What will be the outcome of this war? There are already over 1,200 dead, thousands wounded, and unspeakable atrocities have occurred against countless Jews. Will Israel just pulverize Gaza and Hamas and restore peace? Will Hezbollah join in and complicate the war? Will Iranian troops participate, widening the conflict and, perhaps, draw the Americans in? Will this war spiral out of control and into the final war of Gog and Magog?
The answer, of course is, Vos zucht Got? What does God say, or precisely, what does He want? Logic is great and it has its place, but it has often failed us when we have relied on it most. World War I was not logical. World War II was definitely not logical, and the Holocaust was the least logical of everything. But they happened anyhow, and we’re still not exactly sure why.
One possible answer is the way God builds. When He made Creation, He made something, then broke it, and then made something better from the broken pieces. Why? Because, we are told, it made evil possible, which made free will possible, which makes the fulfillment of the purpose of Creation possible.
In the spirit of this building process Moshe Rabbeinu broke the first set of tablets, both temples were later destroyed, and the Holocaust happened in more recent times. And it seems that we can add the current war to this long, ongoing historic process to the final redemption. Something clearly has broken over here in Israel since the attack first began on Simchas Torah.
Yes, it can be punishment too. Yes, it can look like pure destruction and nothing positive. But no, it is not only punishment or wanton destruction. When something Jewish is destroyed, it is to build something from the broken pieces that takes us closer to the final redemption, even if we can’t see how at the time.
Therefore, when we say that Eretz Yisroel today was built upon the ashes of the Holocaust, we are not being metaphorical only. We are actually being literal, though not in a physical sense. The physical ashes remain in Europe. The spiritual ones came to Eretz Yisroel and became the basis to receive the land and build it up in preparation for the final redemption.
How did that work? It’s easy to explain. It just takes a lot of background information to understand.
The physical world runs by money. Even if you grow your own food and make your own clothes, you will have to spend money at some point to do so. There’s always someone selling something and always someone buying it. If you can’t, then you will have to go without. Money does make the world go around.
Spiritually it is similar. It also takes “currency” to maintain the world and keep it functioning. It’s just that this currency is not physical but spiritual, something Kabbalah calls nitzotzei kedushah, or holy sparks. They are the “money” behind the money, and everything else that exists and happens for that matter.
It’s like energy (actually it is energy). No secular scientist knows exactly what it is (because it’s not physical) , and people do not see it (since it is spiritual). They just see what it can do, and enjoy its benefits. They flick a switch on, enjoy the light, and never give much thought to the miracle that connected the two.
What’s a holy spark? It’s super-mystical, but in short, a holy spark is God’s infinite light miraculously divided into small, finite amounts, each seemingly possessing unique and specific qualities of its own. For example, every human soul is such a spark, and look how different one soul is from another. Everything in Creation is made from the same kind of sparks and look how plentiful and diverse Creation is.
Life happens where the sparks go. Good things happen as sparks accumulate, if on the side of good. The more sparks evil can get its hands on, the more evil it can carry out. It took a lot of holy sparks for evil to capture and murder six million plus Jews. Take all sparks away from the side of evil, and evil disappears like smoke.
Therefore, if a person wants to increase their success in life, they need more holy sparks. If they do that which decreases their sparks or, even worse, funnel them to the side of evil, they will greatly reduce their blessing in life. Torah, mitzvos, good deeds accomplish the former, sinning, the latter. There are no free lunches in this world (even if, in the moment, it seems as if there are).
Having said that, I will say the following. I will say it simply and succinctly, but in no way being glib or demeaning. The Holocaust was too huge and devastating to be shoved into any single explanation, or reduced to single statements as to why God made it happen, and the way He did. The Holocaust remains and will remain a huge question mark in the history of mankind until much later when God Himself explains to us why it was a necessary part of Jewish history. We can’t know the mind of God except when He tells us what He is thinking.
