T here are times in history when winds of change blow through human society bringing with them what seems like a foretaste of yemos haMashiach. Unprecedented events come cascading one after another bringing a radical transformation that we think will last forever. But it doesn’t.
One such era was the fall of the Soviet Union which crumbled in a virtual instant with nary a shot fired freeing a dozen countries from its iron vise-grip. Imposing idols came toppling down the statues of Lenin and Ceausescu and all the despotic rest in city squares across that land. Lenin’s Tomb its occupant surely spinning within it had suddenly been revealed as nothing but a Communist plot.
Anyone observing those scenes with a Jewish sense of history surely heard a soundtrack playing in his mind set to the stirring words of the V’ye’esayu poem V’yiznechu es atzabeihem v’yachperu im p’sileihem [And they will reject their idols and be mortified with their statues]. Unfortunately the culmination of that poetic depiction of the End of Days — the v’yatu schechem echod l’ovdecha and the v’yishme’u rechokim v’yavo’u v’yitnu lecha keser meluchah [They will turn unanimously to serve You… and distant ones will hear and come and present You with a crown of Kingship] — never came to pass. Not even two decades later that empire had been substantially resurrected this time under the wicked thumb of a former Communist thug.
Surely it was a time too of Yosheiv baShamayim yischak Hashem yil’ag lamo when the Eibeshter in the Heavens above sat and laughed at what He had wrought in his kleineh velteleh down below — at the resha’im who had inculcated denial of Him into generations of untold millions for 70 years and the great “chachamim” who never dreamed this superpower could disappear overnight with a whimper.
