Although we are no strangers to attacks from evil enemies, and we have had to fight for survival four millennia, each new situation is like the first time. This is especially true when it comes after a period of relative peace, and how much more so during a holiday whose theme is simchah, coming after our most heartfelt teshuvah and atonement of the entire year.
I just realized something. I’m not American, but Canadian. (No, I didn’t just realize that. The realization is coming up soon.) Nevertheless, as a Canadian, and as a Jew who has appreciated what America has done for the Jewish people over the last 100 years, I have related strongly to America. I love their history, and what they have been able to accomplish in a couple of hundred years. I even have some pride in their past.
One of the most difficult things to do, if not impossible, is convince a secular Jew of a religious reality. They just don’t not believe, but they lack the intellectual tools to believe. It’s much easier to admit that they don’t know why something is happening than it is to agree that something happened for religious reasons.
Most of the times it’s just a yetzer hara to have no reason to become religious. They think that ignoring the truth makes the truth disappear, and that it will never catch up with them. Other times they just can’t believe because they can’t their head around it, being limited in the kind of knowledge that allows such truths to come in.
It sounds like an oxymoron. When you think of fascism, you think of Nazi Germany. When you think of America, you think of democracy…free speech…the land of the free and the home of the brave. And it’s been that way for so long now that it seems incomprehensible that the two could ever merge, as they are doing right before our very eyes.
The second part of the problem is that we identify fascism with Nazi Germany, as if no one else but Germans can create a fascist state. That’s silly and clearly very dangerous. Fascism existed long before Hitler, ysv”z, rose to power and remained after he killed himself. It’s just what greedy, power-mongering, and selfish people turn to as a form of government to protect their own interests, wherever they may be in the world, in any time of history.
Rebi Yehudah HaNasi said, “I learned much Torah from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most of all from my students” (Makkos 10a). It is not always true, but it is true a lot of the time, and not necessarily because of what they say, but because of how they make you say something. I can’t tell you how many times in the middle of trying to better explain something to an audience that I have ended explaining something better to myself!
BACK IN THE summer of 2001, I made a prediction. I was teaching at a girl’s seminary in Jerusalem and making my yearly presentation about the End-of-Days. I had never intended to have such a presentation, but it seemed to grow on its own out of the many sources I had seen over the previous years. It was so compelling that I felt compelled to teach it, and by the summer of 2001, it was standing room only.
Cartoons have come a long way since I was young. I don’t know how they do it, but today they can make cartoons seem so life-like. It can almost fool you and in some cases it just might. But, for the most part, a cartoon is still just a cartoon. Likewise, no matter how cartoon-like people may act, they’re don’t fooling anyone. The actors are real even if the plot is not. The line between animation and reality may be shrinking, but it is still quite definite. It will be a scary day if they ever manage to make it go away altogether.
THE TALMUD SAYS that if the nations of the world understood what the existence of the Temple meant for them, they would have protected it instead of destroyed it (Succah 55b). They didn’t understand that the Jewish Temple was a place of prayer on behalf of the entire world, as they will understand in the Messianic Era. We mention this each time in Selichos right before “Shema Kolainu.”
It turns out that the 210 years in Egyptian slavery were not incidental at all, and they impact the 190 years we’ve been completely over thousands of years. Click here to see the article.
This article is very kabbalistic and therefore needs italics and footnotes. Therefore, you can see it here as a download.