The last verse of this week’s haftara offers a puzzling vision of redemption: “I GOD will speed it [redemption], in [its] due time.” (Isaiah 60:22). But which is it? Will redemption come “in due time” – presumably after the fulfillment of preordained conditions– or will it break forth suddenly, “with speed”? Should we be expecting a long wait? Or should we live in a state of constant hopeful readiness?
In the Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin (98a), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi resolves this tension: “If they merit redemption, I will hasten its coming. If they do not merit redemption, it will wait until its due time.” In this reading, both possibilities stand: The Jewish people may be redeemed immediately, or the redemption might have to wait until certain conditions occur in its due time. Our behavior can tip the scales and hasten salvation; if not, it will arrive at the destined time.
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi’s teaching challenges the normally accepted paradigm of how redemption comes about. By and large, we envision the coming of the Messiah as following a certain set script: The Jewish people repent and return to God, and this in turn leads God to have mercy on us and ending our exile and suffering.
But perhaps this is not the only possible paradigm. Maybe the exile has a fixed limit, independent of the spiritual state of the Jewish people. Even without full repentance, or any repentance, if God judges that the diaspora is too difficult and may destroy us as a people, then the “time” of the redemption will have come, and He will save us unconditionally (in its due time).
Some have pointed out the providential nature of the establishment of the State of Israel immediately on the heels of the Holocaust. On the surface, the horrors of the war years convinced both the Jewish People and the world of the urgent need for a Jewish state.
But there is also a deeper, spiritual dimension: The destruction of the vast majority of the Jewish world and the imminent danger of the collapse of Jewish peoplehood and continuity left God with no choice, as it were, to intercede and begin the process of redemption.
This is not, God forbid, a justification or explanation for the Holocaust, which still defies comprehension. But it can provide a lens through which to view why the greatest redemptive chapter in Jewish history opened so quickly after that catastrophe. And it can help us to understand why redemption began to progress even absent a mass movement of repentance and return to God among the Jewish people: God was bringing redemption “in its due time”.
The Ramban echoes this idea. He states explicitly that repentance is not a necessary prerequisite for redemption: “This song of Haazinu does not condition the future events it describes on repentance or service” (Devarim 32:40).
Likewise, R. Chaim ibn Attar, in his commentary Or Hachayim on Parshat Behar (25:28), writes: “When the Master [God] sees that the people have no power to suffer more blows, and that their debts [sins] have increased so greatly that they can no longer be borne, the time of his bondage will last only ‘until the Jubilee,’ i.e., until the time preordained for the redemption… This will be the end of the exile even if the people of Israel remain utterly evil”.
We likewise find many instances in Tanakh where God decides to have mercy on the people for the sake of His own great name and the covenant with their ancestors, even when they have not yet had a change of heart.
As we recite this haftara, let us hope and pray to be deserving of a redemption that comes in a flash. The Jewish people of today, in Israel and outside it, has progressed spiritually beyond recognition in the years since the founding of the state.
All around us we see Jews, even those who consider themselves “secular,” deeply and actively engaged in strengthening their personal and collective relationship with God and Israel. This movement has only accelerated during the current war, a sign of resilience shining through the darkness of October 7 and its aftermath.
Through the crucible of conflict and strife, let us be blessed to be forged by God “as silver is forged” (Zechariah 13:9) into a people worthy of receiving His grace in an instant.