We are engaged in a very strange struggle. There is no war being waged between the Israeli Army and the Arab Armies like there was in 67’ and 73’. There are no warplanes on bombing raids, no tanks and soldiers invading and conquering territory.

The posuk in Ha’azinu puts our situation in its proper perspective.

הם קנאוני בלא אל כעסוני בהבליהם ואני אקניאם בלא עם בגוי נבל אכעיסם

Hashem says He hides His face from them because Klal Yisroel incensed Him with a non-deity. They got Me angry with their emptiness. So in response, I will take vengeance through a non-people and those who deny Hashem.

When is it that Hashem bring enemies upon us?

In Parshas Bechukosai we read about foreign armies who invade Eretz Yisroel, cause destruction and bring us into exile. But this posuk talks about a non-nation. In the past, Klal Yisroel in Eretz Yisroel faced enemy nations who sent their armies to invade our borders—Egypt from the south, Jordan from the east, and Syria from the north.

But now we have a bunch of teenage Arab youths already living in Eretz Yisroel stabbing people indiscriminately with knives. We are not facing the enemy described in Parshas Bechukosai but the one described in Parshas Ha’azinu.

Why?

In the last Gaza war, there wasn’t a formal nation with uniformed soldiers waging battles. It was a bunch of loosely organized terrorist groups with mortars and rocket launchers scattered among the civilian population in civilian clothing firing at us more-or-less indiscriminately. A non-nation. We are now again faced with a war against a non-nation.

Why?

We incensed Hashem with a non-deity and emptiness.

There are two forms of avodo zoro. There were the kind which the ancient people worshiped-- the spiritual forces that lie behind the forces of nature. These natural forces were powerful, as were the spiritual forces behind them. But they didn’t have any independent power. They are the tools that Hashem uses in running His world. The people who worshipped them made the mistake that these forces were autonomous from Hashem and they can be manipulated by various forms of pagan worship and rituals. But they are real forces.

In Ha’azinu Klal Yisroel is being criticized for inciting Hashem’s anger with a non-god, an empty power.

90 years ago there was a mass defection from Yiddishkeit by the Jews in Russia. Why? They discovered a new god called Communism which was supposed to usher in a utopian age and solve all the problems of humanity. Communism took seventy years to be exposed as a miserable failure as a non-god. There were many such –isms that the Jews of Europe began to worship over the past two centuries. They incensed Hashem with non-deities.

Nationalism was another non-god of the late nineteenth century. Secular Zionism espoused a utopian vision that stole many Jews away from Torah. Jews have worshipped multiple non-gods, even in our times.

The contemporary western mentality views the world as run by many forces – forces of economic determinism, political forces, and historical forces - and refuse to see the hand of haShem as that which is running history. These are also the non-gods of today.

The basis of Torah is that the world is run by one force and that is HaShem who runs the world in a detailed hands-on manner. No other forces run the world. He uses many things as his tools but they are only tools in His hands. There are economic, political and historical forces. But they are HaShem’s tools.

Until we as a nation will define ourselves as a nation of Torah and only Torah; with the culture of Torah and the ideology of the Torah, and we stop looking for false gods to worship—each generation finds its own - we will not arrive at our intended destination from golus.

The Nesivos gives an interpretation of two of the fantastic visions of Rabbah Bar Bar Channah in Bava Basra. The vision that he is interpreting teaches us that the power of teshuvah is enormous. Yishmoel, who despite his future wickedness and cruelty towards Klal Yisroel is spared from death and is brought back to health by Hogor.

Why?

Hashem heard the crying of the lad in his present state. Hashem judges a person by his current situation. Yishmoel was thrown out of Avrohom’s house because he was a metzacheik—avodoh zoro, gilui arayos and shefichas domim! But lying sick under that tree, Yishmoel did teshuvoh. The Nesivos interprets the gemara Bava Basra that with the power of that teshuvoh, Yishmoel was rewarded and will have a permanent presence in Eretz Yisroel until the coming of Moshiach!

We often hear calls by the right wing factions here in Eretz Yisroel to expel the Arabs from this land. According to the Nesivos’s interpretation it is utterly futile.

