The Mashiach Judges by Smell
Yeshayahu describes the shoot that comes out of the stump of Yishai, and then says how he will decide cases. The method is not what anyone expects from a judge.
וַהֲרִיחוֹ בְּיִרְאַת ה’, וְלֹא לְמַרְאֵה עֵינָיו יִשְׁפּוֹט וְלֹא לְמִשְׁמַע אָזְנָיו יוֹכִיחַ
He will be keen of smell in the fear of God, and he will not judge by the sight of his eyes nor decide by the hearing of his ears. Yeshayahu 11:3
The verse rules out the two faculties every court in history runs on. Testimony is heard. Evidence is seen. The redeemer is described as using neither.
The Gemara takes it literally
When the Sages weigh a claimant to the role, they apply this verse as a working test: he smells and judges (Sanhedrin 93b). Not a metaphor for discernment. A faculty, applied to a person standing in front of him, returning a verdict.
Which is consistent, because smell is the one sense that took no part in the eating from the Tree, and the one sense that could not be falsified when Yitzchak was deceived by voice and by touch and still smelled Gan Eden on Yaakov.
A faculty that never fell is the right instrument for a judgment that cannot be appealed.
The judge who smells is the warrior who breathes
The next verse arms him, and the weapons are made of the same material.
וְהִכָּה אֶרֶץ בְּשֵׁבֶט פִּיו, וּבְרוּחַ שְׂפָתָיו יָמִית רָשָׁע
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Yeshayahu 11:4
The rod is a mouth and the blade is a רוּחַ, a breath. Judgment arrives through the nose and sentence is carried out through the breath, which are the two ends of one passage. The faculty of redemption is olfactory from the reading of the case to the execution of it.
A shoot off a felled stump
וְיָצָא חֹטֶר מִגֵּזַע יִשַׁי, וְנֵצֶר מִשָּׁרָשָׁיו יִפְרֶה
A shoot will come out of the stump of Yishai, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. Yeshayahu 11:1
The figure is agricultural and it matters. A גֵּזַע is what remains after a tree is cut down. The one who judges by smell is not a continuation of a standing trunk. He is what grows back out of the part that was left after the felling, and Zecharyah gives him that as a name outright: אִישׁ צֶמַח שְׁמוֹ, Branch is his name (Zecharyah 6:12).
The word for that branch, נֵצֶר, carries the same three letters as נֹצֵר, the participle in the thirteen attributes: נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים, keeping kindness for thousands (Shemot 34:7). Kindness is kept the way a tree keeps, in a seed. The cut gets its few generations. The seed carries the thousands, banked in a kernel the eye reads as nothing, outlasting every trunk that falls.
What a press draws out of a seed is oil.
Which puts the instrument on your table
The sense that survived Eden, cooled wrath, carried a covenant past blindness, and stopped a plague where a man stood holding it, is the sense the final judge is described as using. The argument is about which faculty the tradition thinks is load-bearing.
The full case is in Kol Tehom, free in English and Hebrew. The practice is here.
Keep reading
- Reiach the one sense that came through Eden unbroken
- Why the Soul Takes Only Smell scent as the only currency a soul can be paid in
- Yosef the redeemer who inherited on a technicality
The map shows how all of it connects.
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