Every day, we experience the Messiah ben Joseph's fatal clash with Armilos
Is my Torah true or convenient?
As I work on a bigger post about the traditional “end”-times lore in Judaism, and study the materials for my own benefit, a climactic episode from the “Ten Signs” genre of Jewish texts comes to mind when I least want it to. When I think about this story, I always pause and wonder: is the Torah my Torah? Or is my Torah a more convenient Torah, an idol given by some other hand than G-d’s? And how can I know?
By this point in the story, Mashiach ben Yossef (the Messiah of the Lineage of Joseph), has begun preparing the world for the arrival of Mashiach ben David, the final messiah, the one we usually mean when we refer to Mashiach. Mashiach ben Yossef, whose name is Nehemiah ben Hushiel, is a military leader. He fights alongside the warrior queen Hephzibah, Mashiach ben David’s mother, as we learn from Sefer Zerubbabel.
The part of Mashiach ben Yossef’s story that troubles me is as follows. To quote from the Signs of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai1:
A man will come forth from the city of Rome whose name is Armilos b. Satan, spawned from a stone statue located in Rome. The statue is that of a woman, and Satan will come and have sexual intercourse with it, and it will give birth to this man. On the day when he is spawned he will be as if he is one hundred years old. He will come and wage war at Alexandria and destroy the entire seacoast. Woe to the one unlucky enough to be seized by his hand! He will come to Gaza by himself and establish his throne there.
These are his signs: he will be ten cubits tall. He will sit there upon his throne and utter profanities and blasphemies. He will say to the gentile nations: “I am God! Bring me my Torah which I gave to you!” They will bring him the images of their idols, and he will respond: “This is indeed the Torah which I gave you!”
Armilos will then say to the children of Israel: “Bring your Torah!” Thirty people from the leadership of Israel will enter along with Nehemiah b. Hushiel [who is Mashiach ben Yossef] and they will bring him a Torah scroll. He will say: “I do not believe in this Torah!” They will answer him: “If you do not believe in this Torah, then you are not God but Satan. ‘May the Lord rebuke you, O Satan!’” (Zech. 3:2) At that time he will seize those thirty Israelites who came with Nehemiah, and he will burn them together with the Torah.
Then Armilos will say to Nehemiah, “Now do you not believe in me?” Nehemiah will answer him: “I put my faith in no one but the G-d of Israel, the G-d of heaven who gave His Torah through the agency of Moses our teachers. He is the One in Whom I believe!”
Armilos will issue an order to execute Nehemiah in the Temple of his G-d. So they will kill Nehemiah in Jerusalem, and his corpse will be discarded in Jerusalem. Israel will mourn for him, as scripture states: “and the land will mourn, every family separately.” (Zech. 12:12)
For those unfamiliar with the stories about Armilos and his mother the beautiful statue, there are plenty of other sources, but I won’t linger on the characters’ oddities here. Armilos is sometimes described as being green with two heads, or being red with a weirdly wide face, or having leprosy.
What happens in this incident? Within the particular work I quoted from, which is one of several Ten Signs narratives, this is the ninth sign of the messiah, the tenth being the arrival of Mashiach ben David himself. The world is experiencing the birthpangs of the messiah, the Chevlei Mashiach—that is, the difficulties we’ll face before redemption. Not before the “end” of the world—the universe is redeemed, not annihilated.
As you’d expect of the child of a figure called Satan, Armilos comes about as a test for our people. (Elsewhere he’s the son of Belial, however.) What is his test? He declares himself God and asks the people of the world to bring him the Torah he gave them. And as he sees idol after idol, he’s pleased. The Nations have been deceived. Only the nation with the true Torah poses a threat, and so when Armilos summons the Jews, he freaks out and declares our Torah false.
This would seem to be a simple, invigorating story of martyrdom, but I worry about it all the time. The question I ask myself is this: If Armilos commanded me to bring him my Torah, would he approve of it, saying he had given it to me? Or would my Torah be the true Torah given by Hashem, which scares Armilos out of his mind?
Bearing the false Torah would be convenient in that moment. There’s no reason from this story to think that all Jews, by genetics or having absorbed it through childhood osmosis, automatically bear the true Torah. A false Torah is convenient all the time, too. It’s easy, as we read in Daniel 11:32, to be one of “the forsakers of the covenant” who are “flatter[ed] with smoothness.” The quest for a frictionless existence is an idol, a false Torah.
I don’t want to believe the same Torah as Armilos. And I want to embody what Rabbi Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon writes in the Oz le-Elohim, and as I’ve reflected on before, that it is for our efforts in Torah study that we are rewarded, regardless of errors. The one who doesn’t even try is the one who suffers for it, not the one who tries and errs.
But I still want to know, when held to account, whether the Torah I present to anyone—even, perhaps especially, to the enemy—is the Torah of Hashem. Am I wrong, and my Torah is an idol, or—perhaps worse—am I simply a coward who would lie when called upon?
Israel’s grief at the death of Mashiach ben Yossef is better known than the events leading up to his death. Talmud (Sukkah 52a) and Ibn Ezra (on Zechariah 12:10) both discuss it.
Despite a recent flood of books and think pieces to the contrary, faith is not always pleasant. It’s not just a way to arbitrarily pick meaning out of the secular void. G-d is not a mental health app. Brighter Bite is not my Torah. I’m sure the Jews in this story who die for our faith, including Mashiach ben Yossef, would’ve had a more pleasant wellness experience if they’d put down the heavy Sefer Torah. But they weren’t into Judaism for the vague project of finding meaning. They believed it.
Spoiler alert: in the end of this apocalyptic story, we win. Mashiach ben David arrives, resurrects Mashiach ben Yossef and everyone else, kills Armilos, wins all the final battles, and all’s well that ends well. The possibility that I’d personally fail to meet the moment still nags at me, regardless of the overall outcome.
The stories we learn from these apocalypses are overflowing with lessons worth taking to heart, but the brief martyrdom of Mashiach ben Yossef is the one that sticks with me the most as I go about my day, especially as I teach. Even if I have a different view of how redemption will unfold, the story poses a troubling question, a question that cuts to the quick of the concerns I feel more and more deeply.
I suppose all I can do is continue to ask, as in Psalm 119:18, “Uncover my eyes so that I see hidden things through Your Torah.”
More on Jewish learning and identity:
More on faith and belief:
And lastly, a wonderful and relevant piece from Tulips & Tantrums:
Thumbnail image is Samuel Colman, The Destruction of the Temple.
Otot of R. Shimeon b. Yohai, edited and translated by John C. Reeves, in Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalypse: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader, with some very slight wording, formatting, and punctuation changes by me, only for the sake of non-scholarly readability. I’ve trimmed a few words that refer to the previous portion of the text but have no relevance here.