When Messiahs Get It Wrong

Fallibility is a Feature, not a Bug

If it is the anointed priest (hakohen hamashiach) who has incurred guilt, so that blame falls upon the people, he shall offer for the sin of which he is guilty a bull of the herd without blemish as a sin offering to the Lord. (Leviticus 4:3)

The High Priest may have given an erroneous legal ruling, and the people, by following that ruling, all committed a sin by performing a forbidden act. We know that it was the duty of the people to accept the legal rulings of the High Priest, seeing that the Torah wrote in Deuteronomy 33:10: “they (the Levites) are to teach you your laws.” (Chizkuni)

The high priest taught incorrectly and the people were guilty, all of them having acted inadvertently. On the other hand, the meaning of “to bring guilt on the people” might be, “because of the guilt of all of the people.” It is mentioned here because the priest is the bearer of the Torah and he is very careful and holy unto God. (Ibn Ezra)

“Messiah” (moshiach)—which has come to mean savior or redeemer in common parlance—originally just meant “anointed one.” In the Jewish tradition, kings and priests are anointed, and the Messiah contains elements of both Biblical archetypes: he is both a sovereign political leader as well as a religious leader, a warrior as well as one who purifies. We tend to think of the messiah, whether literal or figurative, as a herald of utopia, of the End Times. The Torah does not use Moshiach to refer to anything so chiliastic, but it is hard not to read into it given the strong overtones the word has come to carry. It is with this in mind that Leviticus offers a shocking statement: “When The Messiah incurs guilt upon the people…” Even Messiahs get it wrong. Even redeemers are fallible.

In introducing us to the sacrificial system, Leviticus highlights one of its core purposes, namely, to rectify and atone for misdeeds committed in error: failures not of will, but of knowledge. While all people are capable of cognitive error, priests are placed first, because their own errors affect others, and because they are thought to be least likely to err. Through modeling and teaching, the impact of their example spreads throughout the people. Moreover, in a society in which the law requires the presumption that the priests are in the right, a failure at the top creates a contradiction: to follow the mistaken priest is to sin, but to claim to know better than the priest and follow one’s own conscience, say, is also to sin. This is a dominant topic in The Talmudic tractate Horayot, and it is also a fundamental problem in political philosophy: what is authority? A priest is in authority, by virtue of his office, but he is not always an authority. A police officer is in authority by virtue of his uniform, but a police officer who violates or misapplies the law is not an authority. The uniform then becomes a lie, representing the coercive power of the state, but not its legitimate authority.

The insistence that religious leaders can get it wrong, and can get it wrong even when they are not malicious, but sincere, creates a wedge of doubt in all human authority. How do we know that we are not deceived or self-deceived? Positivist legal theory says that the law is whatever we say it is—there is no such thing as self-deception. To take the extreme example, if the authorities miscalculate the beginning of a new month and deviate from the lunar calendar, we go with their miscalculation. Human convention overrides cosmological reality. Likewise, as we enter Passover, we declare the crumbs in our homes to be as dust of the earth. Legally speaking, our declaration transforms the substance of those crumbs. Convention (nominalism) overrides material fact (realism). Naturalist legal theory counters that there is a true and universal Law against which we must measure ourselves. No matter that Nazism legally licensed concentration camps. Properly speaking, and in the higher sense of the word, these were illegal. Jewish law splits the difference: the average person must follow the positivist prescriptions of convention, but the tradition also recognizes that these can be distorted. We can’t know what we don’t know. And we are not responsible to do our own research, despite the fact that there are times when it would have done us good.

To take a fresh example, given the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, no common depositor has enough information or understanding of accounting to know if the bank it entrusts with its funds is solvent. But if we assume that banks are untrustworthy, that will be terrible for the economy. Likewise, it is unrealistic to expect most people to know how to adjudicate whether their vaccines are safe or whether a doctor’s diagnosis is accurate. In a well functioning society, we don’t have to: we place our trust in Messiahs, anointed ones, and trust that if anything goes wrong those we entrusted will be held to account. Of course, the degradation of trust in authorities is both a leading and lagging indicator of societal decline.

To maintain trust in the system, leaders must admit when they’ve gotten it wrong. Fallibility must be normalized. The adaptable system is one that allows for mistakes and corrections, not one that punishes people for admitting mistake and so incentivizes concealment. A system that acknowledges its structural limits will be better equipped to handle critique than one that is assumed to speak the unmediated voice of God. Leviticus is a manual for priests, and its first lesson is “Be humble.” You must represent God while remembering that you are not God. Don’t let your power get to your head. Remember that your words and actions will be experienced as teachings.

Ibn Ezra notes that the priest may fail because of the people. This might mean many things, but one possibility is that the priest is lowered to the level of the people and teaches them what they want to hear instead of what they ought to hear. The priest becomes an entertainer who gets captured by his audience rather than an educator who leads the audience to a new place. We know from the example of Aaron and the golden calf that audience capture is a great threat to the priest’s integrity. If the priest judges himself on popularity, his teaching becomes riddled with error, though he may never know it. Self-knowledge is a pre-requisite for effective service.

A common reason we don’t like to admit that we are mistaken is ego. We get so much validation from being right. But if we take our egos out of it, which is what religious life is supposed to help inculcate, and if we practice sacrifice and if we engage in prayer and contemplation, we find that we are not our egos. The self is much vaster than the part of it that seeks recognition and that holds on for dear life to its identity. The Messiah won’t have a large ego. Thus, the Messiah will not only be wrong, but will relish the process of self-correction. When the Messiah comes, we will not stop making mistakes, but we will stop fearing them. We will become not a society that knows everything, but a society that embraces learning.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh