John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
The Rabbis said: His [Messiah's] name is 'the leper scholar,' as it is written, Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God, and afflicted.
BT Sanhedrin 98b.
In the Garden of Eden there is one chamber called the Chamber of the Ill. The Messiah then enters that chamber and calls for all the illnesses, all the pains, and all the sufferings of Israel to come upon him, and they all do so. And if he did not ease them off of Israel, taking them upon himself, no one could endure the suffering of Israel from the punishments of Torah, as is written: Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, [our pains that he endured] (Isaiah 53:4).
The Zohar, Va-Yaqhel, 2:21a.
BT Sanhedrin 98b.
In the Garden of Eden there is one chamber called the Chamber of the Ill. The Messiah then enters that chamber and calls for all the illnesses, all the pains, and all the sufferings of Israel to come upon him, and they all do so. And if he did not ease them off of Israel, taking them upon himself, no one could endure the suffering of Israel from the punishments of Torah, as is written: Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, [our pains that he endured] (Isaiah 53:4).
The Zohar, Va-Yaqhel, 2:21a.
Over the course of a number of threads on Rabbi Hirsch's treatment of the menorah I expressed amazement concerning his insinuation that the menorah, as he conceived it, was a near-perfect emblem of the messianic-personage describe in Isaiah chapter 11. In those threads I included the image (created by Rabbi Hirsch) which he considers an accurate visual of Isaiah's messiah transposed from words to emblematic image:
Naturally this image comports too well with the Christian concept of a leper-messiah who's made into a trespass-offering for the sins of Israel. An immediate Jewish rebuttal pointed out that the image above doesn't include the lines Rabbi Hirsch drew to connect the words making up the horizontal cross-member to words that construct the stump of the tree of light (the menorah). The implication being that the image above serves the Christian concept of the leper-messiah so well merely by means of the elimination the the non-linguistic elements of the drawing (i.e., the lines connecting words). ----- Nevertheless, as in most exegetical points of light, Rabbi Hirsch tends to provide a rabbinical rabbit hole that goes deeper down into the spirit of these things than the average bible-toter is comfortable descending.
We, of course, will descend. . ..
John