Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ... in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.... (AFP/Sameh Sherif)
I can explain everything, including the fact that Olmert has wrangled a way to stay in office, just when it looked like his government might be dissolved.
This is no great feat on my part; it's all in The Knowing Heart - written in the 1700s by an Italian Jew known as the RaMChal.
.... what is needed for settling our minds and clarifying our faith we certainly possess. The Lord, Gd, did not create a condition whereby belief would be undermined through inability to resolve a matter........it is of the deep counsel of the Blessed One to so orient things that they will resolve themselves into an ordinance of good alone, with no existence whatsoever for evil in the world....
.... He allows evil to intensify itself to its fullest possible extent, that is, until, but not including the destruction of the universe...
The intensification of evil consists... in Gd's completely concealing His countenance from the universe, as it is written (Proverbs 1:28): Then they will call Me and I will not answer and (Isaiah 59:15): And truth was lacking and the forsaker of evil was accounted senseless.
This is referred to as complete concealment....
In this order and ordinance, heed is not paid to merit or guilt, but the ordinance proceeds.... by allowing evil to intensify in order to reveal afterwards the reign of good.
And all the time that evil is intensifying, the righteous too must abide its oppression - not because this is just, but because the time requires it.... In the period of the intensification of the evil... merits will not avail to save them from it.
... not only will the merit of the righteous not avail them to escape from evil, but, to the contrary, wicked men will prosper and fortune will smile upon them while the righteous will be tortured and oppressed, as our sages stated (Sota 49a): In the footsteps of the Messiah, audacity will prevail,
the wisdom of the scribes will be despised...
.... at that time the doers of evil are built up, and the heads of the righteous are lowered to the ground.
After this He will reveal His kingdom, the fruit of that revelation being the transformation of evil itself to good.
You can take it or leave it, but I have believed in this absolutely, ever since I first read it in February 2006. Events in the interim have only served to confirm my conviction that what we are seeing is the unfolding of this, Hashem's plan, spelled out hundreds of years ago so that we who must live through it will understand.
For me it is an assumption of faith, not pessimisim, to say that of course it's all getting worse, unrelentingly and inexorably worse. And if we are to believe that this 18th century kabbalist indeed possessed the "profound understanding" attributed to him, it will get worse still:
"... until, but not including the destruction of the universe."
The question for each of us then becomes, what do we do with ourselves during this "period of the intensification of evil" ?
I'm not real clear on that part at the moment.
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