B. Sanhedrin 98a

A lot of things found their way into Stones from the Creek only because they have been on my mind or on my heart for so long.  One is Lazar Sussman's memory of why he lost interest in the synagogue.  He describes an incident that weighed on his heart long after he saw it as a child in talmud torah:

Lazar saw some of the scholars who spent the whole day studying run out of the shul and around behind the old fortress synagogue.  They were beating a raggedy-looking man because, they said, he was trying to sneak in a back window to rob the place.
But Lazar wondered.  He asked Reb Shimon, his teacher, “What if this dirty soul is actually the Prophet Elijah, breaking in to announce the arrival of King Messiah?  Now, his kingdom will be delayed for another generation!”
Reb Shimon dismissed his concern with a scowl.  The man, Reb Shimon said, was just a homeless good-for-nothing and a thief.  Lazar lost his faith in the scholars and in the synagogue that day.

The truth is that this incident occurred in Brooklyn in 1992, and I have been thinking about it ever since.  The man, who in real life was a homeless African American, was rummaging through garbage cans behind the Grand Synagogue of the Lubavitcher Hasidim on Eastern Parkway and he was assaulted and beaten by up to fifty men.  In the context of the divided racial and religious climate of that time, everybody simply took their accustomed sides.  But Ray Kelly (who as Mayor Bloomberg's Police Commissioner has become a kind of shorthand symbol for racial insensitivity) was then Mayor David Dinkins's Police Commissioner, and he was skeptical of the Lubavitchers' story.  He wondered why, if they were detaining the man for the police, did they all scatter when the police actually arrived.  He wondered why the beating and why so many.  Again, in that divided time his skepticism just became evidence (for those who needed none!) that Mayor Dinkins was against the Jews. 

Four years later I asked a Chabad rabbi who came to my door soliciting donations about the incident and he scowled and said, "The man had burglar's tools."  But the police recovered handyman's tools.  I include here a link to a New York Times story from that time:  http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/05/nyregion/crown-hts-beating-described-in-2-sharply-different-ways.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

People who are unfamiliar with Jewish tradition will wonder why I immediately thought that a homeless man might be the Prophet Elijah or even the Messiah himself.  People who are familiar wouldn't even think to explain; the connection is that obvious.  The Talmud says, for example:

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi asked the Prophet Elijah, 'When will Messiah come?' — 'Go and ask him himself,' was his reply. 'Where is he sitting?' — 'At the entrance to Rome' And by what sign may I recognise him?' — 'He is sitting among the poor beggars.  (B. Sanhedrin 98a)

There is more to the story, but what is important here is that the Messiah himself is waiting in rags, among others in rags.  More often the stories say that this great scholar or that encountered the Prophet Elijah disguised as a beggar.  The citations for this are -- as the Chabad like to say -- "too numerous to mention."

For me, as a lapsed Marxist, brought up as an observant Jew, the connection between the communist future and the age of Messiah is strong.  I have had trouble letting go of my faith in both.  The idea that a homeless man ushers in the Messiah is parallel to the idea that the proletariat brings us equality and justice.  For the Lubavitchers, who were so certain that Messiah was coming immediately, to attack a man who -- at the very least -- resembled the Prophet Elijah, disturbed me as much as it did Lazar Sussman.