Sunday, December 11, 2005

A New Series

This is an invitation being sent out by the folks at torah.org. You're all invited to be a part of it. Needless to say it's based on the Great Redemption series running on Toras Ramchal, but as the statement says, the series itself won't include the translation itself very much.

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Let's pass on, you and I, through the door to the Messianic Era! Our text will be Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto's "Ma'amar HaGeulah" (A Discourse on The Redemption), our teacher will be Rabbi Yaakov Feldman, and the series itself will be entitled "The Great Redemption".

"Ma'amar HaGeulah" is a rather short and fairly unknown work of Ramchal's that was composed sometime before 1730, and only came to light in 1889 through the research of Rabbi Shmuel Luria. What is manages to do is explain the cosmic backdrop behind the exile we're in now, the first low stirrings of the Messianic Era, the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah) himself and more!

The series will start off with a quick preliminary overview of classical Jewish ideas of exile and redemption, we'll then be offered the "end of the story" at the very beginning word for word and thus come to see what we're all to look forward to, then we'll go on from there to enjoy a fuller, step by step depiction of Ma'amar HaGeulah.

We'll only be presented with short samples of the original text itself in translation, and we'll be offered very little of the work's out-and-out Kabbalah si


mply because it would demand that we step aside from the subject at hand -- the redemption -- in order to explain terms and concepts tangential to it. We will though have those Kabbalistic ideas that lay at the core of Ramchal's vision of the redemption explained for us, simply because they're essential to the story. And we'll be allowed a bird's-eye-view of the how's and why's of redemption.

This will prove to be uplifting and a lot of fun! The hope is, though, that we'll experience this all for ourselves in real-time with the actual coming of the Moshiach, and that this series will then turn into news reports from the front rather than predictions of the future!

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If you're already subscribed to Rabbi Feldman's "Ramchal" series you'll automatically receive this new series, but if you're not already subscribed and you'd like to be, simply send along a blank e-mail to ramchal-subscribe@torah.org and you'll be a part of it, too.