Three Years Later: What Will We Make Permanent?
On October 20, 1991 – the 12th day in the Hebrew month of MarCheshvan – during the Rebbe’s weekly distribution of dollars for charity at 770 Eastern Parkway, a CNN reporter approached the Rebbe with a cameraman.
“What is your message to the world about Moshiach?” he asked.
The Rebbe replied: “Moshiach is ready to come now; it is only from our part to do something additional in the realm of goodness and kindness.”
Only a few months later, the Rebbe’s holy voice would be silenced by a stroke.
At the time, the message may have seemed difficult to comprehend. How could one additional act of goodness or kindness possibly affect something as vast as global redemption?
Perhaps that was only because we did not yet see humanity, and the extraordinary power of every human action, as the Rebbe did.
Today, unfortunately, it is easier to understand.
We have just emerged from Tisha B’Av, the day that embodies the destruction caused by hatred, division, and our inability to see the divine worth of another human being.
But the Jewish calendar does not allow us to remain amid the ruins.
In just a few days we celebrate Chamishah Asar B’Av, the fifteenth of Av, one of the most joyous days of the Jewish year. The intensity of the summer begins to recede, the nights gradually lengthen, and a new season of Torah, growth, and renewal begins.
The heat is beginning to break, literally and figuratively.
From here we begin moving toward the High Holiday season of Elul and Tishrei, a season defined by our own movement upward: one prayer, one mitzvah, one act of return at a time. It begins with renewal and culminates in the unrestrained joy of Simchat Torah.
This Simchat Torah will mark three years since October 7.
In Jewish law and thought, the number three is referred to as a “chazakah” – an establishment of permanence.
What kind of permanence will these three years establish within us?
October 7 was the most horrific moment in recent Jewish history.
We may ask the agonizing question: Where was G-d? But that question – famously asked in response to the Holocaust – demands that we also ask: Where was man?
Since October 7, much about mankind has become painfully clear. We watched enemies celebrate before the victims had even been buried. We watched large parts of the world respond with indifference, excuses, and eventually open hostility.
But we should also ask that question in its most positive sense:
Where was man? Man was rushing toward danger to rescue complete strangers. Man was leaving his family to defend his people. Man was sitting beside the wounded, feeding soldiers, comforting mourners, supporting displaced families, putting on tefillin, lighting Shabbat candles, sending supplies, giving charity, and standing publicly and proudly as a Jew.
In Israel and throughout the world, we have witnessed an eruption of Jewish courage, unity, generosity, and faith.
This brings us back to the Rebbe’s words.
One additional act of goodness and kindness really can change the world, because the courage, generosity, and love that we foster and cultivate in ourselves and in all of those within our sphere of influence is cumulative, to the point that it creates a light that utterly banishes the darkness of division and hatred.
The world is not shaped only by governments, armies, or great historical events. It is shaped by millions of individual human choices that eventually become a culture, a society, and a permanent reality.
As we rise from Tisha B’Av toward the joy of the fifteenth of Av, and from there toward Elul, Tishrei, and Simchat Torah, we must decide what kind of chazakah these three years will create.
Let it not be a permanence of trauma, fear, and division.
Let it be a chazakah of Jewish strength, unity, faith, goodness, and kindness.
The Rebbe’s holy voice resounds loudly: Moshiach is ready to come.
The next step is ours.