The Eschaton That Needs Its Enemies

The shard doctrine is the late move that turns a national covenant into a metaphysical caste. Isaac Luria, Safed, sixteenth century: the vessels break, sparks of divinity fall into the husks, and tikkun is the raising of those sparks through Israel’s practice. Chabad inherits it through Shneur Zalman of Liadi. The Tanya distinguishes a divine soul in the Jew, rooted above, from the ordinary soul, and does not give the nations the same root. That is the teaching. Jews, in this school, are shards of the divinity they identify with Yahweh-Elohim. The Goyim are the surrounding order. It is a real doctrine inside the movement. It is not a verse in the Torah.

The Torah’s weather is the one the previous file already opened. Deuteronomy 32, in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, has Elyon dividing the nations. Yahweh’s portion is Jacob. Psalm 82 seats a presiding power over an assembly of elohim and tells them they will die like Adam. Mauro Biglino, translator of the Masoretic text for the Italian Catholic interlinear until that house dropped him, counts the beings the monotheist translation flattens into one God. Grant every merger the exegete wants — Elyon, El-Shaddai, and Yahweh as one person — and The Gods of the Bible still lands near twenty elohim. Chemosh, Milcom, Astarte, Rimmon of Damascus stay on the page as other members of the class. Naaman asks leave to bow in Rimmon’s house and Elisha tells him to go in peace. Yahweh forbids his people to serve the others. That is henotheism. A patron of one people. Dan McClellan’s secular point is the same council. Mark Smith’s history is the merger: Yahweh absorbs El, Asherah is demoted, and the lone monad arrives centuries later, fought for, unevenly. Biglino’s concrete reading stays open because the political claim needs it. An Iron Age national god, or an amalgam of El and Baal-Hadad, is not the omni-monad these institutions cash as divine right. The motto that the world unites against Israel and none prevail is Zechariah and Ezekiel, read by a later school. It is not the allotment.

Chabad-Lubavitch is the outreach arm. Menachem Mendel Schneerson ran it from Brooklyn from 1951 until his death in 1994 and never took the movement to Israel, which did not stop him directing Israeli questions of land and of redemption from 770. Benjamin Netanyahu’s relationship with him is on film and in the memory the movement still repeats. On 18 November 1990, Jewish Educational Media’s record of the meeting has the rebbe on the only priority that mattered in that room: much has progressed, Moshiach still has not come, there are hours left in the day, bring him. The line that traveled with that relationship, and that Israel Today was still printing in November 2023, is the scepter. Netanyahu would be the prime minister who passes rulership, in the form they take from the messianic reading, to Moshiach ben David. First he had to hold the office. He did, in 1996, and again, and again.

The current around him does not treat this as a parable. In February 2020, on Radio 2000, Rabbi Yaakov Zisholtz told Yonatan Dadon he was working inside the preparation. He reported Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky’s sequence: the messiah at the door, then across the threshold, then already here. Zisholtz said the elections would not take the government from Netanyahu, because Kaduri and the Lubavitcher rebbe had both said Bibi would be the last prime minister before Moshiach. He spoke as a man in contact with the figure they mean to seat. That is the immanentization. Not a mood. A timeline, with a name on the chair that has to be vacated upward.

By 1991 parts of Chabad were already singing the rebbe himself as king messiah. He pushed the song and told a journalist who insisted “you are Moshiach” that he was not. After 1994 a current kept the claim. The part that matters for the state is the part that survived the correction: redemption is near, the land is not negotiable, and the last ordinary ruler hands over the scepter. The Noahide laws are the legal imagination that comes with the handoff. Seven laws the nations are said to owe: no idolatry, no blasphemy, no murder, no forbidden sex, no theft, no limb from a living animal, and courts. Chabad outreach publishes them as the Goyim’s share of the redemption. Inside the school they are the universal code under a Davidic king, with Israel in the priestly seat and the nations in the administered one. That is the dual order. It is Talmud and later, not the henotheist allotment, which never made Yahweh the landlord of Elyon’s other portions.

Likud is the political house this current learned to live in. The line back is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, then Begin’s Herut. In 1923 Jabotinsky published “The Iron Wall,” and he did not speak in honey. Every native population, civilized or not, regards its land as its national home and will refuse not only new masters but new partners. The Arabs, he wrote, are not fools and not for sale. Culturally behind, in his slur, and just as sharp. They know what the colonists want. To imagine they will consent to Zionism for railways and culture is a childish notion that despises them. Every native population resists colonists while it still has hope of throwing them off. Lenni Brenner reprints the essay in 51 Documents. The original is Jabotinsky’s, and it is enough. A genuine settlement, on the revisionist page, is laughable, because the project was never offered as a partnership. It was offered as a wall of force until the refusal died. Religious nationalism did not invent that wall. It put Moshiach on top of it.

