Ma'amar HaGeulah (Exile, Ch. 10)

Ma'amar HaGeulah

-- "The Great Redemption", a reworking of Ramchal's "Ma'amar HaGeulah"

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman's series on www.torah.org

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"The Great Redemption"

Exile: Ch. 10

We've depicted our state of exile so far, and projected forward to the great and glorious end when all will be right and in place. We'll soon offer the actual playing out of the redemption itself, but let's first offer Ramchal's stirring words of encouragement extended at the very beginning of "The Great Redemption".

At bottom, his point is simple: Take heart! The Moshiach will come! All will be as had been promised! But let's see how he put it.

Ramchal depicts our people as always having had a motto of sorts throughout the exile, derived from this verse: “Do not rejoice for my sake, my enemy! For though I fell, I arose; when I sit in darkness, G-d (Himself) is my light!” (Micha 7:8). For even though "many mighty and prodigious things will have to transpire and a great deal of preparations will have to be made before the redemption can come about", in the end there will indeed come a time when "everyone will see and know for himself that 'G-d has wrought great miracles for us' (Psalms 126:3)".

Nonetheless, despite this attitude there were admittedly times when we "thought that G-d was hiding His countenance from (us) or had forsaken" us. In truth, we're told though, that "He was actually preparing goodness and blessings for (us)" all along! "For each and every moment" in the long course of the exile, G-d "was preparing immeasurably far-reaching and vast storehouses for (us), and setting priceless, precious, and captivating wealth and kingly treasure troves within those storehouses."

And those vast treasurehouses will "be opened up in the great halcyon days to come, when all sorts of exquisite things will cascade out of them and be handed over to the Jewish Nation in recompense for all the arduous things (we) had to endure in exile".

It's clear, though, that Ramchal isn't referring to any sort of material effulgence pouring down upon us from the heavens, since he then says that what G-d had stored was "all *the light* that didn’t shine upon the Jewish Nation for all the years they were in exile that was to have shone had never vanished". Indeed, that's what "will pour out in one fell swoop once (those occult storehouses) are opened". We'll "experience a degree of joy unlike any other" then, "and the world itself will be rectified (and delight in) a state of tranquility and calm" then, too, "and there’ll be no more sorrow".

(c) 2006 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

(Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org )

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