Despite panic in parts of China, the world will not end on December 21, just as it has not ended on the previous dates that various millenarian sects have predicted over the centuries. Yet should we look upon the future with optimistic hope or with fatalistic trepidation?

Jews, whose biblical prophets first wrote about a future Messianic Age, recognize that the birth of a Messianic Age must be preceded by its birth pangs, but emphasize mostly the glories of a world living in peace and prosperity with justice for all. Ancient Jewish prophecies did proclaim that there would be an end to the world as we know it.

But they did not prophesy that the world will come to an end, nor did the prophets of Israel offer an exact date for the transition. The advent of the Messianic Age is not knowable because humans have free will and thus the exact time and manner of redemption cannot be determined in advance. Much depends on what we humans do.

Instead of a personal matter, the prophets conceived of redemption as a transformation of human society that would occur through the catalyst of the transformation of the Jewish community. This transformation, which will take place in this world, not another, at some future time, is called the Messianic Age. The transition to the Messianic Age is called the birth pangs of the Messiah. The birth of a redeemed Messianic world may be the result of an easy or difficult labor.

For example, 2,700 years ago the Prophet Isaiah predicted that someday there would be a radically new world in which Jerusalem would be fulfilled with joy for "no more shall there be in it an infant that lives only a few days." (Isaiah 65:20)

Before the mid 19th century the annual death rate fluctuated from year to year but always remained high. Those elevated, unstable rates were primarily caused by infectious and parasitic diseases. The toll from disease among the young was especially high. A century ago, the infant mortality rate in Jerusalem, as in most of the world, was 25-30 percent. Now it is less than 1 percent. For thousands of years almost every family in the world suffered the loss of at least one infant; now it happens to less than one out of 200 families.

The fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy has come slowly thus gone unnoticed and uncelebrated. But even when the events are rapid and dramatic, people rarely connect them to their Messianic significance for very long.

The amazing rescue of 14,235 Ethiopian Jews in a 1991 airlift to Israel, lasting less than 40 hours, stirred and inspired people for a few weeks. Subsequently, the difficult problems the newcomers faced occupied the Israeli media. Now both are taken for granted. The miracle has become routine. But if you had told the Jews of Ethiopia a century ago that they would someday all fly to Israel in a giant silver bird, they could only conceive of it as a Messianic miracle.

In our own generation we have seen the dramatic fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy: "I will bring your offspring from the [Middle] East and gather you from the [European] West. To the North [Russia] I will say 'give them up' and to the South [Ethiopia] 'do not hold them.' Bring my sons from far away, my daughters from the end of the earth." (Isaiah 43:5-6) Yet people easily adjust to living in a radically new world and forget how bad things were in the past.

Our daily news often focuses almost all its attention on possible dangers and threats. If people recognized more about the great progress we have made improving human welfare, they might be less anxious about future doomsday, and more hopeful about the slow birth of a truly new world.

The author is a rabbi and the writer of an introduction to Jewish mystical thought and editor of Tikunay Nefashot: a High Holy Days prayerbook. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn