A Jewish Take on Armageddon

Richard Landes tells us on the very first page of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience that he isn’t going to confine himself to the usual suspects.  “To illustrate the near universality of millennialism,” he writes, “to cut against the grain that assumes a Judeo-Christian origin for all millennialism, I selected for treatment here only non-Jewish and non-Christian movements.”  Yet the Jews are by no means absent from his new book.  The first chapter begins with a famous Chelm story; the epigraph to the volume’s conclusion is a saying from Pirkei Avot.  And it’s not just a question of outward trappings.  In his taxonomy of millennial ideas and movements over the course of history, Landes ascribes a very important role to Judaism.  Heaven on Earth concludes with an urgent reminder of the danger posed by contemporary millennialism to the Jews.