Friday, January 16, 2009

Every Jew redeemed--even those who don't want!

It is explicit in Rashi on the verse "and Hashem your G-d returned, etc" that the intent in this is every single Jew personally. In the words of Rashi: "He will take him by the hand mamash, man by man...they will be gathered each one of Bnei Yisroel"—we see that the promise of the redemption and the manner of the redemption, "Hashem...returned", comes as a continuation and as a consequence of the "reason" for the redemption, "you shall return to Hashem your G-d" "in the end Yisroel will do tshuva at the end of their exile", namely that in this, too, it is each and every one personally.

And so wrote the Alter Rebbe (Tanya, ch. 39; Hilchos Talmud Torah 4:3) that each and every Jew "will certainly do tshuvah in the end...כי לא ידח ממנו נדח (because none of them shall be thrust away)..."

According to this it includes even all the resha'im (wicked ones), even those that will not want to go out of exile—that the Holy One blessed be He will even awaken them in tshuvah and will redeem them from exile as we see explicitly in the verse: "it will be on that day that a great shofar will be blown and the ovdim (those who are lost) from the land of Ashur and the nidachim (those who are pushed away) in the land of Egypt will come and they will bow down to Hashem on the holy mountain in Yerushalayim" (Yeshayahu 27:13), that even those who are stuck in their exiles to such a degree that they become ovdim and nidachim (lost and pushed away) and they have no desire to leave the exile—even they will be awakened in tshuvah to such an extent that they will "bow down to Hashem on the holy mountain in Yerushalayim".

And as has been said numerous times, based on the language of the sages in the response to the question of the "wicked son" in the Pesach Haggada: "if he was there, he wouldn't have been redeemed"—that it seems perplexing: what is the need and what is the benefit from telling a wicked one that he has no connection to the Seder, which is in rememberance of the Exodus from Egypt? The explanation is that the intention is not to push away the "wicked son" from the Seder and to inform him that the redemption is beyond him, on the contrary—the response to him emphasizes that only "there (in Egypt) he wouldn't have been redeemed", but in the future redemption, since it follows after the giving of the Torah, he too will be redeemed.

And this illustrates to us, in passing, the wonderous effect of Matan Torah, where the Holy One blessed be He said "I am Hashem your G-d" in the singular, that YKVK is brought down to be the power and the life of every single member of bnei Yisroel, and therefore every Jew, even a wicked one like this, and so he is assured that through this power [which was bestowed upon him at Matan Torah] in the end he will be redeemed...

Lubavitcher Rebbe, Likutei Sichos XI, p.2 (Free Translation)

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