To kick off this countdown-to-2000 week, I’d like to issue a heartfelt plea to everybody in the solar system: Stop reminding me that the new millennium doesn’t really start until 2001.
Granted, you’re right. As I’ve been informed in 2,001 smug e-mails by now, there wasn’t a Year Zero, so the first millennium started with Year One. Therefore … etc. I’m also aware that numerical, calendrical, and digital designations for “time” are arbitrary human creations, and that no less an authority than the New York Times recognized 1901 as the start of the 20th century. If the Times were being consistent, the 21st century should by all rights begin in 2001.
But here’s the thing: Who cares? Like some great, unwitting beast that happens to have sound editorial judgment, the Times went with 2000 as the Big Kahuna. So has pretty much everybody and everything else, including the president, all the major religions and cities I can think of, the world’s computers, the pope, and the pope of morning showbiz, Regis Philbin.
It’s not hard to see why. The 2000 digit simply has the correct look, taste, and mouth feel. (As one Christian prophecy writer so aptly put it, “2000! You see it everywhere, like a universal logo!”) Society has spoken loud and clear: We’re panicking about 2000, right or wrong.
The current issue of the New Republic, which I just got, is largely devoted to humorous spoofs and commentary about millennial windbaggery and fears. In a back-page “Diarist,” Leon Wieseltier gets serious and tees off on Christians for acting so goofy about it all. “Whose millennium is this, really?” he asks. “It belongs to Christians and to merchandisers and to journalists, and it is they who will reap the disillusionment and the exhaustion. … Myself, I have a stiff-necked certainty that the world will not change in the next few days. … So this is not, as I say, my party.” Wieseltier, who is Jewish, goes on to lament that in the Christian year 2240–the Jewish year 6000, “our millennium”–Jews will have “our opportunity to embarrass ourselves with our own loss of sobriety.”
The “sobriety” crack doesn’t seem fair to Christians, and it obscures the fact that quite a few Jews are acting un-sober about apocalyptic matters right now. The vast majority of Christians aren’t millennialists, and most of those who are don’t attach any special significance to the year 2000. Yes, you can find people who do, but if you take the time to read a few of those lumbering Christian prophecy books with titles like The Late Great Planet Earth and The Sign, you’ll see that you don’t see anybody saying Christ is coming back in 2000. The “millennium” isn’t a measurement of “how long until He returns.” It refers to the 1,000-year period of peace that follows Christ’s second act, which occurs at the close of a 7-year period of wrack and ruin called the Tribulation.
When that will be, nobody knows–the Bible says so. Therefore, most prophecy believers burn their mental calories searching for signs that the prophecy timetable is playing out, and they debate fine-point stuff about whether Christians will be raptured to heaven before the Tribulation (“pre-Trib”) or during it (“mid-Trib”).
True, Christian prophecy interpreters do express a sense of urgency (“He’s coming soon!”), but so do some Jews, as they await the first coming of the Messiah. Many messianic Jews in Israel share the belief of some Christians that a Third Temple should be rebuilt on the Temple Mount–for different reasons, obviously. The Christians think a Temple must be standing when the Antichrist briefly rules the world. The Jews think the Messiah can’t appear and set up shop until the Temple is restored.
However you slice it, these “Home Improvement” ideas are frightening, because rebuilding the Temple would require knocking down or blowing up important-to-Islam structures such as the Dome of the Rock and the el-Aqsa mosque. And if anybody did that for religious reasons … well, oops, we really would have a raucous time.
Several people have tried, and only one of them was a Christian: a fundamentalist Australian who set fire to the el-Aqsa mosque in 1969. In 1982, Alan Harry Goodman, a U.S.-born Israeli soldier, went on a deadly shooting spree inside the Dome of the Rock, claiming he was on a holy mission. In 1984, not one but two large bands of Jewish terrorists hatched plots to rubble-ize the mosques, both thwarted. In 1990 the Temple Mount Faithful, a messianic group, marched on the Mount, unfurling a banner that denounced the Muslim presence. During the riots that ensued, 72 Palestinians were killed.
The potential for Temple Mount terrorism is still a major problem. Carmi Gillon, who directed Israel’s General Security Services from 1994 to 1996, told me that this is “the most dangerous thing to the future of Israel … it’s nitroglycerine!”
And here’s the really unfortunate part. Since 2000 doesn’t mean much to any of these guys, the potential for an apocalypse party won’t stop when the big day comes and goes.
