The Cleansing Power of Destruction

Not only in the Bible, but in many mythologies, there comes a time when the only way to renew the Earth and wipe away evil is through absolute destruction. In the Bible it's the Flood, the Deluge. In Norse mythology it is Ragnarök: the complete destruction and regeneration of the world. In both cases, complete destruction is followed by rebirth. While the Torah itself says nothing about an end-times destruction, the implication of the Flood is clear. G-d promised not to destroy the Earth with WATER again. He did not promise NOT to destroy the Earth. Nor did He promise that WE wouldn't destroy the Earth. Christian eschatology would become far more explicit, practically a blow-by-blow description of the destruction of the world.

In the New Testament, the focus is on forgiveness and redemption. In the Tanakh, the Old Testament, the focus is on resistance and destruction. In the New Testament, we are told not to resist an evil person, and to turn the other cheek. In the Tanakh we are told to violently oppose and destroy evil. These are reasons, among others, why I came to the conclusion that the religion of the New Testament and the religion of the Tanakh, the Old Testament, can in no way be described as the same religion, the beliefs of Christians notwithstanding. While I once embraced the teaching of the New Testament, the peace, tolerance and forgiveness in it, G-d with a human face, I equally disliked the teaching of the Old.

I compelled myself to read the Old Testament to try to resolve these contradictions, and found that the contradictions all existed in the New Testament. Man as god. Non-resistance. Violation of commandments like dietary laws and the Sabbath. These were not renovations of the Tanakh, they were flat denials of it. The Tanakh was consistent with itself, the New Testament was not consistent with it, or even sometimes with simple logic.

And I fell in love with the Commandments and the fierce clarity of the Tanakh. The Tanakh tears you, burns you. It is supposed to hurt. What it does to you is a gentler version of what the Flood did to the world. You are purified like silver in a furnace. I grew to love this fiercely and uncompromisingly holy Lord, next to whom there are no others. Neither son nor ghost. Adonai eloheinu, adonai Echad. The Lord is One.

Getting back to the topic of destruction - Armageddon as conceived in Ragnarök or as conceived as the Christian or Jewish Last Day is actually a deeply hopeful conception. Evil can be fixed, sin can be fixed, the corruption of the Earth can be fixed. Fixed drastically, horribly, but fixed. Evil doesn't get the last word. The alternative to this is a living nightmare: an eternal twilight of ignorance and evil.

Hell on Earth.

With the riots in the streets these days, with the brazen lies of the corporations through the news media, people turning on each other, hatred, this hell on Earth seems very close to me. It is easy to wish for the cleansing fire of destruction to delete, to "cancel" this world and bring a new one into being. However, the prophet Amos warns us that things will get very very bad before anything gets better:

"Woe to you who long
for the day of the Lord!
Why do you long for the day of the Lord?
That day will be darkness, not light.
It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.

Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?"

~Amos 5:18-20

So we can deduce two things: one, that hell on Earth WILL come. At least for a season, it will come. And two, that it HAS to come is fundamentally a failure. We failed. Humanity failed. Armageddon didn't hinge on G-d's will but our action. We've got nothing to be happy about. We should hang our heads. It's gonna be BAD.

It's not dissimilar to being optimistic about death. We are not supposed to love death but LIFE. Death is a punishment or rather a correction. If atonement comes after, if the Kingdom comes after, it doesn't make the correction less of a correction or any less terrible. For every person who makes it into the Kingdom, how many won't? For the others, death is just death. We aren't supposed to be happy about death or Armageddon either one. It is because of our failure that it comes.

However one hopeful thing is, Evil doesn't win. In the end, Evil is destroyed utterly. That is one reason why I don't believe in hell. As long as there are souls in hell, Evil still exists. Eternal hell would be a slight to G-d's ultimate victory and ultimate justice. Evil is wiped from existence, completely.

In a conversation I once had a year or two ago, I said that I was not afraid that cataclysmic destruction would come to the world. I said I was afraid that it wouldn't. Because if America is not punished, if the world is not punished, G-d is not just. This would mean that eternal twilight, eternal ignorance and evil, eternal hell on Earth would come. Absolutely, with certainty, it would come. No destruction actually means no hope.

But G-d IS, and G-d IS just.