The role of jealousy, its elimination and messianic redemption
By zevi770 · February 9, 2012
I read an amazing thing in a mammer, the Rebbe quotes a medrash (ancient commentary) that God complained that his whole intent in exile is to rid us of the faintest whiff of evil and we complain about exile.
How does exile rid us of the faintest trace of evil?
There is no doubt about it, Jews are the most nice kindhearted people in the world, how did they get this way.
The answer may seem a bit barbaric but true nonetheless.
The answer to this is based on another question the Rebbe asks.
How come, if God was to redeem the Jews from Egypt did he make a final plague on the Jews – namely they had to collect straw from all over Egypt which made their workload ten times as difficult.
You are about redeem your people out of two hundred and ten years of captivity, slavery and abuse, why hurl a new salt into their already crying soul.
The answer is, for the Jews to receive the Torah they needed to be as one man, with one heart.
Little children have a great sense of identification with others, but as our own ego gets born, we tend to be driven toward our own selfishness – so it is not that we are not still pure souls but there is a covering that shields that purity, for a person cannot be running in two directions at once, and the stronger pull eliminates the weaker one, or at least relegates it to the back seat.
But what would happen if God were to remove the ego though showing one how debased he finds himself in?!
Ironically, this happens to drug addicts who deny responsibility, literally stealing their parents money and act with immunity until one day their ego – staring at themselves in the mirror, seeing how debased they have sunken – gets shattered, they call it hitting rock bottom, it as this point that they turn around and they begin to become a mentsh again.
In other words, perhaps – and this is a harsh thing to say, but as mentioned the result is true – the holocaust and the myriad other abuses the Jews went through which could fill tomes – as Martin Gilbert, wanting to focus on the positive, had to mention all the negative in Jewish history, for it is so prominent, getting literally expelled from homelands where Jews built up country after country over centuries – in fact every European country expelled Jews at one point or another (and only through the grace of God who ensures that we were scattered, did we manage to be welcomed and reestablished by brothers in new continents etc.) so all of this had the net affect of debasing our ego.
This in fact happened in a small way o the western countries and which is why they too have become good people.
The western countries having killed each other for millennia, with holy wars etc. and finally two world wars, started by amalek-Germany (for the Rebbe Rashab says, based on midrashik sources that Germany is the tribe of amalek) so waking up after the mayhem of tens of millions of peoples senseless slaughter, the western world abandoned the policy of abuse – England gave up, as all other countries did, their colonies, and a new era of human rights, Democracy, was ushered in.
Even Russia’s changed happened by looking in the mirror and contrasting herself with the policies of other western countries, particularly America, she was repulsed by what she saw, and changed.