Nevertheless, there are things we can wonder about. For example, only three years after the Holocaust ended in 1945, the UN voted to grant the State of Israel official nation status. According to the Vilna Gaon, that’s an important detail about redemption when we don’t merit it directly.
Then there was all the amazing Hashgochah Pratis (Divine Providence) leading up to the vote, and all the amazing Hashgochah Pratis after it. It is very hard to say that all that has happened is not part of Divine construction of the final redemption, whenever it finally happens (hopefully very soon, b”H).
On the ground, getting back Eretz Yisroel as a Jewish homeland was a long process that began back in the 1800s when the students of the Vilna Gaon began the process of Kibbutz Golios, the ingathering of the exiles from the four corners of the world. It picked up steam in the early 1900s with increased aliyah, and greater physical development of the land.
We got the land because of blood, sweat, and tears.
We’ve kept the land through blood, sweat, and tears.
Yes, and no. Not all blood, sweat, and tears results in success. Many have not, especially when given the same odds of success the Jewish people have always been up against. Unbearable conditions for survival. Blood-thirsty enemies. Existential wars. In short, we have not only survived, we have thrived when, in reality, we should have died.
In what merit? How did we “pay” for all of this? Back in Egypt in Moshe Rabbeinu’s day, we paid for redemption with years of suffering, and then six months of intensified slavery. In the 1940s, it clearly had to do with the six million sacrifices, as incredible and painful as that may seem to be.
If we had been told by God, “You can have Eretz Yisroel back and rebuild the homeland, but it will cost you the cruel and inhumane deaths of six million of your people, and the suffering of many more,” would we have accepted the deal? Of course not. We had waited for Eretz Yisroel for millennia already. We would have waited a little longer rather than have the Holocaust thrust upon us.
But that’s because we do not know why it was essential that Eretz Yisroel officially return to Jewish hands by 1948, and why six million Jews had to perish to make it happen. Such a calculation is beyond our comprehension. But God made it, and when He did, those six millions sparks left Europe and went to Eretz Yisroel to make possible all that has miraculously happened since then. So yes, Eretz Yisroel has been built upon the “ashes” of six million Jews.
And here we are again, 78 years later after the end of the atrocities of the Holocaust to witness Holocaust-like atrocities by Nazi protégés. At last count, over 1,300 sadistic deaths and over 3,500 injured, mostly civilians, have been perpetrated, and Israelis, once feeling relatively secure, now feel vulnerable.
Something has just been broken.
Something is about to be built. Something BIG.
Who knows for sure—in advance. We don’t have prophets again yet. We don’t have the Urim v’Tumim to consult. We just have ancient prophecies about the End of Days, and Chazal’s explanations of them. And they all talk about the War of Gog and Magog as a transition to the Messianic Era.
But how can we rely upon prophecies that were written so long ago? Could they have taken into account how modern the world would become? How can we trust the words of Chazal who lived 2,000 years ago when they weren’t even prophets? True, they made predictions about the state of affairs in our time, but nothing so specific as to convince us that they knew what it would be like in our time.
Sooner or later we’ll know the truth one way or another. Either nothing Biblical will result from this war, or it will. If it doesn’t, there will be a lot of very confused and disappointed believers. If it does, there will be a lot of very shocked disbelievers. But in the meantime, what does a “believer” do?
Believe. Believe that the prophecies are real and do apply to today. Believe that Chazal had supernatural foresight about the End of Days and shared it with us. Believe that as hard as it is to believe that this could be the final War of Gog and Magog and lead to the Messianic Era, that it is.
But what if it doesn’t? Believe that you don’t need to ask that question. You’re not faulted for believing in what you are supposed to believe in. You’re only faulted for not believing in what you’re supposed to believe in. It’s safer to play it safe and not assume more than you see. But it is also a lack of emunah, and at the end of the day, no matter what happens, emunah is the metric of Divine evaluation.