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.
My prediction? Something big would happen in the States soon that would change the way Jews feel about living there.
Why? Not because I like being the voice of doom. If I am going to be known for anything, I’d much prefer it be the way I share Torah philosophy through my essays and books. Who wants to be associated with death and destruction, God forbid?
If anything, my warning was in order to avoid such a disaster, to prevent it from happening again, as it has happened so many times in the past. And it has happened in the past because the Jewish people just weren’t where they had to be when an exile or portion of it came to an end. But they were after the disaster occurred.
And there we were again, this time in different countries in the West. We had settled in and were doing well for ourselves. There was little or no geulah consciousness because people thought they were living in it already. Assimilation was high. Intermarriage was rampant. More than half the Jewish population lived in the Diaspora. And, most important of all, the Shechinah was in exile and no one seemed to care or even think about it.
But that is the way it had already been for decades and nothing too catastrophic had happened to America. That was true. But time was also advancing, and there were predictions, not for the arrival of Moshiach, but for other Messianic Era like things (see the Tenth Hour page on this site). Time was running out, but American Jewry was not.
It’s like preparing for Shabbos. At one point it seems like you have all the time you need to get ready, and you can even forget Shabbos coming. The next thing you know is that only a few hours remain until sundown, and you have a lot left to do. Panic ensues and you work frantically to finish on time.
Likewise, Jews around the world live as if there are hundreds of years left until Moshiach comes. They think, and many hope, that they have all the time in the world until Moshiach comes and they will have to move to Eretz Yisroel with the rest of the nation. They are nowhere near ready for the final redemption, and are oblivious to any need to be.
“How do you change all that, and quickly?” I used to ask my students who, if they already knew the answer, did not want to admit it. They were the ones going back to America and what they believed was a great and successful life in America. My presentation put a damper on all of that.
“Well,” I asked them further, “how has it happened in the past?”
They most definitely knew the answer to that question. And they most definitely were not going to let on that they did. The implications were too heavy.
So I predicted that something, probably out of the blue and completely unexpected would happen in the near future to expedite the redemption process, though I had no idea what it would be. About four months later, 19 terrorists brought down the Twin Towers in New York and changed the course of world history.
Shortly after I received somewhat frantic overseas phone calls from some of those students, “How did you know?! How did you know?!”
The real question was, “How could I not know?” I had the sources that told me what has to happen. I could see with my own eyes what actually was happening. I had learned already what had happened in the past to do the same thing. The only variable in the equation was what actually would happen to jolt the Jewish people out of their golus complacency. On September 11, 2001, the equation was solved.
It’s 20 years later, and the world has changed tremendously in that time, and in ways that confirm, at least to me, that redemption is not so far off. But Diaspora Jews for the most part have once again hit the snooze button and just rolled over and gone back to sleep. They just won’t take the hints that the end is near.
Maybe they’re not meant to. After all, we lost four-fifths on our way out of Egypt and the Talmud says that part of history is destined to repeat itself (Sanhedrin 111a). Maybe they are meant to, but like someone who refuses to get up, they require something drastic to “inspire” them to wake up. If something major happens to the States, as it is now happening to the Ukraine, we’ll have our answer, just too late.
In the meantime, terrorists are at it again in Israel, cowardly murdering innocent people in the name of murdering innocent people. And look at that! They’re using the land we gave them for free at the cost of our own people as their terrorist base and giving sweets to their children to celebrate our tragedies. Land for peace really works, doesn’t it?
But it too is part of the final movements Heaven is making to prepare us for the grand finale. It’s a wakeup call for us too, but at least we already live in the final destination of Jewish history. It’s the Diaspora Jews who not only are physically distant from home, they are mentally and spiritually distant as well. That will have to change, and soon. And it will, the moment Heaven green lights whatever it deems necessary to get surviving Jewry on the same page as God.
It’s coming. And it’s coming VERY soon. We don’t like it, but it makes sense, Jewish history sense. So brace yourselves, again.