Moshiach

"Moshiach signifies the separation of the good from the evil. This is why he will come "only in a generation which is altogether meritorious or altogether sinful," i.e., at a time in which there will be no mixture of good and evil. So as long as Moshiach has not come, there is a mixture of good and evil in all the worlds: there is no good without evil and no evil without good."

~ Rabbi Shneur Zalman
The Alter Rebbe

Considering that the overwhelming majority of B'nei Noach have emerged from Christianity, it is quite certain that the idea of a messiah, or savior, was central in our belief system. Is it possible for those of us who have emerged from Christianity to reconcile our formerly-believed Christian concept of messiah with the Jewish concept, which predates Christianity by several centuries?

Even within ka'al B'nei Noach we find individuals who still struggle to keep their belief in Jesus intact. Instead of believing in the Gentiles' Jesus, they now believe in a Jewish Jesus - and they now call him Yeshua Ha Moshiach (Yeshua the Messiah). They strip away the Christian's Anglo-Saxon garments of Jesus and redress him in a more ethnic Jewish costume. Now Yeshua is introduced as an Orthodox rabbi, complete with tzitzits, tallit, and tefillin. And by doing this to Jesus, they erroneously believe they have rectified the Church's whitewashing of a Jewish Yeshua into a figure called Jesus, and that they have restored the truth to the world.

But have they bothered to ask, "Who is the messiah that the Jews have been looking for?" No. In their struggle to keep their Jesus/Yeshua belief system intact, they have neglected to study Moshiach from the purely Jewish viewpoint. They, in fact, have long forgotten that the idea of Moshiach is an original Jewish concept. Therefore, only the remnant of Torah-observant Jews can make clear to us who Moshiach is, what his responsibilities are, where and when he will ascend the throne of kingship, why he will be crowned King Moshiach, and how all of this will come to pass.

Although the concept of Messiah has always been a part of Judaism, we find greater definition of who the Messiah is, and what the Messianic era is, from the hasidim who are part of the Chabad Lubavitch. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson stressed to the hasidim that we are the generation who will witness the Ultimate Redemption. Examining the Messiah according to Hasidic (Chassidic) thought is a robust challenge, and a storehouse of information is available on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Much, much more can be said regarding Moshiach than what we could ever hope to accomplish on this web page. Therefore, we will be recommending the reader to select certain web links in order to examine the concept of Messiah from a Jewish perspective and gain a greater understanding of the Hasidic concept of Moshiach. You can go to the Study Resources page for these links, or go directly to Chabad Lubavitch in Cyberspace. And on this page we will recommend books concerning Moshiach and the Ultimate Redemption for B'nei Noach to study.

One of the books we are recommending is an outstanding book by Rabbi Shmuel Boteach, entitled The Wolf Shall Lie With the Lamb: The Messiah in Hasidic Thought.