A Second Look Through the Abyss
First the good news:
Moshiach can be expected any day now with any day being between now and the next 226
years. That’s the max, but the reality
at ground level is leaning much more to any
day now, because paraphrasing what we said in EmunahSpeak: Mañana,
Hashem is not locked into Aristotle’s dramatic model, therefore He doesn’t do
Hollywood.
Doing Hollywood refers to the virtual reality which Aristotle conjured
up from within the wickedness of his mind; a three act structure, climax,
anti-climax and all of the other artifices, dramatic concepts, and structures that
are brilliant forgeries devoid of any substance in the real world. They have
nothing to do with the way that Hashem runs His world and absolutely nothing to
do with Moshiach.
So what do we do?
We persist in gazing into the future awaiting the
confluence of events that will present us with the comfort zone of Aristotle’s virtual reality rather than Hashem’s in your face REALITY. And as we said in EmunahSpeak: Mañana,
Hashem keeps sending us signs, and we keep misreading them.
What is meant as a wakeup call spelled NOW,
as in:
Pay
attention, I’m about to do big things NOW, so prepare yourself for
Moshiach and anticipate him NOW, gets morphed into yet one more scene in
Aristotle’s long running Moshiach epic, as we wait to see how it all plays out.
Unfortunately, it never quite plays out because as we also said, in the way a person wants to go, that’s
where Hashem will lead him. The more content we are to be couch potato
meshichistas, the more Hashem will prolong the drama by adding “scenes.”
So if Hashem is allergic to doing Hollywood, Moshiach is going to have put in an
appearance posthaste because events
are inexorably moving toward an Aristotelian climax with all of the bells and
whistles.
Events?
That’s the bad news.
In truth, the ebb and flow of
current events are a very old story with the only thing new being that apparently the goyim are no longer troubling
themselves to hide their intentions. It
seems that as of late a shtick emes has worked its way into what heretofore was
a diplomatic world almost totally engulfed in sheker because the enemies of
Klal Yisroel have unequivocally put us on notice that they have some unfinished
business from World War II to which they would like to attend.
The operative word here is Iran and
nothing more need be said.
And we needn’t conduct ourselves as
if we have been taken by surprise because we weren’t, or more accurately, we
shouldn’t have been.
Had we been more attentive to the sweep
of Jewish history we would have realized that as a general proposition the adversaries
among the goyim that Hashem has brought against us have tended to be people of stature,
as in world or regional conquerors and the like. And we also would have known that there were
exceptions to the general rule and that those exceptions, to a man, brought
nothing but disaster in their wake.
So in the winter and spring of
2008 when we were presented with a community
organizer, who in reality was nothing more than a small time street hustler
devoid of any substance as that word is generally understood where Torah values
obtain, instead of seeing another Lincoln, the Second
Coming (chas v’shalom), or the dawn of a great new era we should have been
on historical notice to see another
stable boy, barber, or house painter coming for us.
But fools that we are, we didn’t. So now what?
Last year at this time HaGaon HaGadol
Rav Moshe Shapiro shlit"a assessed the political/military situation in the
wake of the latest Gaza dust up.
In referencing his remarks, we said
in EmunahSpeak:
There is No Other Solution, that the bottom line of our current and
future situation, as Rav Moshe sees it, is that the Creator of the world has
placed us between the ultimate rock and hard place with an unsolvable
problem.
Rav
Shapiro reminds us that the Rambam states clearly that Israel will only be redeemed through Teshuva. And the Torah already promised that
eventually Israel will do Teshuva at the end of the Exile and immediately they
will be redeemed.
The
Rav is not saying a nice vort, a shmuz or giving a Shabbos Shuva drasho. He’s speaking in the context of hatzolas
nefoshos, and after looking into the aforementioned Rambam he states
categorically:
To live like this is impossible and
to do something against it is impossible. But we have found a solution; the
definite solution! We learn from this
that there is no other solution. Any
thought in the direction of another solution is stupidity!
That was
last year when the Iron Dome was successfully knocking rockets out of the
sky. What would he say now? What should we say now?!
We are
presently at the crossroads of our existence as a people in this world. We can, if we so desire, cling to that cozy feeling of denial or we can choose to shake the fairy dust out of our eyes and
heed the Rav’s call. If we don’t, my gut tells me
that this may not end well, Hashem should protect us.
In
a macabre form of self fulfilling prophecy, the curtain may actually come down
as per Aristotle’s model, but instead of the Hollywood ending it may, chas v’shalom,
be in the form of a Greek tragedy.
