The Sweet Gift of Darkness

Nothing says “Mashiach” more than what we endure every moment we are awake. G-d is giving us the gift of Redemption. It’s right in front of us.

Just 50 years ago it was unheard of for a husband or wife to engage in relations outside the bonds of holy matrimony. A child born out of wedlock was an unbearable shame. Over acts of infidelity, people lost friends, jobs, and influence. Today all of it is seen as permissible. Even more, the media is convincing us that we have a right, even a social obligation, to commit all forms of immorality.

Thank G-d.

Half a century ago you had to adhere to a basic standard of speech. Profanity was offensive. People would be asked to leave parties, even to stay away from colleagues simply because they chose the wrong words in a conversation.

Now it’s no holds barred. The overwhelming majority of television channels encourage the basest levels of verbal expression. Today’s music spews forth obscenities that traditionally made people cringe just to listen to. It doesn’t bother us anymore because these words are recycled to such an extent that we’ve gotten used to it.

Thank G-d.

Half a century ago the world didn’t have the amount of wealth, technology, and free economy to give so many people the opportunity to become rich. Now you can open a small online business in Chicago and become a millionaire by selling your products to people in Mumbai, India over 7,000 miles away.

The fact that you can go from being broke to being a billionaire in your 30’s has turned all of us into money-crazed monsters squandering every moment we have in pursuit of all the things that we don’t have.

Thank G-d.

Hashem has set the table. The Leviathan is right in front of us. Mashiach is waiting to say the blessing over the bread. All we need to do is wash our hands and sit down.

It has never been this bad, which is why it has never been this good!

We lost the First Temple and the greatest era of our national history due to murder, immorality, and idol worship. We lost the Second Temple to slander and baseless hatred. Even with the Land of Israel back in our hands, we are still an empty and shattered people. We have no Temple – who can live without a heart? We have no king – who can live without a brain?

That is soon to change. The reality our Father has engineered is geared to precisely this end.

The only way to atone for our most tragic sins is to make teshuva for them. It has to be a real, intense teshuva. It has to be under the same exact setting as we were in before, with the same levels of temptation to commit the same atrocities. Yet this time we have to get it right!

The only chance we have to get it right is under the same level of darkness we encountered before. To make real teshuva, we have to descend even lower to a far darker place. Only in the deepest, darkest place in the hole can we make a soul correction for the sins we’ve committed before – a soul correction that has the light to rebuild the Temple and re-establish G-d’s Kingdom.

Every moment we strive to take on the mitzvah of Personal Holiness we are rectifying the sins we committed over 2,500 years ago. Every moment the world moves towards greater chaos and we maintain this mitzvah, the light of our actions becomes all the brighter.

Every time we leave work to go home at a reasonable hour and to focus on our family and really being with them rather than thinking about the next project or office politics, we are making a rectification for idolatry, which has been reincarnated into the pursuit of money.

Every time we resist the immense urge to insult someone, retaliate a put down, or to just simply talk about other people because we are bored – we are laying the foundation stones of the Third and Eternal Temple of Hashem. We are reversing the devastation of baseless hatred with baseless love. [Editor’s Note: Rabbi Arush is stressing now that all of us pray that every Jew does teshuva, especially in the mitzvot between people. We all desperately need a merciful Redemption.]

Only in an era as difficult as ours are these corrections possible. That must be why Hashem brought us to this point in the first place. We are holding the keys to Redemption in the palm of our hands.

Thank G-d!