Mañana means tomorrow in Spanish. It also defines a lifestyle.
In the same way that Israeli irreverence to detail is encapsulated in the expression yashar yashar, which is the de rigueur response to any query as to directions, mañana mañana is the bottom line of a culture that would rather relegate the vicissitudes of life to the back burner.
And this brings us to Moshiach.
As the house lights begin to dim on the final act of this world’s six thousand year first round run, we are inundated by all the signs that Chazal have given us to signal the coming of the Moshiach. And when coupled with the reality and implication of the Iranian nuclear program, Hezbollah’s 50,000 rockets aimed at our jugular, the distinct possibility of Egypt once again becoming a confrontation state, the almost universal hostility of the nations to both Israel and the Jewish People, and the possibility of world wide economic meltdown, we can feel in our bones and almost taste the palpable closeness of Moshiach.
Tomorrow that is…
…because mañana is when he’s coming. Never today, mind you, always mañana. And therein lies a problem, for the Rambam states clearly in the 12th of his Ikarim that “....and even though he may delay, with all that, I await him every day that he will come.” It seems that the more we see the signs the more clearly we see tomorrow’s scenario.
That most of us think this way is an indisputable fact. The why behind our collective mindset is Aristotle and the apikorsis of drama.
Aristotle’s rules of dramatic construction were laid down in his Poetics with a few thoughts on the subject also scattered about his Rhetoric. Although he never says it in so many words, the bottom line foundation of Aristotle’s laws of drama, as put forth in the Poetics, is that man is the master of his fate. A protagonist that doesn’t believe in “My power and the might of my hand,” is dramatically speaking, a wimp.
In reality, nothing can be more dramatic than an open miracle, which is nothing but an open manifestation of the Yad Hashem. Although his dramatic construct seamlessly replicated reality to the extent that one could lose oneself in it as if it were reality itself, it was the genius of Aristotle, in all of its inherent wickedness, that it was man, and only man that made it work. “Good drama” cannot brook any intrusion by Hashem.
The same miracle that would rivet us to our seats if we would be privileged to witness it would be but an emotional let down in the context of a dramatic production, be it a movie or a stage play, because Aristotle’s drama world is the very antithesis of Hashem’s world, and it follows its own rules which are sacrosanct within the genre.
While the existence of nature has a very definite function in that it hides the Hand of Hashem, thereby enabling us to exercise our free will, Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers introduced the concept of Nature for the purpose of creating a world without the Creator. And Aristotle’s laws of dramatic construction parallel the Greek view of Nature in that they also write Hashem out of the script.
By making Man the mover and shaker of the Dramatic world, Aristotle forever poisoned the collective mind of the West. And given the relegation of both Aristotelian physics and philosophy to the status of historical curiosities, one can reasonably argue that Aristotle’s greatest influence on the Western mind was by way of the theater.
While Broadway, Hollywood, Piccadilly, and all the rest prove the point, that in and of itself doesn’t bring the point home to those who have no truck with secular entertainment in any of its debilitating incarnations.
For that we need Bais Yaakov.
Is it not true, for instance, that the ending of a Bais Yaakov play, in which the girls save themselves by outwitting the Gestapo, has more dramatic appeal to us than an ending in which they are saved because their pursuers are all struck down by lightning a few minutes before they were to arrest the girls?
And while we would, no doubt, be experiencing the allowable limits of ecstasy in this world if we actually witnessed SS men being zapped by lightning at the doorstep of a Bais Yaakov school, in the context of a dramatic production it would be a terrible ending. Anyone who has had the slightest experience with drama even as a couch potato intuitively understands this.
It is ironic in the extreme that many of those who are careful not to bring television, videos, newspapers, secular books, the Internet, and yes, even the radio into their homes, have nonetheless been influenced by Aristotle’s inversion of emes and sheker as incorporated in his dramatic model. So in spite of the fact that this imaginary play is about girls who are saved from the Nazi beasts by a miracle, we would rather have the miracle kept under wraps to let the girls demonstrate my power and the might of my hand by extricating themselves from their predicament.
Such is the power of Aristotle’s dramatic construct, and without his intended obfuscation we would all be applauding the miracle.
The reason we are mañana oriented is because we see that the trend lines (world economic dysfunction, Hezbollah, Iranian nukes, Egypt etc.) are building toward a climax. It would be a dramatic no no for Moshiach to put in an appearance today, and that’s why almost no one can see it as a possibility, despite our fervent hopes to the contrary.
The fact that this is total sheker manages to elude us.
Although all of us readily acknowledge that Hashem is bound by neither time nor space, we have nevertheless locked Him into Aristotle’s dramatic model, and we are totally unaware that we have done so. Climax, anti-climax, and all of the other dramatic concepts and structures by which Aristotle created a virtual reality are brilliant forgeries devoid of any substance in the real world. They have nothing to do with the way that Hashem runs His world and nothing to do with Moshiach.
Hashem keeps sending us signs, and we keep misreading them. What is meant as a wake up call spelled NOW, as in:
Pay attention, I’m about to do big things NOW, so prepare yourself for Moshiach and anticipate him NOW, gets morphed into yet one more scene in Aristotle’s long running Moshiach epic, as we wait to see how it all plays out.
In the way a person wants to go, that’s where Hashem will lead him. The more content we are to be couch potato meshichistas, the more Hashem will prolong the drama by adding “scenes.”
When we finally grasp that what is required of us is to recognize that
these signs are about today rather than tomorrow, we will daven each tefillah, learn each blatt of gemora, and do each chesed etc., as if it were the last one before Moshiach.
And as soon as we do, the movie will stop, and the realty of Geula will displace the virtual reality of Aristotle.
So when will Moshiach come, anyway?
When the Rambam says: “....and even though he may delay, with all that, I await him every day that he will come,” he most certainly means today, not tomorrow.
Today?
You are standing under the chuppah with your chosson or kallah, and just as the mesader kiddushin is about to begin the brocho, everyone in the chuppah room faces the two big doors in the back in response to a very loud and disturbing tumult taking place in the lobby. Instead of being upset you sincerely hope that the tumult taking place on the other side of those doors is in response to the arrival of Moshiach.
That’s the Rambam’s today, and it means that no matter what we are doing at the time, it will be as nothing the second we hear that Moshiach has come, Aristotle notwithstanding.
Everything else is mañana.
