It’s all delineated in our Torah. Let’s go back to the first Jewish massacre in Egypt under the merciless Pharaoh. How did our salvation come at that time? Our people didn’t simply pray but cried out from the depths of their souls, and those cries shook the Heavens themselves and reached the Throne of G-d.
Words of prayer are our language. Hakol kol Yaakov – the voice is the voice of Jacob – the voice of prayer. Painfully, though, we have not been using it. So first and foremost we must learn how to daven, each and every one of us.
Of course, there is more we need to do. It is all written in the Talmud. At the time of travail that will precede our final redemption, three things can protect and save us from the agonizing pain that will accompany those days:
1. “Ya’asok b’Torah – let Torah become your business.” That doesn’t mean an occasional session of learning but rather a total mindset and way of life.
2. “Ya’asok b’gemilas chasadim – let kindness and generosity become your business.”
3. The third part of the formula is to be extra scrupulous in the observance of Seudah Shlishis, the third meal of Shabbos we eat toward the evening of the holy day. There are many reasons for this – too many for me to delineate here but they are explained in my book Life is a Test.
Briefly, the first two Sabbath seudos are eaten when we are hungry, but after a festive noontime seudah we are hardly in the mood for yet another meal a few hours later. So it is not to satiate our hunger that we gather around the Shalosh Seudos table but rather to celebrate the Sabbath and sing her praises. It is symbolic of the conversion of the physical to the spiritual, and that of course is our ultimate purpose: to become spiritual beings and free ourselves from the shackles of materialism.
The Messianic period will be very much like Shalosh Seudos, when we sit at the table neither to satisfy our physical hunger nor to glory in our material achievements but to celebrate our spiritual attainments.
And there is still more. We are fortunate in having a Torah that can unravel even the most complex dilemmas. We must only meditate upon that Torah, probing its secrets and bringing forth its treasures.
Our sages tell us that the Torah can be referred to as “pardes,” an orchard. The word pardes is an acronym for the various levels of Torah study. P (pei) stands for p’shat – simple translation, understanding the words without searching for deeper commentary. R (reish) stands for remez – hints and signs, which every letter, dot, and word of the Torah contains. D (daled) stands for drush – digging into the words to bring forth the precious inner truths. S (samech) stands for sod – secrets; the Torah is full of secrets that have the power to open the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf, and the minds of the most obstinate.
If we look for illumination by entering the orchard of Torah and using these amazing tools of pardes, all will become clear and we will find meaning in our contemporary predicament as well as in our history and that which is yet to happen.
Great Torah luminaries have said there will come a period of time called “Ikvesa DeMeshicha” – when the footsteps of the Messiah become audible. Our Torah tells us of four exiles that we the Jewish people will have to endure: Egypt; the Babylonia/Persia/Mede empires; Greece; and Rome.