In fact, nearly all the prophecies regarding the person of the messiah are useless; if not because they were penned by humans, then because humans can edit and interpret them to suit their needs. That is what humans do — edit and interpret. That is 50 percent of what makes them human. It is an outcome of having a human soul.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter all that much who the potential messiahs of the past generations were. A tree might grow from a seed, but that does not make the seed a tree. Yeshua might have been the potential messiah of his generation. So might have been Sabbatai Tsivi. Or Shimon bar-Kokbah. Or Menachem Schneerson. But not one of them was the messiah. The messiah doesn’t die. And Yeshua and those others — all those guys are dead.
What matters is who the actual messiah is, and the only way we will know the actual messiah is by his effect. He will bring perfect justice to the world. He will build the third Temple. The dead will rise from the Mount of Olives. No one will doubt Whose kingdom is the universe. The messiah may be a soldier, a king, a rabbi, or all three. His methods may be military, scriptural, miraculous, or all of these. No one will know until the messiah has succeeded. And the messiah cannot fail. That is what will distinguish the messiah from all the potential messiahs before him, whoever they were or are: victory undeniable.
Environments
For a generation’s potential messiah to become the messiah, the environment must be right; the world must be in the right condition. There are prophecies about that, too, prophecies about what conditions = the right conditions. There is a prophecy that states the potential messiah will become the actual messiah if all the Israelites celebrate a single Passover together in the land of Israel. Another one says it will happen if all the Israelites in the world, wherever they are, observe the same two consecutive sabbaths.
Probably the most talked-about condition, most likely because it is the most interpretable one, is the Brink of Destruction condition, which is exactly what it sounds like: the entire (human) world’s very existence just being a moment or two away from assured erasure. This prophecy, however, is subject to the same difficulties as the prophecies mentioned under the heading Persons, and it is subject to those difficulties to an even greater extent because who could possibly know if the world is on the brink of destruction or not? At any given moment, some madman genius in a basement with a few plane tickets could complete his fast-acting doomsday virus and go around the world contaminating all the water and who would know? And say someone did know — like the Mossad. Say the Mossad knew all about it, and so, at any given moment, the Mossad could be at the basement in question, destroying the virus or the man: if the Mossad were to know about this and were able to prevent it, would it be right to say the world was ever on the brink of destruction? I don’t think it would be right. I don’t think you can know what the brink of destruction is until the destruction has well begun — and even then… Maybe the madman will have invented the virus because a girl he thought he loved as a boy did not love him — maybe the brink was the moment just before she called him a bancer, or laughed at his engagement proposal, or kissed some other boy in front of him. You can’t know, so the prophecy is useless.
Apart from all of that, the Kabbalists tell us that Hashem holds the world together by speaking the ten sephirot at a rate of uncountable billions of times per second and, were He to stop, the world would stop existing. So, from where we stand, as humans, the world is always on the brink of destruction, and so the world is never on the brink of destruction.
And so the Brink of Destruction condition is a useless condition to consider, not because it isn’t truly a condition under which the messiah might come — it is a condition under which the messiah might come — but because it is impossible to determine when the world is on the brink of destruction.
Adonai
No few scholars claim that the actual messiah will hear the voice of Adonai and that the voice of Adonai will tell him — in advance of his undeniable victory — that he’ll become the messiah. Rabbi Avel Salt himself once made this claim, and, for a moment, it seemed reasonable.
But then the scholar Emmanuel Liebman, in what might have been his finest moment in all of eighth-grade Torah Study, opposed the claim with oratory of such high caliber that when he was finished we applauded for minutes. Emmanuel stated that Adonai would most certainly not tell the messiah that he was the messiah — ever; that not only would “having heard Adonai tell you in your ears that you were the messiah” be insufficient reason to conclude that you were the messiah (this insufficiency a qualification that Rabbi Salt had, to his credit, stipulated), but hearing Adonai’s voice in your ears would necessitate that you were not the messiah.
“First of all,” Emmanuel said to us, “it’s been millenia since He spoke to anyone in their ears. He didn’t speak like that to Chaim Weitzman nor Theodor Herzl, nor Maimonedes, nor Nachmanedes. He didn’t speak in Rashi’s ears either, and He didn’t speak into the Bal Shem Tov’s. No king, but for Saul and David — and even then only mediated by judges and prophets — ever heard Adonai in his ears. When the time of Judges was over, He stopped speaking into ears.
“And granted: to argue that examining what Adonai has not done can predict, with any kind of certainty, what He will or might do — that would be blinkered, and I would never even dream of attempting to put such sophistry into your ears and call it wisdom. I say, ‘The time of Judges is past,’ and Rabbi Gurion, who breathes deep, hands animating, he wants to say, ‘While no longer in the time of Judges, Emmanuel, we are no longer in the time of Kings, either, and this, the time of the disapora, is certainly on its way out.’ He wants to say, ‘Times change, earnest student, and times are always changing. It is impossible to define clearly the characteristics of our own era, let alone those of eras to come.’ And with Gurion ben-Judah — by whose suddenly relaxed posture I can see is satisfied with the words I have put in his mouth — I would, as always, agree. The argument from eras may be compelling, but it is well shy of convincing. I only note the history as an introduction to the following explanation, which, among other things, may help account for the history. And while you consider the following explanation, I ask you to note that you’re being asked to do nothing other than consider, however more explicitly, that which you already consider every waking moment of your lives.
“We have the written Torah. We have the one document that contains the universe, and therefore all the truth in the universe; all the truth that is, was, and will be. As well, we have this world; a world that Adonai is constantly acting on. And finally, we have scholars who study both — the Torah and the world. We are scholars who study both, and we are scholars who study the methods by which we study and the methods by which others who were like us have studied.
“In other words, all the truth is before us, arranged perfectly. And so I submit that it would be inelegant of Adonai to speak into ears with words. And Adonai is elegant. I submit that it would be sloppy, and He is not sloppy. For Adonai to speak into ears with words would furthermore be shmaltzy in the slickest, schlockiest Hollywood tradition, and He is no more a Spielberg than was Moses a homesick alien or Ruth a tragic cutie pie in a little red dress.