The messiah’s shrink

Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg, the psychiatrist to Jerusalem’s aspiring redeemers, talks about Jerusalem Syndrome as a Jewish phenomenon.

By SAM SOKOL
Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Walking down a winding alleyway in Jerusalem’s Old City on any given day, one has a pretty good chance of spotting one of the capital’s many “messiahs.” Afflicted with what is popularly known as Jerusalem Syndrome, these poor souls believe that they are inextricably bound up with a redemptive process centered in this city.
While the diagnostic construct of Jerusalem Syndrome has not been clearly defined, Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg says it can be loosely explained as “any kind of redemption fantasy with Jerusalem playing a role.”
With messianism “in the air” of Israel’s capital, which itself has an overwhelmingly religious and historical character, “ideas of redemption and ideas of the messiah and imminent coming” can “seep in” and affect anyone, although they are thought to be somewhat more common among the religious.
Lichtenberg, a lecturer at the Hebrew University and the director of men’s psychiatry at Jerusalem’s Herzog Hospital, is well known as one of the world’s foremost experts on Jerusalem Syndrome.
Interviewed about his patients in many publications around the world, Lichtenberg is somewhat upset that the media frequently chooses to focus on the “classic” case of the “devout pilgrim who loses it all” when he comes to Israel, he says.
Jerusalem Syndrome, he stresses, “is not for Christians only.” While the majority of the patients brought into Jerusalem hospitals suffering from messianic delusions are Christians, he expands, many are Jews, a phenomenon rarely covered by the media.
“Every time I speak with people from the press about this I always tell them about the Jewish cases but they never seem interested,” he complains.
As he enumerates the various manifestations of excessive religious fervor that he encounters in his daily work, a psychiatric patient can be heard ranting and raving from the other side of a door behind his desk as orderlies try to calm him. It is with this in the background that Lichtenberg begins to describe the most typical cases with which he deals.
Before he begins, the doctor makes sure to explain that he does not believe that Jerusalem itself is the ultimate cause of its eponymous syndrome, but that visiting a city where “messianism is in the air” and there is such a high concentration of holy sites can act as a trigger for those who have a pre-existing problem. “It might play out in Jerusalem because of their ideas of what’s going to happen here, because of the sense that they are being summoned here [or] because it just feels right to be over here... but it’s not that Jerusalem is in itself making them sick,” he explains.
As someone who has always found historic Jewish messianism, such as the story of the 17th-century false messiah Shabtai Zvi, to be of immense interest, Lichtenberg says that he “used to think that the most interesting time in Jewish history was the century before the destruction [of the Temple], that had all of these messiahs walking around, one of whom [Jesus] came to particular prominence.”
However, he continues, “I think that today there is probably a much higher concentration of messiahs and messianic thought, and everywhere you look this is present very widely.” One of the reasons for the uptick in “messiahs,” says Lichtenberg, is that “the content of psychosis is always reflecting things that are going on” in the wider culture.
From the Zionist messianism of the Gush Emunim settlement movement to the cult of resurrection centered on the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of the Chabad-Lubavitch hassidic movement, redemption certainly has become part of the zeitgeist in contemporary Israel.
“These are obviously psychoses keeping up with the times, as part of the times today is a sort of messianic fervor,” Lichtenberg says. One of his recurring patients is a local homeless man who is regularly brought into Herzog Hospital’s psychiatric ward following his frequent attempts to to “rearrange the architecture” on the Temple Mount.
“Thank God,” says Dr. Lichtenberg, that this man, who is Jewish, is “not sophisticated enough intellectually or technologically to get very far” in his efforts.
Entering the Mount from the Muslim Quarter to avoid the police checkpoint from the Western Wall entrance, Lichtenberg’s patient is often found by authorities “praying intensely and vociferously in a place where Jews shouldn’t be, until he is carted away.”
There are also the more learned and sophisticated messiahs, he says, who have tapped into Judaism’s “rich tradition of what the messiah” will be like.
In the Talmud there are two messiahs mentioned, Lichtenberg explains.
“When we hospitalize a messiah, [we ask him] what kind of messiah he is, the ‘Moshiach Ben-Yosef,’ Messiah son of Joseph, or ‘Moshiach Ben-David,’ the messiah who is the son of [King] David. Because there is a strand in Jewish law that the messiah son of Joseph is supposed to take part in the Armageddon and die, when we get a messiah son of Joseph we question [him] very closely about suicidal impulses.”
The cases with which he has dealt, says Lichtenberg, range from those who believe that they know the identity of the messiah and are tasked with hastening his coming to those who believe themselves to be Elijah the prophet, heralding imminent redemption.
“Sometimes [sufferers] are not the messiah but they have spotted who the messiah is and it could be some neighborhood rabbi, it could be a friend of theirs or it could be someone they saw on television.”
In one case, a patient was brought to Lichtenberg in an agitated state, obsessed with “redeeming” an archeological site adjacent to the hospital where “he believed that the Temple priests would prepare the various incenses and oils which were used in the Temple practice.” After being taken for a walk through the site, he calmed down somewhat, although “he never quite relinquished his beliefs about that place” and its role in bringing about some sort of salvation.
The average “Elijah” feels “terrible because this is far more responsibility than he feels capable” of handling, Lichtenberg notes.
Another case, somewhat more humorous, was that of David Ben (the son of) King David, a peddler who sold backscratchers on Agrippas Street in central Jerusalem.
Lichtenberg knew “Ben-David” from his stall and was surprised when the man was brought into his ward around the turn of the millennium. This was the period “when everyone was very anxious that we were going to be inundated by throngs of messiahs coming to meet the millennium here,” and the peddler had decided that he was the messiah.
Ben-David “dressed in a special way but basically he was [harmless]” and was released from the hospital after one night, says Lichtenberg, “because there was no reason to keep him here. I sent him back to selling the backscratchers.”
As an Orthodox Jew, says the doctor, he is able to “know where [his patients] are coming from” and he tries to “help them understand what might be the spiritual strivings behind these seemingly crazy ideas.”
He tries to help his patients find “what might be the kernel of meaning or truth within these ideas.”
Asked what he would do should the Jewish messiah actually arrive, Lichtenberg says with a smile and a wink that “we let everyone who comes tell their story” and that he gives patients “the benefit of the doubt.”
“A couple of times I’ve actually gotten my hopes up,” he says facetiously, “but until now they have ultimately always been dashed.”
However, he concludes, “if the messiah were to come he might end up here [at the hospital], and that’s a responsibility which I take seriously.”