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How It Might Play Out: How Current Events Could Lead to the Messianic Era – By Pinchas Winston
PART OF MY job, I feel, is to connect people to the concept of redemption. After all, one of the six questions the Talmud says people will be asked on their final day of judgment will be “Did you anticipate redemption?” Sadly, many people will have to answer “no.”
It’s worse than that. NOT anticipating redemption slows it down, literally. Yes, the Final Redemption MUST come at a certain point, but it can also come earlier. Although that may not sound like much of a reason to anticipate redemption from where we stand, because we ALREADY have it so good, not anticipating redemption could become the very reason to make everything even worse.
Redemption is not only about being able to walk around freely and to safely live a Torah lifestyle. It’s actually about much more than that, like returning the entire nation to its borders in all of Israel, everyone accepting Torah as from God, and perhaps most important of all, the return of the Temple with the Divine Presence in it. Until that time God “suffers,” and for that reason WE should too.
The truth is that as good as we have it, we have NO idea what we are missing. It’s a little like someone who thinks Saturday is the best day of the week until he discovers Shabbat. Then he wonders how he could ever have thought he was happy without it.
But try to tell that to someone who has never known Shabbat, the REAL Shabbat. More people become Torah observant because of Shabbat than for any other reason, but until they discover its great joy for themselves, it’s hard for them to believe it. Until then, Shabbat just seems to restrict pleasure and fulfillment, not enhance them.
It also works like that with respect to redemption. When things are going well for the Jews, they think they’re already living it. They don’t believe that life can get any better, and they’re not convinced just by someone saying that it will, at least not enough to motivate them to anticipate and expedite it.
That’s one of the main reasons we’ve never really been ready for the end of an exile. It usually catches most Jews off guard, even the ones who pray for redemption three times a day. They just don’t see it coming because they didn’t see how current events could and would evolve into end-of-exile events—until they actually did. And they STILL can’t see it today.
To try to do something about that, I started a weekly essay called “Connecting the Dots.” The goal was to paint current events in messianic terms, in order to get people thinking that way. More than likely it only worked for the people who already thought that way, or at least wanted to, and not for those who didn’t.
For a few months in 2015 I went from the essay format to a novel format. I decided to portray the End-of-Days once again. I had already written two novels about this, called “Not Just Another Scenario, 1 and 2. I called the new novel “How It Might Play Out,” showing how the events of that time could lead to an End-of-Days’ scenario to stimulate the imagination of my readers.
I have no idea how many people read it or liked it. I do know that my mailing list increased more during those months than at other times. People love a good story, and some people like a messianic story even more.
A short while later I finished the novel. I felt the story had ended, and that it was time to go back to the essay format, which I did. “How It Might Play Out” was archived, and I forgot about it.
Several years later it occurred to me to give the material a second look. Perhaps it was still relevant. Maybe it was even publishable. I decided that it was, and here it is, published. At the very least, it may help those willing to think about Mashiach to do so, and thus be able to answer on their day of judgment, “Yes, I DID anticipate redemption.”
After all, we’re certainly living in the Messianic Era, probably towards the end of it. SURPRISE! So we might as well get with the program before the program moves along without us. That’s never worked well for us in the past.