In 1967, after the stunning victory of the Israeli Army over all the Arab invaders, the governnment managed to reclaim Har Habayis and reestablish Jewish sovereignty over all of Jerusalem which was divided for 19 years prior. People were intoxicated with the dramatic success that was achieved in such a short time. The Chief Rabbi of the IDF at the time, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, declared that the tefilloh “Nachem” should no longer be recited on Tish’a B’av. His logic was obvious—Har Habayis is in our hands!

My Rebbe protested sharply with this approach. We mourn over Yerushalayim over the loss of the Schechinoh. And this is why we still say “Nachem”. Before Tish’a B’av that year, I asked my Rebbe about the lines in Nachem which also includes that it is controlled by a foreign army. How does this fit with the current reality? He turned to me and said that if Chazal included the lack of sovereignty over Har Habayis as one of the things that resulted from the churbon from then until the time when a new Sanhedrin can change it, it means Chazal knew that Jews will not have sovereignty over Har Habayis until the times of Mochiach.

At the time he said this, the situation on Har Habayis was in flux. No-one knew what the final arrangement would be. My Rebbe insisted that we would not retain sovereignty over Har Habayis because of what Chazal put in our tefillos. Soon after, Moshe Dayan the minister of defense decided to hand over control of the Temple Mount to the Arab Wakf Authority. And that has been the situation for 48 years till this day.

This was the prediction of the Nesivos based on one vision of Rabbah Bar bar Chana.

In the next vision, a ship at sea encountered an enormous fish that was covered in soil where things were growing. The passengers and crew disembarked on the fish, thinking it was a normal island and started to settle on it as if it were dry land. They stared a fire to use for cooking. As the fire burned through the layer of earth and singed the skin of the fish underneath, the fish started thrashing and twisting, throwing all the inhabitants into chaos. At the last moment, another ship came by and saved the inhabitants of this “island”.

The Nesivos and most meforshim on this story have a single interpretation.

Klal Yisroel will get tired of millennia of golus-- being driven, uprooted, and expelled from place to place. Klal Yisroel will become desperate to find a place they can call home. They will come across a place or places which seem suitable and will start to settle in, thinking it will be a permanent security. They will forget that the golus really continues until Moshiach comes to bring Klal Yisroel to their final destination. They want to believe that they can find peace and quiet by anonymously blending into some hospitable country. It makes no difference if that place you want to blend in to is New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, Toronto, London or Johannesburg or even Tel Aviv.

It’s the mentality of ending the golus by losing your identity and becoming like all other nations. Golus is not a geographic reality but a psychological and spiritual reality. A religious Jew needs to see himself as only a visitor, an outsider, hopefully tolerated, but never truly at home among non-Jews or Jews who do not observe and believe in the Torah. When he is no longer tolerated, he picks up and finds another place to visit and be tolerated—never being at home anywhere.

The idea of golus is one that is uncomfortable and is tempting to resist and deny. But is it a part of who we are—a permanent feature of our collective history after the churbon. Wherever Jews came and started to feel a little too comfortable, the goyim told them to leave. Charlemagne welcomed the Jews into Germany and yiddishkeit flourished there, yeshivas were established there. But then the Crusades came and the Jewish community in Germany was decimated. Spain had its Golden Age followed by the Inquisition in 1492. Poland had its Golden Age followed by the Chelminiski pogroms of Tach ve’Tat. Two centuries ago Germany became the Jewish intellectual center of the world and then Hitler came to power in 1933 to put an end to it.

Throughout our long history, Jews wanted to be comfortable, they wanted to blend in. But the Nesivos says especially in the end of history Jews will be so comfortable and forget about being in golus for so long, that they will eventually start a fire and cause an upheaval that will threaten their very survival. Only at that point when they realize that the only One who can save them is Hashem, will Moshiach arrive to finally bring them home.

We don’t predict when Moshiach will come it is beyond our ability to calculate. But the gedolei achronim predict that before Moshiach arrives, Klal Yisroel will get exceedingly comfortable in golus and live their lives as though the golus is behind them. They will worship all the non-gods of the nations around them.

