It is clear to all that something has changed in the world. For the past century Jews have been reclaiming their lives in the Land of Israel and the Return to Zion (Shivat Tziyon) has transformed the world. However, the state of Israel is still a far cry from representing the aspirations of the Jewish people to be a nation of priests and a holy people.
This special farbrengen was given in HaRav Ginsburgh's home on the 4th of Shevat this year and delineates four stages: life in exile, the Return to Zion, a leap to a state run according to Torah principles, and finally, the true and complete Redemption.
In connection with this week’s parashah, Vayakhel, we bring this excerpt regarding the need to assemble our people to continue its transformation and encourage the next steps in Redemption.
The verse warning Pharaoh about the eighth plague reads, “And now send, gather [הָעֵז] your livestock and all that you have in the field; every man and beast that is found in the field and is not gathered home, the hail shall come down upon them and they shall die.”[1] This is the only time in the Torah—and Rashi brings two more examples from the Prophets—that the translation of the word הָעֵז (pronounced ha’ez, which sounds like “the goat”) is gather or assemble. This can easily be seen from the continuation of the verse, “and is not gathered home.”
Based on this, we can suggest a new meaning for the verse “Havayah will give boldness [עֹז] to His people, Havayah will bless His people with peace”: God gives us the strength and boldness to be gathered and assembled together (a gathering for the sake of Torah, for “there is no boldness but Torah”), and this gathering will bring peace to our people.
Repentance, Mission, and Assembly
If the word translated as “gather” (הָעֵז) instructs us to gather together with positive and holy boldness, the words that precede it—”And now send [שְׁלַח]”—require us to first take upon ourselves a Divine sense of duty, a shelichut, and even before that we need to perform teshuvah, return to God, since the sages say that, “And now” is an idiom alluding to return to God.[2]
So, the order is: first teshuvah (return to God), then embrace your Divine mission—your shelichut—then assemble the people around an idea that can be realized; a new dream. The bold dream that requires the boldness given to us by returning to God is to return to the Land of Israel and to thereby be included in the collective body of the Jewish people, for the collective has special status in the Land of Israel.[3] For instance, in the legal principle that “the congregation does not perish.”[4] The power of assembly overpowers death, when it serves as the basis for the Jewish willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the sanctification of God’s Name.
Groundbreaking Assemblies
The prescribed action (since “action is the main thing”) that comes out of this analysis of the verse regarding the plague of hail is that we must hold many assemblies out of a sense of holy boldness.
Once every seven years, in the year after the Sabbatical year (the shemitah), the king of Israel is required to assemble the people. This is known as Hakhel. The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested a great innovation: that Hakhel is not a one-time event on the festival of Sukkot, but that the entire year after the Sabbatical year is called “the year of Hakhel,” and that throughout the entire year assemblies should be held whose purpose is to increase our awe of Heaven. We now want to go another step further and say that in each of the seven years of the Sabbatical cycle, we should perform Hakhel and encourage assemblies that come from holy boldness, to assemble the people, to receive Torah, to return to God, and to immediately be redeemed.
As a rule, an assembly needs a purpose, and if there are to be many assemblies, they require many different goals around which to gather the people. One can hold Torah assemblies, but that is not what we are talking about now. We are talking about assemblies like those that began revolutions. Every revolutionary movement in the world began with many assemblies. That is how political Zionism began, that is how Agudath Israel began as well. All movements begin with assemblies, and the more the assembly captures the public eye, the more the mission they set out to achieve meets with success.
The example we gave on Shabbat is the assemblies of the Movement for Greater Israel (the Land of Israel defined by the borders promised to Abraham). The famous Israeli poet, Nathan Alterman established this movement after the Six-Day War. Alterman was not so openly observant of Torah and mitzvot, but he had Chabad roots and the Rebbe inquired about his welfare. In organizing these assemblies for the Greater Israel, he was careful that it be inclusive and included a list of people from the Left and also from the Right. This movement began with assemblies but failed; it did not succeed in affecting a change in reality. Alterman, who breathed the spirit of life into the movement, passed away prematurely. But the main problem was that the movement was not based on the true heritage of Israel, on faith in God and His Torah. The respectable founding members of the movement were not invested in these, because what they wanted was to provide Jews who wanted to flee exile with a safe haven. The longing of the generations for the Land of Israel remained in the background, and the Land of Israel was not necessarily viewed as the Holy Land.
Change by Leaps, Not by Continuity
The feeling is that what we have been trying to do—to awaken the people to the holiness of the Land of Israel and to the covenant we have with God to observe the commandments—is unfortunately not taking off. This is a sign that we have some problems with our messaging. The message is not clear enough and not innovative enough. We need something truly new. A revolution comes when you are completely not satisfied with what exists. When we talk about a revolution, we want, as the Rebbe emphasizes, that everything be in pleasant and peaceful ways, but it must be a revolution. As he said, “ker a velt heint” (Overturn the world today!). Recently we have been talking about the fourth revolution in Torah learning: spreading Torah to the nations. But now we are talking about a revolution regarding leadership in the Land of Israel, a revolution among the Jews.
In the past we talked a lot about what we want, about the changes, and about the ways to achieve them. We mentioned the slogan, the “prophecy” of our generation, that the ba’alei teshuvah will take control of the State of Israel. Even though this is catchy, it does not fully convey our truth. What do we mean? The main point is that true innovation is not a continuous process. One cannot expect that gradually (קִמְעָא קִמְעָא), from within the existing situation, will come true change—a real shift from one extreme to the other. Thank God demographics favor Torah observant Jews and they say that within several years they will be the majority. Thank God it is so, but this is not the consolation; this is not the way, not the method. This is not an innovation because it is continuous and revolution is not a continuous process, it is not gradual, it is a leap! We have not been successful in integrating this point into our own thought, and certainly not in conveying it to others. In the past we talked about whether we want a political party. Our conclusion was that a political party is the final and last resort because it is more of the same. It does not convey the message that something new, something else, is needed. Once again, the goal is not that there will be more and more people voting for religious parties; that will not lead to the revolutionary type of change we are seeking!
