Headline News.
News? What news?
There is no news under the sun:
(desert or otherwise).
There is at best slight variation.
Amorites fought Jews.
Three thousand years ago.
The Parsha calls the Amorites bees.
They would die in battle:
a bee that buries its stinger and dies.
”I’m happy to die, as long as I sting.”
Suicide bombers?
Headline news never talks of Amorites.
Suicide bombers don't learn parsha:
They do not know of Amorites.
They turn bold statements into tired cliches:
"with their blood and with their soul"
And think they’ve come up with something new.
He who does not learn from history. . .
is destined to make someone, somewhere repeat
"he who does not learn from history. . . ".
The pessimist sees only tunnel;
the optimist sees only light;
the realist sees tunnel, light, tunnel, light, tunnel, light.
The Jew sees Moshaich.
History has proven
Amorites disappear.
History has proven
Jews do not disappear.
History has proven
the Jew is eternal;
the eternity of the Jew
is G-d’s hand in history,
a sign of His presence.
In Hebrew miracle and sign are synonymous.
Jewish continuity is unique.
it takes a leap of irrational faith (faithlessness?)
to even think that the Jewish future will be ordinary.
This Shabbos is the saddest in our calendar.
It is the Shabbos of Tisha B'Av (the fast and mourning is postponed until tomorrow),
the day that encapsulates all the bitter, tortuous history of the Jews.
This Shabbos is called Shabbos Chazon:
the Shabbat of Vision.
The vision of Isaiah.
Vision as in “I have a vision”
denotes distance, haziness, elusiveness.
Vision as in eyesight represents clarity and immediacy.
Of all the senses vision encapsulates the entity
and transmits it into the mind.
The Vision of this Shabbos, the masters tell us,
is of the third Bais Hamikdash.
Something elusively beyond history
but in tandem with historical cycles and logic.
The ethereal building, the eternal people --
In history but never of history.
How will we know when Moshaich arrives?
The masters over two centuries ago said we will know Moshiach is here ---
when we read about it in the newspapers.
(Again, the ordinary dimension of the mystical)
In defiance of historical precedent,
on that day the newspapers will carry a story
of something new under the heavens.
Headline News.
A miracle, indeed.