The Key To Redemption

By Yochanan Gordon

Rabbi Eliezer bar Avina taught: “If you see kingdoms provoking one another, anticipate the footsteps of Moshiach.” (Bereishis Rabbah 2:7)

We are now in the Book of Redemption, and even a cursory glance at world events carries an unmistakable messianic intensity. Kingdoms are provoking one another. Alliances are shifting. The geopolitical air is thick with tension and uncertainty.

Political commentators speak openly about the possibility of a third World War. But it is not the fear that compels us to long for redemption, nor is it anxiety over instability. What unsettles us far more deeply is the absence of Hashem’s revealed presence in the world, the gap between what is and what ought to be. The world feels saturated with Yesh—noise, power, assertion, and ego—but starved of divine light. That absence is what makes us hope that these convulsions are not random, but preparatory.

Still, we’ve been here before.

In my lifetime, there have been moments when the light of Moshiach felt close enough to touch, only for that hope to recede. And that happened enough times to force the question: If redemption is so near, what keeps delaying it?

To answer that question, it seems necessary to look at the first redemption.

In last week’s parashah, Moshe Rabbeinu approaches Pharaoh and asks him to allow the Jewish people to travel three days in the desert to serve Hashem and then return. On the surface, this was a strategy, but Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneerson, the Rebbe Rashab, reveals a deeper dimension. In a sicha, he explains that the redemption from Egypt was meant to be absolute, one that would eliminate the need for future exiles. However, because Moshe framed the request as tentative, presenting redemption as temporary rather than final, it was decreed that this redemption would be followed by others.

Hashem expected Moshe to speak from a place of Yesh—of presence, certainty, and confidence. Redemption demands a declaration, not a negotiation. Moshe was meant to say: We are leaving exile and we are not returning.

And yet, the redemption itself was triggered by something altogether different.

The Torah tells us that Hashem heard the cries of the Jewish people. Chassidus explains that these were not eloquent prayers, nor even conscious appeals. They were the inaudible cries of a nation crushed by labor and spiritually depleted, stripped almost entirely of mitzvos and merit. The Zohar describes this as kala penimah d’lo ishtama (an inner voice that is not heard). This was not Yesh. This was Ayn.

So here is the contradiction in full: redemption requires Yesh, confidence, clarity, and presence, yet it arrives specifically through Ayn, brokenness, emptiness, and self-nullification.

What pride could we possibly have had in Egypt? What confidence could exist when we had nothing to point to, nothing to claim, nothing that merited redemption?

The answer, I believe, is that Jewish confidence is never self-generated. Our Yesh is not our own. It flows from Hashem.

The work of redemption is learning to hold Yesh and Ayn together—unbroken. To feel Ayn when we look honestly at ourselves, and Yesh when we recognize our utter dependence on Hashem. Not alternating between the two, but allowing them to exist in constant confluence.

This dynamic runs through our relationship with Torah as well.

King David writes in Tehillim: “If not for Your Torah, my delight, I would have been lost in my poverty.” The verse does not say that Torah fills our emptiness. Even with Torah, we remain impoverished. But Torah anchors us so that our Ayn does not become despair.

The Chofetz Chaim explained the verse, Toras Hashem temimah, meshivas nafesh to mean that the Torah itself remains whole and untouched. No matter how much Torah we learn, how vast our Jewish scholarship becomes, the Torah remains complete. Its Yesh is divine, not mortal.

Rav Simcha Bunim of Peshischa taught that a person must carry two notes at all times: “I am but dust and ashes” and “the entire world was created for me.” These are not contradictory statements. They describe the same truth from two perspectives: Ayn from below and Yesh from above.

And so, while the world rumbles over the prospects of war, we continue to daven for something else entirely—that the provocations, instability, and noise are the contractions of birth. That the collision of Yesh and Ayn in history will finally give rise to a Nasi, a leader who embodies both qualities and reveals Hashem’s fullness in the world.

As we read in the Haftorah just a few weeks ago: v’David avdi nasi lehem l’olam. Dovid, whose entire life was a gift from Adam HaRishon and therefore embodies Ayn and Yesh simultaneously, is the Nasi for whom we are waiting.

May these be the footsteps of Moshiach, who will flood the world with healing, wholeness, and clarity, transforming centuries of darkness into revealed light. 

The author can be reached at [email protected].