“I don’t believe it!” is a common reaction to something that seemed highly unlikely but actually is. When I used to travel a lot, I would see people do things at airports that I could never do, at least not in public, like really losing their cool at some airline employee or a fellow traveller. “Don’t they see what they look like to others?” I would wonder to myself. Apparently not.
Part of the problem is that the sin of eating from the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra, according to Kabbalah, was multi-faceted. The actual eating of the fruit was the last stage, not the first stage. It went like this, as explained in Drushei Olam HaTohu, Drush Aitz HaDa’as.
The Zohar has many sections, some more kabbalistic than others. One is called Sifra D’tzniusa, and it deals directly with the kabbalistic origin of Creation. It requires considerable background in Kabbalah to understand, even with the commentary that the Vilna Gaon (the GR”A) provided. However, the following from the Gaon reads pretty straightforward…
When we last left off, we were talking about the sixth millennium dividing into two parts, the Yesod and the Atarah. While Yesod proper governed history, exile and destruction occur. Once history passes from Yesod to the Atarah, Yemos HaMoshiach officially begins.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to predict Moshiach’s arrival accurately! So many people have tried, GREAT people. People who we might have though COULD make an accurate prediction, but didn’t. It’s so elusive, the day of Moshiach’s coming, and it will be until, the Zohar predicts, it will become so obvious that even a child will be able to know with certainty that Moshiach’s appearance is imminent.
When Chizkiah HaMelech was confronted by Sancheriv’s massive international army (185,000 battalions from different countries), he went to bed. Not because he was exhausted, through he was, not because he wanted to hide from impending doom, because that wasn’t possible. He went to bed—and actually slept—as an expression of his total faith in the salvation of God.
So often we look back on history and ask, “What were they thinking?” After seeing in hindsight what happened and what led to it, we can’t understand how they didn’t see it coming and avoid it instead. For example, how did British Prime Minister Chamberlain take Hitler ysv”z at his word and think that amicable peace was possible with him? How did American President Roosevelt think that a pacifist approach to the European war would spare his country thousands of miles away?
We need to get one thing straight from the start. The Internet is neither good nor evil, friend nor foe. Good and evil is an evaluation of human morality, which is a function of free will. Something without will can be neither good nor evil, though it can be used for either. Guns kill both friends and enemies, depending upon who is shooting and why. It is easy to love or hate the Internet (I happen to love it), because it is what we see doing the building or the destroying, not the people behind it.
Here’s something new to think about (I think). There are certain givens about Gog and Magog, and certain variables. The problem is that we don’t always know which are which.
The War of Gog and Magog is supposed to be some End-of-Days cataclysmic event that will act as the threshold between history now and the Messianic Era. The Midrash speaks of three such events, and the Chofetz Chaim identified both world wars as being the first two. The Talmud speaks of one “almost” occurring back in Chizkiah HaMelech’s time, when Sancheriv went to war against the Jewish people with a massive international army (Sanhedrin 94a).