Ma'amar HaGeulah (The Remembrance, Ch. 15)

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"

The Remembrance: Ch. 15

Taking us through the long course of human spiritual history -- the ups and downs of the battle between good and evil -- these last couple of chapters, Ramchal revealed that "an utterly black darkness" eventually overcame our people, which we'd have to endure "until the throne of the righteous Moshiach would be built". So he now brings us back to the point when the two redeemers will be working in tandem (see The Remembrance, Ch 12).

His point here is that not only will the two Messiahs -- Moshiach Ben Yoseph, who'll appear first, and then Moshiach Ben David -- manage to bring about the great redemption, at long last, but that they'll also be joined by Moses (who would obviously have been brought back to life just for this), who'll help to "complete the Jewish Nation’s emendation" (see para 58). It really shouldn't surprise us to hear that Moses will play a role in the final redemption, in fact, given that we were told early on that the redemption from Egypt and the final one have a lot in common (see para 2).

But what would be left to be done, actually? After all, "good would have been removed from impurity" already, and "evil would have been thrust downward". Not only that, but there'll even be "as great an emendation then as Adam would have effected originally", which means to say that not only would we have returned to square-one by undoing the harm done by Adam and Eve's sin, we'd also have managed to do what they couldn't do, and seen to it that "the edifice that hadn’t been perfected would then be" (see para 58).

Only this would be left. There'll "come to be a day of great judgment ... which will then finish (the process of) purifying all souls and all creation". And as a result, "all of creation will become utterly pure" and the world will be "recast as a new edifice ... in a way that’s neither explicable nor knowable, which will go on forever" (see para 59).

That's to say that all of G-d's creation would have been set aright at long last: our people will be back home, all wrongdoing will have been undone, and everything will have been made pure.

And so we're about to begin the final section of this work, entitled "The Rectified World". In it, Ramchal will present us with some rather esoteric ideas about what will happen in the Heavens to bring about all we'd just cited, along with some other insights.

(c) 2006 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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

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