The interesting people were two New York Times opinion columnists: Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat – who, together, make an odd couple. Ezra Klein is a political liberal; Ross is politically conservative. Ezra is Jewish; Ross is a devout Catholic. But despite these differences, the two of them are often able to come together to discuss important contemporary issues in a thoughtful and nuanced way.
But it wasn’t only the interesting people who caught my attention.
Even moreso, I was intrigued by the advertised topic of their conversation. According to the episode description, Ross and Ezra were going to be discussing the surprising confluence of two wildly different phenomena. As the summary read: “This is a conversation about [on the one hand] religious mysticism – and the role it is playing [on the other hand] in the Trump administration.”
In rabbinical school, I wrote my thesis on contemporary Jewish mysticism. So of course, I was intrigued by this podcast episode, and wanted to hear what Ross and Ezra had to say.
In their conversation, they described how some supporters of President Trump view him as a quasi-mystical figure – a person who is so significant that he exceeds the expected image of your average political leader, and instead can best be understood in religious, mystical terms.
Ross and Ezra point out that, like so many mystical figures throughout history, Trump is seen – both by those who support him, and also by those who oppose him – as dramatically ushering in some new and consequential era on the world stage, whether for good or for ill. For his supporters, the story of his unlikely political comeback seems to have a certain mythic quality to it: from his seemingly having hit rock bottom on January 6, to his triumphant return to the White House in an electoral college upset. What’s more, when he was nearly assassinated this past summer, he just so happened (in the eyes of some of his supporters) to tilt his head ever so slightly in just the right direction at just the right moment, and instead of the bullet killing him, it only grazed his ear – as if he were being guided by the hand of a protective angel.
This mystical interpretation of President Trump is fueled by the sociological trends of our era. Ours is a time in which fewer and fewer Americans are affiliating with traditional religious institutions, like churches or synagogues. As many commentators have pointed out, Americans are, instead, channeling our religious instincts into a different outlet – whereby our political convictions become our new religion. Against this backdrop, it is easy to understand how, in some circles, President Trump gets elevated from merely a charismatic political leader into a figure with a much grander, quasi-mystical religious significance.
As is often the case, I found Ezra Klein’s and Ross Douthat’s comments on this matter to be incisive and clarifying. And yet, there is one thing about their analysis – one very important thing – to which I strongly object.
To be clear: I am not about to propose that I am a better interpreter of our political and social climate than these two New York Times opinion columnists. Rather, the piece of their analysis that I object to is this: they seem not to accurately understand the meaning of the word “mystical.”
I do not mean to quibble over religious terminology. Rather, I believe that something larger is at stake. The point is: by using the wrong religious term, Ross and Ezra have partly misunderstood what it is that some of Trump’s supporters see in him.
“Mystical” is one of those fancy religious words that is often said but seldom understood. It is commonly misused as a synonym for the word “magical” – as in: By some mystical power, the bullet only grazed his ear.
But in fact – as I learned while writing my rabbinical thesis – the word “mystical” does indeed have a specific definition. Mysticism is: the spiritual intuition that all things in the universe are one. In our day-to-day experience of the world, we perceive that the universe is comprised of many distinct and separate entities – that a tree is different from a cat, which is different from a rock, which is different from your house, which is different from your grandmother, which is different from the color blue, which is different from the planet Mars. But in the mystical religious imagination, all of these things – though they appear to be separate – are, at the deepest layer of truth, united in a single fabric of reality.
Jewish mystics find hints of this deep truth hidden in the words of our prayer book. For the mystical mind, the Shema is no mere claim that the Jewish people believes in only one God. Rather, it is a radical claim that all things in the universe are, in fact, One.
Would that Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat were correct! If only President Trump were truly a mystical figure! A president who recognized that, on the deepest level of reality, everything in the universe is united – now that’s a president I could (potentially) get excited about!
But Ross and Ezra mislabeled how Trump is seen by some of his supporters. What they described is not a quasi-mystical figure. What they described is, more accurately, a quasi-messianic figure.
Not to be confused with religious mysticism (which, again, is the belief that all things in the universe are one), religious messianism is the belief that some great and heroic figure – the messiah – will come into the world in order to save humanity. The messiah, it is believed, will overturn the corruptions of our society. He will usher in a better era, and take us back to the perfect world that we once inhabited in the Garden of Eden. To (perhaps crudely) blend a religious idea with a political slogan, the messiah will “Make the World Eden Again.”
When Ross and Ezra described the religious significance that some people project onto Trump, they were not describing a mystical figure, but rather, a messianic figure – and, specifically, a Christian messianic figure. The Christian messiah, of course, is Jesus. And just as Jesus was resurrected from the dead, so too has Trump made an unlikely political comeback. Just as Jesus was unfairly persecuted by the Roman Empire, so too do some of Trump’s supporters feel that he has been unfairly persecuted, by establishment politicians and by the liberal media. Just as Jesus’s suffering was intended to vicariously absorb the suffering of his followers, so too has Trump made a similar claim about the way that he has suffered political attacks – saying, in an almost direct quote of the Gospel of John (John 15:20): “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.”
When we are able to more accurately name the messianic significance that some of Trump’s supporters project onto him, we might be better able to understand the implications of that terminology – some of which are alarming.
Many books of the Bible imagine what the world will be like when the messiah comes. We might be familiar with some of the more idyllic imagery: a world that will be tranquil and at peace, in which “nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation,” and “the wolf shall lie down with the lamb.”
But the biblical writers also imagined that, in order to bring about this idyllic world, the messiah would first need to wreak havoc and desolation: civilizations would be destroyed; humans would be subjected to immense suffering; the righteous would be vindicated, but the wicked would be condemned with terrifying scenes of fiery punishment.
Let us hope that those who understand Trump in quasi-messianic terms do not have this sort of process in mind.
Unfortunately, the problems with messianic thinking do not end there. As Rabbi Donniel Hartman has pointed out, messianic thinking is a way of retreating into a world of fantasy. On this score, it has two weaknesses. First: it imagines (unrealistically) that some superhuman will swoop in and solve the world’s problems for us. And second: it imagines (again, unrealistically) that a world without suffering is possible. This kind of magical thinking is impractical on both fronts: it both does too little, while also expecting too much.
It is perhaps for this reason that our Jewish tradition is, at best, ambivalent about messianism. It is true that Maimonides – widely considered to be the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time – did indeed include messianism among his list of the Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith. But we should note that Maimonides advocated for a sort of restrained messianism. On the one hand, he believed that the messiah would come; on the other hand, he believed that the messiah would not be coming anytime soon. After Maimonides’ death, his students would summarize his thinking on the matter in the famous liturgical poem Ani Ma’amin. They wrote: “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the messiah – and although he may tarry, nevertheless, I wait.”
As Maimonides suggests: it is unlikely that the messiah is coming anytime soon in order to magically save us from all our problems. We should likely be wary of anyone who is believed to have such a purpose.
It is conceivable that someone with a mystical intuition – someone who believes that, at the deepest level of reality, all things are united – that a true mystic could potentially make a good president.
But we should, by contrast, be extremely cautious about how much political power we are willing to grant to a quasi-messianic figure. History – and especially, Jewish history – is littered with the carnage of would-be messiahs. Let’s not go that way again.
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