Anti-Zionist Eschatology: Envisioning a Better World

Jenny R. Labendz

Leftists must not cede our redemptive imagination to Jewish and Christian religious fundamentalists. Ancient Jewish wisdom can pave the road to liberationist, ethical models of redemption.

“Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

Arundhati Roy¹

“Radical imagination…isn’t counter to doing the work of changing our material conditions and improving our quality of life. Rather, radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.”

Ruha Benjamin²

“Messianic Zionism” is bad. Whether in its Christian or Jewish forms, it uses Jews as pawns in a program to achieve narrow visions of religious redemption and dismisses Palestinians as meaningless impediments to that redemption. Messianic Zionism has motivated colonial violence, displacement, and dispossession in Palestine for the last hundred years, from Balfour to the Third Temple Movement.

But handing over the discourse of redemption to those who pedal these instrumentalist and dehumanizing models is a mistake. This discourse – “eschatology” in academic circles – is fundamentally about envisioning a better world – indeed the best of all possible worlds – whether it will come about naturally or supernaturally, now or in the indefinite future. Engaging in that imaginative discourse is a moral imperative. Eschatology is what Professor Ruha Benjamin calls “radical imagination,” which, she explains, “isn’t counter to doing the work of changing our material conditions and improving our quality of life. Rather, radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.”

Anti-Zionism should not avoid engaging in eschatological discourse simply because it eschews the theological and apocalyptic varieties foregrounded by Zionists. Because eschatology gives more than hope. Eschatology provides a horizon against which to measure ourselves and our actions, and it pulls our attention to that horizon, urging us to position ourselves in relation to it.

There have been innumerable varieties of eschatological conceptions in both Judaism and Christianity throughout the centuries. The decade plus of research on early rabbinic eschatology and its Christian analogues that went into my newly published book Beyond Hope (Oxford University Press, July 2026), revealed many things I never expected, but least expected of all was the finding that Talmudic literature lays the groundwork for a liberationist, ethical, anti-Zionist eschatology.

Talmudic literature, the anthological writings of the ancient rabbis who flourished in Palestine and Babylonia in the 2^nd to 6^th centuries CE, is the foundation for all subsequent forms of Judaism. It contains rabbinic law (both practical and hypothetical), biblical interpretation, stories, debates, wisdom, theology, and more. Eschatological writings peppered throughout this literature.

Imperfection

The very first thing I noticed about Talmudic eschatology is that it challenges Jewish supremacy and exceptionalism. In the stories the rabbis told, when the final judgment comes about, it usually does not result in a triumphalist vindication of Jewish righteousness. Instead, the other nations of the world challenge Israel’s superiority, and argue for their own worth. These stories, bear in mind, are the product of the rabbinic imagination. They were a choice. These stories teach that considering the eschaton – the ideal, redeemed, best version of the world – requires us to humble ourselves, challenge assumptions, and question our own righteousness. Rabbinic eschatology is riddled with individual and collective self-doubt and surprising suggestions about how we – and others – will fare in the world to come.

Rabbinic eschatology is not about perfection. Rather, it’s about refusing to be paralyzed by complex pasts. In one rabbinic story (Bavli Pesaḥim 119b), each of Israel’s mythic ancestors are called upon to recite blessings in the world to come, but they each decline, unwilling or unable to shake their sense of personal imperfection due to one or another perceived flaw. The only character able to recite the blessings is King David, not despite his well-known flaws and past misdeeds, but because he is able to accept them. It’s David – the only character in the scene who had committed grave sins, received rebuke, and repented (2 Samuel 11–12) – who is uniquely able to break the paralysis of the narrative.

The rabbis elsewhere (Bavli Berakhot 34b) issue a conundrum. Which is ultimately preferable: to have been perfectly righteous from the beginning, or to have sinned but repented? They never explicitly resolve it, but they implicitly endorse the model of repentance by never providing any model of perfect righteousness (in contrast to their Christian counterparts). When all the inhabitants of historic Palestine, and their neighbors, come together for a final reckoning to usher in the liberation, these are principles we will need: past wrongdoing – however it is measured – must not stop us for rejoicing together as we forge a path forward. We will not find a perfect leader, and we shouldn’t look for one.

Just as the rabbis didn’t imagine that any of us have perfect pasts, neither did they imagine a perfect future. One rabbinic messianic scene (Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 18:6) imagines two Jews who have a monetary dispute, so they decide to go up to Jerusalem and have their case decided by the messiah himself. When they get to Jerusalem, they find the streets paved with precious gems. The alleged debtor picks up a handful of gems and says, “Do I owe you this much?” And the other replies, “Not even that much!” The gems are handed over, and all is well. In this vision, the messianic era still includes dispute and judicial intervention. But the underlying condition of universal fortune makes possible a just and joyous resolution.

Palestinian liberation, like the precious gems filling Jerusalem in the messianic era, will create the conditions necessary to meet the challenges of daily life in a liberated Palestine. Liberation is the beginning, not the end, of the ideal world. The rest – equality, justice, relationship building – will have to be worked out on their own bumpy road forever.

