Rabbi Winston – HATE TO SAY IT!

Hate To Say It

09/05/2024

This letter is not to my Prime Minister, not to any Senator, not even to my mayor. It is not to any politician but to my own people, including myself. Will we ever learn? The answer is, after thousands of years not learning, it is safe to say that the answer is, no, at least not on a national level. 

So once again I preach to the choir, reminding me that the most I can do when it comes to this topic is strengthen those who already know or suspect the truth, but who may also have a difficult time living with it including, once more, me too. 

If I were writing the script, the Americans would be our complete allies until Moshiach comes and makes their help superfluous. And not just the Americans, but the West in general. I would write about how, despite Arab propaganda, all of them recognized the truth of the Israeli position, and would shore us up rather than dismantle us as they seem to doing now.

The plot I would hatch would have Diaspora Jews waking up on their own to the need to make aliyah now, and leaving their host countries on their own terms. I certainly would not have them waiting until it becomes unbearable, risking getting caught and being victimized by extreme anti-Semitism, as has happened countless times in the past.

But the little bit of Kabbalah that I do know reminds me that my version of the End of Days would find itself in the Fiction Section of a bookstore, categorized as a feel-good, happily-ever-after, ride-off-into-the-sunset fairytale. When scientists say that chaos rules the universe, they don’t realize just how true and dangerous that is. 

This is not the time or place to go into the nitty-gritty kabbalistic details of it, which I have already done anyhow in my more recent books, ETA, Highest Knowledge Ever, and hot off the keyboard, Strategy For the End of Days. I’m just going to point out that what people suspect is the inevitable is in fact the inevitable. And I will add, why waste your time (and maybe your life, G–D forbid), trying to change what you can’t while not changing what you can?

Plenty of books have been written about how amazing Hashgochah Pratis, Divine Providence, can be when it comes to unexpected and miraculous eleventh hour victories. They were written to give chizuk, to strengthen a person’s emunah (faith), and they do. 

But there are other books that should have been written but have not been written because no one likes a tragic story, to write one or to read one. Those are the ones that speak about how Hashgochah Pratis had the opposite effect, resulting in what might be called “Black Miracles.” 

Like Jews, for example, who happened to be visiting Europe as the Nazis conquered it and could not leave in time. Like people who might not have been in the Twin Towers that day when they were attacked except that one circumstance or another put them there at the wrong time. Like people who took an alternate route home the one day a terrible car crash occurred including them. 

In fact, every time I am “forced” to change my plan because of some unpredicted and unusual circumstance, I wonder if I am being set up by Heaven for some undesirable result. Call it paranoia, but I have heard many stories to that effect, and I often have no surefire positive answer to the question, “Why not?” On the contrary, I can too easily answer, “Why yes?”

What Torah teaches us is that G–D has an agenda when it comes to history in general, and Jewish history in particular. What Kabbalah reveals is just how complex and complicated that agenda is, and how little we understand about it. The most difficult sections of the Zohar and Arizal speak about it, and explain it as much as G–D has let them. 

But what we do know for sure is that that agenda is absolute, nothing can interfere with it, and it never strays from its intended path. It is the will of G–D and therefore the only thing that can impact is the will of G–D. The only question we can at least try to answer is, “Will we be carried by it, and run over by it?” 

And sometimes we can’t even know that. How many times has something seemed to work in our favor in the beginning, only to work against us in the end? How many blessings in life have become curses, and vice versa? How many good guys have become bad guys by the end of the movie?

The good news is that none of history is the least bit random. Everything that happens is from G–D, no matter how “natural” it seems. Nothing slips by Him, and nothing can happen if He doesn’t sanction it. In short, no matter how out of control the world seems to get, G–D has complete control over it at all times. 

That might seem like small consolation if you are suffering. For some, knowing that G–D is behind it makes matters worse, not better. But that’s because, like the rest of us, they do not think that they deserve to suffer in any way they didn’t choose, and they cannot, at the time, see what good it is doing them or the world. 

The Gemora (Brochos 5a) says that if a person suffers, they should check and see if they have sinned in any way that might have “pushed” G–D to wake us up through suffering. If they can’t find anything like that (Who can honestly say that?), then they should see if they’re wasting any time that could be spent instead learning Torah. 

The position of the Gemora here seems to be that suffering can occur for reasons that we can figure out, and therefore fix. And though that is certainly true, the Gemora elsewhere (Brochos 10a; Menachos 29b) talks about a different reason for suffering not tied to anything we ourselves might have done wrong. The Master Plan for Creation just needs it.

Needs it? Creation can need people to suffer? What kind of Creation are we talking about or designer of it that needs people to suffer, just for the sake of suffering? 

No Creation, and no Creator. There is no such thing, kabbalistically, as suffering just for the sake of suffering. Everything that happens every moment of history has meaning and contributes to the ultimate purpose of history. Nothing “just happens.” Things are “good” because history requires them to be good, and things become “bad” when the Divine plan for Creation requires them to be bad, or at least appear that way to us.

But here’s the point. There are people who will hear that and it will make a difference to their approach to life. It might not change them that much at first, but it will nag at them until they eventually do. Others will hear this and just shrug it off, disbelieving it or just hoping that somehow it does not apply to them or their time period. 

Traditionally, the first group of people has always been very small, handfuls of individuals who not only saw the writing on the wall, but they responded to it. For some very fortunate reason that they cannot explain, they got to be cognizant of the truth while it still could work in their favor.

The other, much larger group that clings to hope while trying to maintain a safe and productive status quo beyond its Divine permission to exist, also eventually sees the same thing. But history shows that by the time they do, the time has come and gone to do anything about it. 

The main point? We don’t care what some national leader (or ex-leader who might be calling the shots behind the scenes) says or does. We only can understand what they are telling us through what they are saying or doing. We don’t try to stabilize a collapsing place of refuge if it was never meant to be a long-term haven in the first place. We try to put it into the proper historic context of redemption, and act based upon that. 

If that makes sense to you and inspires you to take the current course of history more seriously in a redemption context, then consider yourself blessed to be part of that small and fortunate category of people. If, on the other hand, it just makes you want to crumple this letter up and toss it at the closest garbage can then, all I can say is, “See you on the other side…hopefully.”

That’s not me talking. That’s Jewish history and millennia-old prophecies talking.