Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi — known simply as Rabbi, the Holy One, the redactor of the Mishnah — sat one evening at his table with two of his youngest guests: Yehudah and Chiskiyah, the sons of Rabbi Chiya. The boys ate in silence. They were awed, perhaps, by the presence of the patriarch of Tiberias.
Give the boys some wine, Rabbi said. Let them have the boldness to speak.
The wine went in, and the secret came out. The boys declared that the Messiah son of David would not arrive until the two great houses of Israel had fallen — the house of the Exilarch in Babylon and the house of the Patriarch in the Land of Israel — for so it is written in Isaiah 8:14, and He shall be for a sanctuary, and for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to both the houses of Israel.
Rabbi, himself the patriarch whose house was one of the two named, winced. Children, he said, you are thrusting thorns into my eyes.
Rabbi Chiya smiled. Do not be offended at them. Wine and secret — yayin and sod — both have the numerical value of seventy. When wine enters, the secret leaks out. (Sanhedrin 38a.)
The Messianic hope, the boys were saying, is not the preservation of current power. It is the willingness to let every throne fall — including your teacher's — so that the final throne can be set up.