Moral Support

The generation of Ikvesa D’Meshicha, the time just before the Messianic era, will be, according to the Vilna Gaon, a dor chitzoni — a superficial generation focused on the external, to the exclusion of the internal. That would be us.

And as Rav Eliyahu Dessler elaborates, this is true of both the generation’s aveiros and its mitzvos. Its weakness will be not for philosophy but for gluttony, its undoing will not be Kant, but cant. This thoroughgoing externality will infect the good things people do, too, which will come to derive not so much from spiritual desires within as from material incentives from without, or, worse, simply from going unthinkingly with the flow of what everyone else is doing, too.

In a situation like that, what’s an Almighty G-d to do? During a family discussion about these disturbing points, my brother-in-law, Reb Avrohom Beer, pointed me toward a Michtav MeEliyahu (3:133) that’s particularly prescient of our present predicament. Rav Dessler quotes a letter of the Ramchal in which he explains why Heaven sometimes sees to it that we suffer the deprivation of our spiritual resources, such as the passing of tzaddikim, the enactment of decrees against mitzvos, the shuttering of yeshivos and the destruction of sifrei kodesh. Or, closer to home right now, when a pandemic and the ensuing responses to it accomplish some of the same.

The Ramchal says Hashem brings these things about in order to create the conditions necessary to address the sin of avodah zarah in our midst. Since that is an internal aveirah, which uproots the emunah existing in our hearts and minds, it thus requires a correspondingly internal response.