THEIR beginning. We live by a Torah that flows back in time all the way to the beginning of that “mythical” Tanachi period of time.
The interesting thing is that it all comes down to a bunch of assumptions. We assume things about our world, and we assume things about their world. For example, we assume that, being so early in history, they were backwards and unsophisticated. Our society, we assume, living over three millennia later and having been around the block several times, is the closest to being the realest of all societies. Their world was the cartoon. Ours is the reality show.
This is why the idea of a final redemption is so hard to grasp for us. It has been defined in Tanachi terms. If you want to talk about the redemption of man in modern terms, we can imagine it. Freedom from oppression for all mankind. Social justice. Equal opportunity, etc. All of these are modern-day terms and concepts that resonate for us.
But talk about the final redemption in Tanachi terms, and it becomes a cartoon image. Miraculous like in the days of leaving Egypt? Really? Moshe Rabbeinu will lead us out of exile as Moshiach? Hard to imagine. God will be recognizable to all mankind? How? Like the Evil Son in the Haggadah, we have a hard time appreciating ancient history in modern-day terms.
Funny, though. I remember the first Pesach with Coronavirus. I mean, we were scared. We had the fear of death. Our Seder was missing most of our family because they had to stay home instead. And as the three of us, my wife, my son, and I, went through the Haggadah that year, the recounting of the plagues was the realest it has ever been for us. It felt like as if the King of Kings was out there going from house to house to decide who to kill and who to leave alive. It felt…well…so Biblical!
And as 2026 approaches, I’ve got a similar problem. I have done the math countless times and warned about the year for decades now (see here). And even though history has given me reason to believe it is a possible date for the end of history as we know it, I have a tough time getting my heart to respond accordingly. Even though I have worked out a realistic scenario for the final War of Gog and Magog, I am skeptical about it just like everyone else.
And it really bugs me. I so want to get my head around all of this. I so want to be real with it in my heart, as well as in my head. I so want to be able to grasp what the events of today mean in terms of ALL of history, the so-called mythical part and the realistic part.
I think that was the part that I “enjoyed” about the first Covid Seder. It felt so real to feel so real about what happened back in Egypt, and how it could easily happen today as well. I’m not saying that Pharaoh will come back and we’ll all go down to Egypt again, God forbid. I’m saying that we don’t have to. Whatever that was in principle can be repeated again today in modern terms.
Wasn’t the Holocaust this in many ways? We certainly relearned what it meant to be reviled as a people and treated like slaves in need of a miraculous redemption. We certainly had to endure unbearable pain and suffering. I can’t imagine what it was like to make a Seder then in the midst of it all, or even just think of making one. It must have been TOO real.
Not only is Jewish history convoluted, but it is so impossible to understand in advance. There is a good reason why we have misjudged our future so many times in the past. It just didn’t look at the time like it was going where it eventually did. Antisemitism, we are used to. Harassment, we are used to. Being treated like second-class citizens, we are used to. But being treated sub-human by an intelligent society to the point of genocide? That was something terrifyingly new.
Likewise, we have never gone anywhere in exile where we have been treated so well and able to succeed to such an extent as we have in the West today. We have never been able to successfully build a Torah world on foreign soil as we have done in Western countries. We have never enjoyed such equality as a people as we have in recent times, so why assume that all of that could come crashing down on us, at least any time soon?
Wait a second. Didn’t all of that happen when the Jewish people went down to Egypt, as the Haggadah says, we excelled there? Wasn’t Spain in the 1400s such a safe haven for Torah Jews that we even had a golden era? Wasn’t Europe showing tremendous promise for Jewish equality as the Industrial Revolution progressed? And didn’t all of that come crashing down on us EACH time?
If you think about it, the Seder is all about this. It is not merely a commemoration of ancient events. It is the Jewish people trying to hang on to an old perspective in order to view the present through its eyes. It is the Jewish people trying ward off the inherent danger of stretching thin the connection to our defining national origin as time moves forward. For so many, it has already snapped.
And when that happens, the past becomes only the past, with little or no connection to the future. Then Tanach looks like a cartoon compared to the modern reality we find ourselves in during each generation. Torah history just stops being emotionally real for most, and they stop learning from it. Until, that is, they find themselves, as we did in Spain, and Europe, looking at their present and wondering how it became the uglier part of our past without us even noticing.