IMPROVEMENT SUPPRESSES THE IDEAL The bloody disjunction between the "Kingdom of God" and "Tikkun ha Olam"

The expressions "Kingdom of God" and "Tikkun ha Olam" correspond to the hope of access to an ideal/better world, conceived/allowed by divinity, and can be understood as synonyms (as they appear in some authors), but have the potential to distinguished not only by the different innovative processing of their common origin - the Tanakh (Old Testament) - but also by the fact that, being related, they are suspected of actually suppressing each other, which will result from the text of the following essay ; the demonstration inevitably gives rise to the outline of an original contribution to the discursive construction of the "Kingdom of God".

With concerns rooted in the Bible, this essay could be suspected of exegetical intentions, but the expressions "Kingdom of God" and "mip'nei tikkun ha-olam" (1) promised, in their time, ways of functionally rebalancing society , corresponding to a higher purpose of life, that is, exactly what, today, we are looking for as an antidote to the disorganization that undermines the meaning of the world (the most perceptible crises - social, economic and financial), so that the interest in the subject is rather practical, than exegetical nature.

Translating the solutions appropriate to the Bronze Age and the slave society to contemporary problems would prove a dubious humor, but the stereotypes in the collective organization, the invariants in human life and the millennial persistence of the axiological benchmark raised by the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions, allow the examination of the ancient solutions to be not just suggestive, but even stimulating, instructive and, therefore, recommendable.

The present essay has its origins in my book "The solution to the crisis/Terminus a quo" (RAO Publishing House, Bucharest, 2016 - the book can be read freely, online, in English, on the website www.bursa.ro), where I included some of my press articles on the subject of the financial crisis, published (between 2010-2016) in the Romanian financial daily BURSA; the paper concludes that the solution to the global financial crisis is not of a financial nature, but resides in the design of the desirable world (Apocalypse) and its practice.

Searching for the concept of a desirable world in the Judeo-Christian sacred texts presents advantages:

- the research is supported by the processing of thousands of other seekers from current and past generations (2), synchronized in an imaginary debate that, like in the Talmud, does not take into account the time that separates the opinions expressed (fatally, the enterprise is traditional and, in a measure, ahistorical);

- it avoids, for the moment, the toxic problems of planning a collective multidisciplinary research, undertaken with contemporary tools (philosophy, sociology, economics, law, ethics and certainly others) and of the appropriation, by the political will, of the result of this process; for it is not certain that more poisonous consequences would follow if we left to chance the evolutions of our disorganization towards senselessness (which, in fact, seems most likely to happen);

- it can benefit from the power of religious piety, before it is appropriated politically.

The New Testament reports the declaration of Jesus Christ that the mission for which he was sent was to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God (3), but it is unanimously accepted that a development of the concept is missing from the Christian text, which reports only his gestural and/or verbal reactions Jesus, in various biographical circumstances, from which we obtain, at most, an external outline of the notion, without ever being inside.

The fact generates a triple challenge:

a) it is contradictory that the New Testament does not present the very doctrine whose preaching was the life mission of its central character (and very likely, the reason for his death sentence); The Gospels do not explicitly tell us why Jesus Christ lived and why he died (the reasons were developed and interpreted by the Apostle Paul and subsequent Christian tradition); Is this a deliberate omission, or were the authors of the canonical Gospels simply unable to explain the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, despite Jesus' best efforts? - there are indications to support both variants;

b) the believer longs for his admission to the Kingdom of God, the certainty of which he can acquire only after acquiring the concept he lacks;

c) intelligence, regardless of faith, is tempted to search the sacred text for the satisfaction of understanding.

This triple challenge has fermented the vast literature devoted to the definition of the "Kingdom of God", a literature which has been nourished by the generous metaphysical suggestions that this so expressive name inspires and which cannot be refuted by anyone, although confirmation is not at hand ( a frequently used textual support is found in the "Prophecies").

However, the New Testament indicates that the ideational source for the Kingdom of God includes the Law and the Prophets (4), i.e. the Tanakh/ (Old Testament); which could be the reason why the teaching of the Gospel preached by Jesus is omitted - the New Testament does not present what is already presented in the Old Testament (because it would be useless), but, at most, reports the leitmotif spoken by Jesus - "in order to fulfill the prophecy" -, repeated in all the circumstances he creates, so that he is identified as the Messiah, without declaring himself explicitly.

Most likely, when Jesus specified the Law as a "bibliographic source" for the Kingdom of God, he was referring to the Torah (written and oral), on the basis of which, later, the body of the 613 Divine Commandments (Mitzvot) was established on Mount Sinai by Moses, who is said to have transferred them on.

Although tradition maintains that the Commandments were handed down from generation to generation unchanged, yet it records the loss of 300 of them (or even more, since the first transfer) and affirms their subsequent recovery; then, the total loss of the Book itself, (in whole or in part) and its recovery during the reign of Josiah (5), in the 7th century B.C.E. (some exegetes even suspect that the Pentateuch has been lost forever and that the finder, the priest Hilchia, is, in fact, its author); the questionable way in which Rabbi Simlai (6) arrived at the figure of 613 and the intuitive way in which this figure became the numerical value of the set of Commandments, rejected by some exegetes as foreign to the rabbinic tradition; but, above all, the unsuccessful effort for almost a millennium of some brilliant minds to concretely find the list of the 613 Commandments; which, finally, Maimonides establishes, in a laborious work (7); and although his list is vigorously and argumentatively contested, it becomes generally accepted; in all these reincarnations, tribulations and adventures of the list of Commandments, the action and spirit of people participated, so that, all the more, the Commandments were defined as a "meeting place with God", in all areas of social and spiritual life, and not only as an open set of obligations charged by God to each member of humanity.

