Everything is comprised of an outer shell and inner core. Fruits are overcovered by peels and shells; our body serves as the outer shell of our inner core, the soul; and so forth. We learn here that Jewish history is likewise comprised of a shell and core. Its core is redemption and the rectification of everything gone wrong because of the exile; and our exile state, despite its wearying length, is merely the hard outer shell of our experience.

Eventually, though, all outer shells will need to be peeled off if one is ever to get to the fruit as we’ll see, as we begin to turn a corner in The Remembrance. For, to this point we’d been discussing all the great emendations that will occur in the redemption, like the rising up of the Shechina out of the dust, the appearance of both Moshiachs, the ingathering of the exiled, and more; but we’ll now discuss the undoing of the influences of exile.

Ramchal cites an allegory that depicts what will happen. After “the leaves of the Holy Tree will become stronger on each side … seventy branches” will attach themselves to it, “then an infinite number” of them. Then “seventy other trees” will surround the original one, whose many branches “will (begin to) intertwine with the branches” of that original tree. (see para. 47).

What that comes to this. The original tree alludes to the Jewish Nation, and the seventy branches and trees cited refer to the seventy other core nations that were originally established. We’re told that those original seventy will eventually expand into a very large number of nations, and that those nations will eventually begin to cover-over the Jewish Nation — like shells — and to hold sway over us in the exile. We learn that they’ll grow stronger and stronger, and that they’d eventually stop “acknowledging their Master”, G-d. In fact, things will get to the point where “holiness could not rule” (ibid.), and something would have to be done.

That’s when Moshiach Ben Yoseph will “lop (them) off … and pluck them from the boughs in which they sit”, the way shells would have to be cut off. That way the nations that had overcovered us with their mistaken beliefs will no longer hold sway over us and we could savor the sweet fruit of redemption in full glory.

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