Not even the final judgment of God, the classic pinnacle of eschatology, is portrayed in Talmudic literature as a straightforward, decisive event. Rather than an absolutist gavel-strike reflecting God’s immutable and automatic division of humanity into the righteous and the wicked, the process of divine eschatological judgment is repeatedly portrayed as collaborative and flexible. Even in the ideal world to come, there is argumentation, hermeneutics, and moral intervention. This is how the rabbis imagined the truest justice coming to fruition.

The value the rabbis’ placed on the processes involved in redemption also means they didn’t need a perfectly delineated picture of what a new world will look like. The idea of neat conclusions to “this world” ushering in a radically different and perfectly ordered “world to come” is not one found often in rabbinic texts. More frequently we find texts that leave us wondering: what even is an “end” and a “new beginning” anyway? Like postmodern fiction that challenges the value of linear narrative structures, and like post-apocalyptic literature that challenges the idea that redemption is to be found through the reformation of traditional social and political structures, rabbinic eschatological narratives are often provocative and inconclusive, challenging the necessity of structures and binaries that we have long taken for granted.

An anti-Zionist eschatology doesn’t need to challenge the laws of nature (as the rabbis sometimes do), but it needs to challenge the alleged “laws” of human nature and societal potential. We must be able to imagine a world that is not governed by self-interest and that doesn’t rely on isolationism to create community. The first step to imagining those things is simply to challenge the necessity of our present reality.

Inauguration

The other major thing I noticed about rabbinic eschatology was something that Christianity has taken for granted for millennia: The eschaton – the redeemed world, the goal – can be experienced in part already, because the eschaton has been inaugurated. For Christians, the eschaton was inaugurated with Jesus’s incarnation, ministry, resurrection, and ascension. For the rabbis, I argue, they understood the eschaton to have been inaugurated long ago: with the exodus from slavery in Egypt, the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and the construction of the Tabernacle that traveled with the Israelites for forty years in the Wilderness (each of which are celebrated with one of the three major pilgrimage festivals on the Jewish calendar, and none of which took place in the land of Israel). The difference between rabbis and Christians wasn’t that the latter thought the messiah had come while the former were still waiting. It was that the rabbis thought the eschaton had begun long ago, and the Christians thought it had only just begun recently.

In both the Jewish and Christian model of inaugurated eschatology, we are living now in the in-between, or the overlap, between the wholly unredeemed and the wholly redeemed worlds. Before those inaugural moments or processes (neither occurred in just one moment), the redemption was entirely foreign and unimaginable. Now, we can move in and out of it, occasionally experiencing a taste of the world to come.

I do not know if or when the inaugural moment for an anti-Zionist eschatology arrived. Maybe we will only see its roots in retrospect. But I cannot help but sense, in particular uplifting moments, that I can already steal a glimpse of a liberated Palestine – a taste of the world to come.

Resurrection

Tens of thousands of Palestine’s children have been murdered in the last eighty years, and nothing will bring them back or mitigate the horror of those losses. Palestine’s land bears the weight of immeasurable physical destruction, and it will always bear that weight. Correcting or compensating for those realities is impossible. For this reason, so many people cherish the dream of a resurrected life with lost loved ones, and that is a precious dream that should never be abandoned if it provides solace or hope.

But that sort of resurrection is not at all what the Talmudic rabbis had in mind when they referred to resurrection of the dead. Tehiyyat ha-metim – “resurrection of the dead” – means transcending the limits of temporal life. It means conceiving of the existence of both the living and the dead, human and environmental, in a way that defies time and participates in something eternal. It’s not about reunion but about communion.

Talmudic language around tehiyyat hametim – which is better translated as “the enlivening of the dead” rather than “resurrection” – refers both to something we can experience after death, and to something we can experience during our lives, through the relevant access-points. For rabbinic Judaism, the access-point of eternal life was Torah (or in modern parlance, Judaism). Studying and practicing Torah is routinely described as “engaging in hayye olam – eternal life” in the present, which one can move in and out of in between the pursuits of hayye sha’ah – “temporal life.” The blessing in synagogue recited after each publicly chanted portion of the Torah praises God for having “implanted in us eternal life.”

The value of describing and accessing eternal life does not hinge on its permanence or literal revival of anyone or anything. Its value lies in the sacred experience that it generates while it can. But more than that, it serves as a focal point for what to do with our lives while we exist materially here. Because in the Talmudic parlance of tehiyyat hametim – enlivening the dead – all of us who live on earth without engagement with eternity are hametim, the dead.

When we are able to exist imaginatively in a space of Palestinian liberation from occupation and oppression, and of Jewish liberation from Zionism, we are accessing eternity: the world as it should be, in its best possible form. That ability – that access point – is hard to find these days. But it is a horizon whose presence we must keep in view at all times. A democratic, pluralistic state with equal rights and privileges for all its inhabitants and for those forced into refugee status due to the Zionist project since 1947, with no ethnic or religious supremacy, can be the “new heaven and new earth” dreamed of by the prophets and poets.

To treat this as utopian escapism, however, is to miss the point of eschatology. Eschatology is a challenge to evaluate the gap between this world and the ideal world, and to “listen very carefully” (in the words of both Arudhati Roy and the Deuteronomist) for the faint breathe of the new world that is already present inside this world.