If it is inappropriate to pronounce on divine reason and motives, however, human processing and participation in the normative space of the divine Commandments gives them the presumption of coherence - the uniqueness and consistency of the self-identity of each Commandment, the observance of the principle of the excluded third and the non-contradiction of the body of Commandments - what are the qualities of human logic, with a view to comprehensibility.

The presumption supports the present essay, in the configuration of what we can call the "Kingdom of God", by assembling the Divine Commandments in a normative system of the organization of society, corresponding to the values of the Torah.

At the center of this construction is the Tzedakah, with its two Laws - the Law of Forgiveness and the Law of Liberation - the observance of which is the divine condition for concluding the last Covenant between God and the People of Israel, through which God allows them to use the Promised Land/Erertz Israel and secures his supremacy in the World.

Shmita works bivalently, because its observance not only fulfills the condition of the Covenant, but also ensures social cohesion, economic efficiency and the atmosphere that trains the ethical and spiritual values promoted and imposed by the Commandments; these values are supposed to define the Kingdom of God - an ideal human organization, whose promised supremacy is realized by itself, without any other transcendental intervention than that of the promise.

It is an intelligible miracle - the Promise is fulfilled through the Covenant (divine promise, through human observance of the Commandments).

As it is said, "One behind the lid of the ark should visualize himself as if he were standing in front of the lid of the ark..." (Berakhot 30a).

Citing the fact that the Shmita inhibits credit around the Sabbatical because it causes a cyclical economic deadlock, Hillel introduced the Prosbul procedure, under the guise of "repairing the world" (Tikkun ha olam), authorizing the circumvention of the Law of Forgiveness through legal and linguistic quirks, for credit to flow continuously.

The practice of Prosbul altered the Shmita (on the observance of which the fulfillment of the Divine Promise in the Covenant depended) and, thus, made impossible its realization - possibly the Kingdom of God, which remained a messianic utopia.

Moreover, God himself has become an external court, whose words can be interpreted.

The radical modification of the Commandments, in their very opposite, is the extreme limit of a long process of altering the divine character of the Commandments, which opened the line of rabbinic creativity, in which the validity of the interpretation of the holy text corresponds to a human decision adopted by majority vote, rejecting the invocation of intention divine behind the words of the Commandments (the authoritative interpretation, originating in the Oral Torah).

This development accomplished during the Amoraim seems to have sprung from the controversy between "a better world" (Tikkun ha olam) and "an ideal world" (Kingdom of God), transformed into a bloody conflict that apparently the ideational motive, probably succumbing to the spectacularity of the narrative that culminates in the crucifixion of Jesus.

The configuration of the Kingdom of God, in this essay, was not claimed from the Bible except to the extent that everyone can find in the Book what they are looking for and can read it in their own way; and does not propose it as a social ideal, but as a basis for discussion and a benchmark for testing.

Notes

(1) "Tikkun ha-olam", in the sense of "Aleinu leshabei'ach - a prayer from the "Siddur", the classic Jewish prayer book: "to perceive with speed the splendor of Your omnipotence, to make the abominable (idolatry) to be removed from the earth, and the (false) gods to be completely removed, to takein olam - repair / improve the world - under the Kingdom of the Almighty" ("to speedily see Your mighty splendor, to cause detestable (idolatry) to be removed from the land, and the (false) gods will be utterly 'cut off', to takein olam - fix/repair/establish a world - under the Almighty's kingdom" - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam) .

(2) "The Kingdom of God: A Bibliography of 20th Century Research. Update Les³aw Daniel Chrupca³a/Created: 5 July, 2007. Last modified: 11 November, 2019" is one of the bibliographic lists available on the internet (https://www .academia.edu/41346521/The_Kingdom_of_God_A_Bibliography_of_20th_Century_Research._Update), which, without being the only one of its kind, is dedicated exclusively to works on the subject of the Kingdom of God; the list extends over 400 pages, displaying about 6000 studies.

(3) "And He said to them: I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities, because for this I was sent." (Luke: 4:43).

(4) "Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the prophets; I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill." (Matthew: 5:17)

(5) "When they took the silver that had been brought into the temple of the Lord, then Hilkiah the priest found the Book of the Law of the Lord that had been given by the hands of Moses." (The second book of Paralipomena/the second of the Chronicles - Chapter 34/14. ).

(6) The total number of Commandments was established in the second half of the third century (circa 250-290) by Rabbi Simlai, a second-generation Amoraim, by calculating the gematria of the word Tawrah (Arabic pronunciation Tawrah, for Torah), see: ( https://www.sefaria.org/Makkot.24a.2?langbi&withChidushei% 20Agadot&lang2en/The William Davidson Talmud/Makkot 24a).

(7) "Mishneh Torah", written between the years 1170-1180.