Comes, Leaps, Jumps
To illustrate the matter, let us bring a well-known verse describing the Redemption, “the voice of my beloved, behold he comes, he leaps over the mountains, he jumps over the hills.” The sages say that he leaps over the mountains in the merit of the Patriarchs, he jumps over the hills in the merit of the Matriarchs. But there are three verbs in this verse—comes, leaps, jumps. I don't remember at the moment if anyone interprets it this way, but according to this there are three stages in the verse.
The insight is like this: During the two thousand years of exile, we were sustained by the Torah and the self-sacrifice of the Jewish people, which were fueled by our longing for Redemption. “In the merit of righteous women our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt,” and in their merit we are destined to be redeemed as well. The women sang lullabies describing the Redemption to the children, and this kept the Jewish people alive and preserved an ember of faith and longing for redemption.
Afterward, already in our generation, there was an inception—an atchalta (אַתְחַלְתָּא)— not necessarily the inception of Redemption (אַתְחַלְתָּא דִּגְאֻלָּה), but certainly an inception of an important process, the Return to Zion. Before the Holocaust, and certainly after the Holocaust, Jews are returning to the Land. We must give thanks for this, it is a miracle in itself according to the Rebbe’s approach. This is the stage of “behold he comes,” the beginning of coming home. This is the first stage of change that follows the state of exile.
Everything begins with exile, which is the foundation. The days in the future are called “days in which I have no desire.” We will long for the service that required self-sacrifice during exile. The service in exile is the foundation of everything. In Kabbalah it corresponds to what is known as “initial immaturity of mind” (קַטְנוּת א). Next there is a state of “coming,” the beginning of the return to the Land, “behold he comes.”
These two levels correspond to “and the revealed things are for us and our children.” It follows then that the next two stages will correspond to, “the concealed things belong to the Havayah our God” indicating that they must, to a certain extent, be much more innovative than the innovation of the return to Zion, which started some 200 years ago and has continued until today. Coming is still not a leap. But the next stage requires a leap, and the fourth stage requires a jump. They are not the same. Jumping can only be done after you have leaped, and you are approaching the true goal; you jump into the Redemption. Leaping is towards the Redemption, but at the last moment you need to jump with all your strength, with both legs, into the redemption. The jump requires the power of the women—“in the merit of the Matriarchs”—to jump over [i.e., by means of] the hills.
Our Service on the Path to Mashiach
Again, there is no continuous process here. We are all waiting for Mashiach. Those who think the State of Israel is the beginning of Redemption perhaps think we simply need to move forward until Mashiach arrives; no leaps required along the way. The Haredim, who do not believe the State serves any purpose, are only waiting for Mashiach, arguing that only he will solve the problems. Until then, they say, one should not trust the State of Israel and therefore not participate in it. This is the Neturei Karta approach. Alternately, there are those who argue that we need to get along with the existing establishment, and even try to influence it for good, to strengthen Jewish values, while making efforts to enter the Knesset and benefit from its budgets (for our good purposes).
But, as far as I know, the Rebbe did not speak about another stage between the State of Israel and Mashiach. This is the point of innovation we are now discussing. This is in fact what we have been talking about all these years, only apparently the message was not clear enough. Our projection that ba’alei teshuvah will take control of the State, meant that they would create something else; not that they would take control of the existing State of Israel, but rather that they would lead some other entity, here in our Holy Land. Clearly, it is not easy for us to envision what this might be. Yet even this new entity is still not Mashiach, but a necessary stage toward the appearance of the Mashiach. This stage is what we can do and what we must do.
Mashiach is a person of flesh and blood, but truly he is “superhuman.” He is a man walking among us, but he is also a new soul descending to us from the heavens described in the Torah as, “a star shall rise from Jacob.” Until his coming and appearance, we must prepare the ground for him by establishing a new governmental entity that is within our power to create. This is not something that exists yet; it requires a revolution. We believe this revolution can also happen in pleasant ways (according to the Chasidic principle that light dispels darkness naturally, and that everyone is drawn to light). This is the message, and around it there need to be many assemblies. We need to encourage a great deal of thought and discussion about how to convey this message in an acceptable manner—for children to adults, from young to old. We need to inspire everyone that we want something new; that the people of Israel want something else, and that because nothing stands in the way of will, we can realize this goal.
Rectifying the State of Israel
We have a book titled Rectifying the State of Israel. This name can be misleading. The intention was not that we should make do with fixing the existing state (renovate it, refresh it, upgrade it, all with cosmetic repairs), but rather that we must create a new reality, a new state, a different state (beginning with a different Declaration of Independence and continuing with changing the DNA of all government ministries and procedures, to the point where the previous State’s legacy is erased). In truth, the new State we dream of and aspire to will constitute, retroactively, the repair of the existing State of Israel, until finally, with the coming of Mashiach, we will be able to say about the existing State that it has made “evil into the foundation for good” and that it illustrates how light that comes out of darkness is superior.
To bring about this reversal (it’hapcha), we do not need to break the existing State. It is known that the Alter Rebbe was careful to never break anything, even for a holy purpose, only to take it apart carefully, and then rebuild it.
[1]. Exodus 9:19.
[2]. Bereishit Rabbah 21:6.
[3]. See Horayot 3a. See also Tzafnat Pa’ane’ach on Berachot 10a.
[4]. Horayot 6a. Temurah 15b. Sifra Dibura Dechata’ot, parshata 6.
