Holy Monsters Class 1 - Summer Talmud Torah Or Zarua

JEWNIVERSE - jta
The End of Days occupies a much more central place in Christian theology than in Jewish thought. Judaism, for the most part, is more concerned with the present day than the final days.
Perhaps we don’t think too much about the End because some Jewish visions of the apocalypse are just so weird. According to the Talmud, the highlight is an Ultimate Fighting Championship of unprecedented proportions: The Leviathan, a giant sea-beast, will fight with the shor habor, an equally giant wild ox (Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 74b).
God will witness the battle, and all the people who were righteous will have front-row seats. The Leviathan and the shor habor will kill each other–and then God will actually sheht (kosher-slaughter) them both. The meat will be served to the spectators in a sukkah large enough to hold them all–with its walls made out of the leviathan’s skin (Leviticus Rabbah 13:3).
Now that’s the kind of barbeque nobody would want to miss.

The Zohar (2:179a) teaches that “its tail is placed in its mouth.” In other words, this wondrous creature has neither beginning nor end. Undetected, it surrounds and unites the entire world. This hidden unity will be revealed in the future, when the righteous tzaddikim will feast on the Leviathan (Baba Batra 74b).

From Lehrhaus
Leviathan: The Biblical Beast of the Brain
By Victor M. Erlich
The great philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, writing during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, titled his book on man and society Leviathan, precisely to emphasize the leviathan as a representation not of sea serpents but of man himself, as well as his church, and his larger society. Hobbes’ full title goes like this: Leviathan Or The Matter, Forme, and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil.
Because human nature is Hobbes’ subject, he begins with a long exploration of the nature of man, his psychology, his passions and his intelligence, finding that the vast complication of the human mind is indeed a leviathan, as are the conglomeration of his religious beliefs and the troubled societies he founds. The leviathan is within us all. This is perhaps best illustrated by the book’s frontispiece, which was designed by a Dutch artist under Hobbes’ supervision. Boldly presented is the figure of a man, a representation of Mankind as a whole, and, more specifically, a royal figure, supposedly the only one who can, crowned with proper training, harmonize the psychological, spiritual, and social aspects of the human leviathan. This makes Hobbes, incidentally, the founder of the modern, psychological understanding of the human brain as a huge, complex entity, with distinct capacities for multitudinous arts, from armaments to manuscripts to ziggurats:

The need for this hypothetical royal figure to master the human leviathan is best summarized in Hobbes’ own, most famous words. The leviathan of mankind, according to Hobbes, is a beast that leads to “war of all against all.” “In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This one sentence is an apt summary of the challenge that faces any Church or King wishing to govern the human mind. Whether or not Hobbes knew how to produce the best Church or King is, perhaps, less important than an agreement on what the search entails.