"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.
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". 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.
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".
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"a.
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.
Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org.
