As a consequence of all that, a great wealth of light will flow from above that will grow mightier and mightier. Don’t forget, though, that Heaven and Earth would only have been *temporarily* reconnected at that point. Since we’d only be in midst of The Visitation — the fourth stage of it, by this point — rather than in the more advanced Remembrance epoch.

Nonetheless, “Don’t think … that The Visitation itself won’t have accomplished anything because it would have been so brief and ephemeral”, as Ramchal puts it, for you’d be selling it short. It will indeed have its aftereffects. For one thing, the sorts of “stirrings for redemption and repentance among the Jewish Nation” we’d cited earlier on will come into play in this fourth stage.

Something will be touched off in the Jewish heart at that point. For “the soul … would have escaped from its prison” for a time. And that will inspire us all to look forward to redemption and to drawing close to G-d.

A certain inexplicable inner incandescence will come to the fore, and all our most lofty, most inherently, essential Jewish hopes will be regenerated. We’ll dream of holiness and of experiencing the sort of true freedom that the angels enjoy in the heavens, rather than the kind we know of here. Odd and inscrutable longings for holiness will come upon us which we’ll have no rational explanations for, and a curious sense of homesickness will overtake our beings for a time.

In fact, all that will come about because the Shechina will have heard a “voice” in the distance at that point — “The voice of my Beloved … leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills” (Song of Songs 2:8), coming to the rescue, if you will.

But those sorts of deep, close-to-the-bone reactions will close off on their own soon enough, sad to say. And a certain “darkness (will) follow it, in the course of which the Torah will come to be forgotten more and more, every hand will weaken, and each arm will become feeble”. For “the remediation and repair will not (yet) have come in full”. And the spirit’s heart will have broken, so to speak.

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