This transformation is rendered in graphic detail, with reversals of every
possible geologic or topographic obstacle: that which is low will be raised up;
that which is high shall be leveled. Indeed, the world will be flat. The flattening
of the world is the strongest expression of the idea that the return of the ten
tribes will bring the repair of all the cleavages, ambiguities, barriers, and
unknowns spread across the face of the earth. Until the messianic moment,
we live in an age of spatial disconnection.
In Jewish thought and its later Christian inflections, the most basic
definition of messianism as a category postulates “the certainty of the coming
of a blessed world in some indefinable future moment.”^81 At first blush, the
concomitant question is a purely temporal one: when will the Messiah come?
Indeed, most Jewish and Christian messianic calculations have focused on
temporal considerations, signs, and signals. But it is God’s question, “where
were they?” that makes the spatial dimensions of messianism key: where does
the messianic moment begin, and where—literally—can it be found?
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(lu)
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