The midrash at the begining of Bereishis expounds on the posuk sohu va’vo’hu ve’chochech al p’nei sehom, ve’ruach elokim mirachefes al p’nei hamoyim. Chazal say these words refer to different periods of Jewish history and exiles. One period will be before the Torah, another will be a period of confusion. Then there was the kefiroh of Greece, and finally there is tehom—the period of Rome and Christianity. Chazal explain that it is called tehom because Edom’s domination is so powerful and so complete that it seems like it will never end. But nevertheless, a ruach Elokim will be blowing. The ruach of Moshiach at the end of days. What brings that ruach Elokim? Mayim—which is Torah.

It is very easy to get sucked into a mentality that the golus is over. We think we have arrived and we are free to assert ourselves on the world stage side-by-side with the non-Jews. We have Jewish sovereignty over Eretz Yisroel, we have enormous political and economic clout in the western world, etc. We have all the keilim made and ready to be used in the new Beis Hamikdash. We have a group of people who every year try to go up to Har Habayis to bring a Korban Pesach.

Moshiach is here already, right? Just a few minor technicalities to overcome and we are at the geuloh. But the reality is not so simple. As long as Klal Yisroel have a mentality that we are essentially goyim who keep Shulchan Aruch or speak Hebrew; as long as we harbor the attitude that we are not really different than any other people and that we are an integral part of the community of nations; as long as we deny that we are an am levodod yishkon, then Hashem needs to send us harsh messages to wake us up.

What is the power of Torah that allows it to bring Moshiach?

First of all, it is the most important mitzvah in the entire Torah. But more essentially, we can only realize and appreciate who a Jew is and what we are doing here when our mind is filled with the ideas of the Torah. Such a person gives himself over to the mental world of the Torah and the will of Hashem instead of being defined by the surrounding culture of the world. Only when we establish our identity as Jews through the Torah—whose reality is that we belong to Hashem-- can we hope to be worthy of bringing Moshiach.

We live on a very unstable island.

We’re still in a serious golus regardless of where we live on the globe. The world will never let us forget that. The people who try to make believe the Moshiach is here are endangering us even more.

We have to remember we are a different nation that exists by different rules. If we were to exist by the forces of history that govern the destiny of all other nations, we wouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here. It goes against all logic. So our existence is fragile. The minute we start to look to other concepts and ideologies to shape our destiny, we subject ourselves to the natural forces of history and lose the ability to exist supernaturally. We are a different nation with a different history, with different values and a different mentality.

What all of this tells us is that we have a lot of teshuvoh to do. We aren’t talking about the teshuvoh of mechalelei Shabbos and people outside the world of Torah and mitzvos. We have to look at ourselves, at our tzibbur, and realize how we are contributing to the lengthening of the golus by not embracing the mission of being in golus. This mission is to define ourselves as a unique nation even when surrounded by a welcoming culture that denies the messages and the values of Torah. This is the point of the Nesivos in Bava Basra.

The golus isn’t over yet and it is premature to get too comfortable. We cannot allow ourselves to sink into the mentality of the western world and western culture and feel at home. We are a different nation. We do not have anything to do with a culture that stems from Greece which Chazal termed “choshech”. We define ourselves in terms of Torah.

What does that mean regarding each person’s individual life? In means asking ourselves what we should be doing or not doing; reading and seeing or not reading and seeing, in order to make our thoughts conform with the Torah. To make our minds and our hearts naturally feel at home with the Torah and its counter-cultural values.

We haven’t reached an island paradise. We should not think that we’ve come to a point where we can be American or Western people.

We are still in golus and make sure we define ourselves by the Torah and only the Torah. Otherwise we make Hashem angry by adopting other values and worshiping empty, non-deities. Hashem responds, not by bringing conventional wars but by sending us a non-nation who isn’t even fighting a religious war. They do not believe but use religion as rhetoric to rile up the masses to their cause.

Our response is to take Torah more seriously. To define ourselves more in terms of Torah based concepts and values. That is the nisayon of our generation and the danger that looms when we think the golus is over. When you think the golus is over and the non-Jews have finally accepted you, you naturally want to relax and put your guard down. We are being swept and overwhelmed by the western world. We always must remain vigilant to ensure that our hearts and minds and our mentality is governed by the Torah.