Summary
Rabbi Menachem Kasher (died November 1984, in his nineties), a renowned scholar whose messianic tracts classifying the contemporary period as the Great Era had, in Lustick’s report, an enormous impact on the core and periphery of Gush Emunim (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3700-3800).
Details
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Following both the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, Kasher published treatises arguing that Jewish law and the opinions of the great European rabbis of the last two centuries justified classifying the contemporary period as the Great Era — the beginning, or even the middle, of a redemption process culminating in the messianic age (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3700-3800).
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His work, with that of Abraham Isaac Kook, is a direct basis of Harold Fisch’s systematic presentation of the fundamentalist worldview (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3700-3800).
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Lustick quotes him accounting for United States support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War as a supernatural exception to universal gentile hostility: “truly this is a miracle from heaven” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3900-4000).
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Chapter 4 gives Kasher’s interpretation of the Holocaust as the “birthpangs of the Messianic Age (which) fell upon our generation and thus opened for us the way to Redemption”, and his scheme of the Messiah Son of Joseph, in whose period the Arab-Israeli wars fall and “miracles are shrouded in natural events”, before the Messiah Son of David (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 4119-4400).
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Kasher hoped that Jewish casualties in 1948, 1967 and 1973 were sufficient to warrant the Yom Kippur War’s categorisation as the third and last of the wars of Gog and Magog; otherwise, he contended, it must be considered the first of the three, and he predicted two much more terrible wars before the appearance of the Messiah Son of David (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 4119-4400).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Harold Fisch, Jewish Fundamentalism