478) 'Fixing' broken Messiahs

The extreme messianic mysticism of the students of the Vilna Gaon (Part II)

 

Kitvei haGramam, recently published writings of R. Menachem Mendel of Shklov

Introduction

This article is a continuation of the previous post and deals with the surprising and extreme messianic mysticism of the students of the Vilna Gaon. It is a technical excursus into the Kabbalah of the Mitnagdim and it shows their conceptualisations surrounding the possibility that the Vilna Gaon was the Messiah and part of his messianic mission was ‘fix’ the previous ‘broken’ Messiahs including the Christian Messsiah as well as Shabbatai Tzvi. It makes liberal use of coded gershaim (inverted commas) and germatria (numerical values) because, as the reader will soon see, these topics are sensitive if not audacious, especially as they were written in the aftermath of the false Messiah Shabbatai Tzvi. This Kabbalah resembles the writing style of another Lithuanian mystic, R. Heshil Tzoref.