Longing for Redemption

“Did you anticipate the coming Redemption of the Jewish People Every Day?” 

The Sages in heaven will ask you this question right after you die.  

I would like Mashiach to come, but it’s not at the top of my mind. My answer to this question is likely to be, “Sure.” 

That’s not enough.   

I never thought about what salvation means. When you leave New York and settle down in the Jezreel Valley, your default instinct becomes “I made my yitziat Mitzrayim (Exodus) already.” 

It’s the wrong answer. Even in the heart of Eretz Yisrael, we are still living in exile. We still need to be saved. 

We Are Still There Even if We Aren’t 

For two thousand years, we were accused by the Christians of killing their god. Look at the misery, torture, and death that came out of this blood libel. 

Imagine how horrifying it must have been when Hashem commanded us to kill the god of the Egyptian people. The lamb was the deity of Egypt.   

We were not just commanded to kill their idol – we were commanded to broadcast this fact for almost a week. We were commanded to put a lamb outside our homes on the 10th of Nissan, and slaughter it on the 14th.  

The moment the first Egyptian saw the lamb and found out what we were doing, he would spread the news to everyone. The most powerful nation on earth would be united in their quest to wipe out their 2 million Jewish slaves.  

We still did it. In killing the lamb, we destroyed everything Egypt stands for. That’s the Pesach offering. We are offer up to Hashem everything that Egypt represents.  

As Rabbi Avigdor Miller teaches: We clean our soul of the chametz of Egyptian, Greek, and American culture.   

Chametz is anything not Jewish.  

It’s a lifelong struggle to get rid of it.  

We have been working on it for thousands of years.  

Social media is chametz.  

The news is chametz. Who cares about the leaders of Russia, America, and even Israel?  

God is the King Who rules over kings. He controls His servants – the “leaders” of their respective nations.  

English is chametz. The Jewish People have a national language. It’s Hebrew. To speak, write, even think in any other tongue keeps our very essence locked in exile.  

We are free, but we really aren’t.  

The Salvation We Yearn For 

What does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be redeemed?  

What is the salvation we are commanded to yearn for every day? 

True freedom. 

The same freedom we yearned for from Egypt.  

To stop serving idols so we can serve Hashem.  

Real freedom is to want to serve God.  

But today, ae are subjects to our environment. We all want to read the news. We all want to earn a day’s pay. We all want to fit in and stand out among the masses.  

It’s our nature.  

Freedom is when we want to read today’s Torah insight as badly as we want to see what’s happening in the world. It’s when we are as excited to break our head over a question in the Gemara as we are to find out how to produce and market our company’s next big success.  

It’s when acceptance is measured by how deeply we connect to God.  

It’s when the only thing that matters in life is serving Hashem.  

The Messianic era comes as Mashiach, sent by Hashem, purges us of outside influences. 

It’s when opening up Facebook means going to Rabbi Nachman’s live site. He will be revived from the dead and will start teaching Torah the moment he takes his next breath. If we still have internet, his lessons will be there.  

It’s when our livelihood takes less than 60 minutes to procure. Over the last 120 years, wealth has multiplied by a factor of 70. There are five times more millionaires in the world today than the entire population of Israel.  

We are rapidly approaching an era of massive wealth where we can generate enough livelihood in minutes. A lot of us are already working from home, saving 10 hours of commute time each week. In some places, they are implementing a four-day work week.   

The Chofetz Chaim opened his store for an hour. It was all the time he needed to procure his family’s needs for the day. Then he went to learn Torah for 20 hours.  

All of Our Being Will be Liberated 

This is the Era of Salvation. This is what Hashem is transforming the world into.  

Modern fashions will be beards, kippot, tzitzit, dresses, head covering, and modesty. Anybody who is anybody will be sporting them.  

Celebrities will be the Sages for from Zion shall spread Torah and the world of Hashem from Jerusalem. (Isaiah 2:3) 

The verse that precedes this one says it all: It shall be at the end of days …. (Isaiah 2:2) 
The same way we wear jerseys with number 6 or number 23 to associate with someone we would like to be, we will learn specific areas of Torah, talk about certain points of Gemara, and improve specific personal behaviors to associate with our favorite Sages.  

We will all learn Hebrew. It will be the only language of the Jewish People. Speaking in foreign tongues will be considered illegal.  

The same social forces that drove us into exile will immediately turn and force us back.  

It will be Hashem Who decrees this, and Mashiach who carries out His decree.  

Every day in our morning prayers, we bless God as He Who Decrees and Fulfills. This Salvation was decreed by our Maker long before we were born.  

It’s up to us to want it.  

It’s up to us to desire to want a world where our obsession over our next Facebook post will be replaced by an even greater obsession to learn something new about God.  

To fulfill the demand that we yearn for salvation every day, we must have this new world in mind when we request from Hashem in the Amidah blessings for redemption, healing and salvation, and the ingathering of the exiles.  

We are asking God to take the world around us out of exile so we can go home and serve Him with all our being.  

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David Ben Horin is the writer and trader for Endurance Investing & Trading Daily. He lives in the Jezreel Valley with his wife and children, lots of Jews, Arabs, and the occasional shepherd.