The Greater Israel project is the wall drawn outward. One layer is biblical. Genesis 15 runs the promise toward the river of Egypt and the Euphrates, and maps in the religious-Zionist current, including those tied to Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon, draw the dream at that size. The other layer is Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” Kivunim, February 1982. Yinon’s essay treats the Arab states as sectarian mosaics whose fragmentation serves Israel. It is a published strategy, and the wars since have been read, inside this current and by its critics, as the coloring-in: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the pressure on Iran, Gaza and the West Bank as the near edge. Mearsheimer and Walt do not need a forged cabinet stamp to show the mechanism. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy the same years are a lobby at work on the Palestinians, the invasion of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and the 2006 Lebanon war. The essay, the biblical border, and the lobby are three documents. They point the same way. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are the coalition voices who say the religious version out loud. Likud supplies the premiership the scepter story requires.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s finding is the scale of the support, not a sermon about who is allowed to notice it. The United States is Israel’s great benefactor, in aid and in vetoes, past what strategy explains and past what the moral case still holds. The organizations doing the work are public and named. AIPAC. The Washington Institute. The Conference of Presidents. The Zionist Organization of America. Christians United for Israel. They are a coalition with arguments inside it. Morton Klein and John Hagee have rejected a Palestinian state. Others in the same network have wanted a managed one. What they share is the labor of keeping American backing in place when Washington would otherwise flinch. That labor is how an eschaton gets ships, votes, and time.

The junior partner is Christian Zionism, and its ending does not need Jews to remain Jews. Daniel Pipes has called America’s Christian Zionists, beside the Israeli army, one of the Jewish state’s ultimate strategic assets. Michael Freund, out of Netanyahu’s communications shop, wrote in 2006 that the future of the relationship may hinge on them. CUFI, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews: dispensational clocks, a greater Israel, no two-state outcome. Gershom Gorenberg’s line, carried in Mearsheimer and Walt, is the ugly honesty of that alliance. In the end-times script the Jews die or convert. The love is love of a character in someone else’s play. The junior partner will hold the hard line and still be waiting for an act in which its allies are removed.

Elvira King’s The Pro-Israel Lobby in Europe is the same religion in the Brussels register. The European Coalition for Israel launched there in 2004, carried especially by British and German networks, working the Parliament after Lisbon’s Article 17 had already opened the door to religious bodies. Clive Jones’s measure of her research: influence on EU decision-makers out of proportion to the numbers. King distinguishes the style from the American one. The European current is less apocalyptic in public. The ECI has said eschatology is not the precondition of its lobbying. She also shows that eschatology stays at the core, and that the quiet is tactical, because the American hawkish ending does not travel well in Brussels. Antisemitism is one of their stated motives, particularly in the German stream. It sits in the same office as a spiritual claim on the Jewish state. A lobby can speak safety and vote prophecy in the same week.

The chair inside the American state is no longer theoretical. Yehuda Kaploun, born in Kfar Chabad to Lubavitch emissaries, was confirmed on 18 December 2025 as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. A Chabad rabbi, in that office, under Donald Trump. Jared Kushner is the family channel beside it: Netanyahu’s circle, Friends of Chabad at Harvard, and a conversion in the house through Ivanka. This is not a rumor about a mood. It is who holds the file, and who carries the policy, while the scepter story is still being told about the man in Jerusalem.

This is the part that makes the project ethnically suicidal for the people it claims to crown. The Hassidic ultra-nationalist and the Christian dispensationalist share a plot point. The nations gather against Israel. That gathering is not read as failure. It is read as the chapter before the rescue, the test of whether their Elohim will cover them. Zechariah 14. Ezekiel 38. A Chabad reading of the close of Deuteronomy 32 in which the nations end by praising God for his people. If the rescue is guaranteed, exposure is useful. Hostility is confirmation. You can prosecute the land in the open, expand on the Yinon logic, and file the backlash as prophecy fulfilling itself.

The source will not cash that check. Yahweh is a national elohim in a council, not the most high, and Biglino’s count leaves him one among many. Psalm 82 has the council dying like men. There is no deus ex machina in the henotheist pages for a modern state that has organized its own siege. The operators of the eschaton are not the ones who will wear the reputation. Jews as a whole wear it. Diaspora communities wear it. The neighbors inside the wall wear the war. Mearsheimer and Walt already mark the strategic result without the theology: the policies damage the American interest and Israel’s long-term security together. Add the theology and the result is plainer. A Second Temple monad, a Lurianic shard-doctrine, and a lobby are being asked to do what Elyon’s allotment never promised. No national god is coming to save the wager. The people who did not write it will be left holding it.