These lines are written as the dimensions of the disaster in Beit Shemesh slowly come to light—a tragedy that unsettles hearts already brimming with the joy of these days. What is the proper movement of the soul in such an hour? How does one hold pain and greatness together without diminishing either?
In recent days, one phrase has echoed again and again: We are living through historic moments. That is certainly true. Yet to describe these terrible and exalted moments as “historic” and nothing more is to see only part of the picture. The hours in which we are privileged to live are not merely another link in the long chain of Jewish and world history. They are moments toward which history itself has been flowing—moments long awaited, prayed for, studied, and believed in across centuries.
Generations read of such days, taught about them, hoped for them, and lifted their eyes toward their fulfillment. We are not only participants in history; we are standing at one of its points of convergence.
***
At the redemption from Egypt, it was revealed that all of creation is but a staff in the hand of the Holy One, bent according to His will and for His glory. The revelation of Megillat Esther is deeper still. Through a story in which the Name of Hashem is never mentioned—through intrigue, excess, vanity, and the pursuit of honor—it becomes clear that even human choice is a staff in His hand. What people freely choose to do, whether noble or wicked, becomes part of a winding plot that ultimately reveals Divine glory.
The arrogance, cruelty, and ancient hatreds that seek to extinguish the light of Israel become, paradoxically, the raw materials for a higher unveiling. Carefully laid plans of destruction, refined ideologies of enmity, projects engineered with brilliance and determination—all these can become instruments in a symphony whose end is redemption. Through the choices of human beings, for good and for ill, the Divine plan advances with exact precision. The words promised to us—“They shall know that I am Hashem, Who brought them out of the land of Egypt to dwell among them”—continue to unfold before our eyes.
The terrible pain that erupted on Simchat Torah 5784 opened a chain of events whose scope we are only beginning to grasp. What began in darkness has set in motion a sequence that has reshaped the landscape of threat and power. Looking back, even over a relatively short span by historical standards, one discerns moments of astonishing providence without which none of this would have occurred. Courage on the battlefield. Quiet endurance on the home front. Unlikely turns of political and military circumstance. Strategic miscalculations by enemies bent on destruction. Technologies developed here with astonishing ingenuity. An economic and social resilience that made action possible. Piece by piece, these elements have combined into a single reality in which the armies of earth appear to move in concert with the armies of Heaven.
And yet—there is Beit Shemesh. There are tragic and harsh losses. They, too, are part of the story.
The words “existential threat” had become so familiar in reference to the Iranian nuclear project that they risked turning into clichés. We spoke of them without fully pausing to consider what they meant. An existential threat means precisely that: a plan in which no Jew would remain upon the soil of Zion. Not rhetoric, but blueprint. Not fantasy, but methodical intent.
To recall this sobering truth is not to minimize our losses. It is to widen the frame. The terrible price paid in confronting danger is beyond words, yet it must be weighed against what would have been paid had we shrunk from facing it. We are being tested now—tested in our ability to see beyond the immediate image, beyond the pain of the present hour, toward a truer and wider horizon. The truth is that the story unfolding around us is larger than any single moment within it.
***
We have grown accustomed to a narrow soundtrack—complaint, pettiness, fixation on the visible fragment. “There can be no celebration,” some protest, as though the absence of unalloyed joy negates the magnitude of the hour. From a child, such a claim is understandable; a child sees only the immediate hurt. But are we children, unable to lift our gaze to the full stature of the moment in which we stand?
We have been granted the privilege of living in a generation that many of our greatest leaders feared to witness—so turbulent, so marked by concealment and fracture. And yet we have also been granted the privilege of seeing the sweetening of so much bitterness, of watching the hand of Hashem at work in our enemies, raising our stature and binding our wounds.
The final stretch has never been promised to be free of pain. Redemption does not unfold without cost. But the forward gaze must be one of clarity and trust. “Their salvation shall be eternal, and their hope in every generation.” Even as we mourn, even as we stagger beneath the weight of loss, we are called to recognize the vastness of the hour—and to respond not with smallness, but with faith worthy of it.
