If Our Grandparents Walked Through Jerusalem Today
A friend of mine was once giving a tour in the Old City of Jerusalem. At one point he stopped and told the group something very simple. He said, “If your grandparents and great-grandparents suddenly appeared here right now and saw Jews living in Jerusalem again, what would they say?”
And honestly, I think they would all ask the same question: “When did Mashiach come?”
Think about it. After two thousand years of exile, Jews came back home. Jews are living in the Land of Israel again. Jerusalem is filled with Torah. More Torah is being learned in the Land of Israel today than at any other point in Jewish history. Who would have imagined this?
My grandparents were murdered by the Nazis. Would they ever have believed that one day they would have a grandson living in Jerusalem as a rabbi, learning Torah and teaching Torah? I honestly don’t think so.
For so much of Jewish history, returning to Jerusalem felt almost impossible. Jews prayed for it. Dreamed about it. Cried over it. But most never imagined they would actually live to see it happen. And yet somehow, here we are.
Jews from all over the world came back to the Land of Israel. Hebrew became a living language again. Jewish life was rebuilt here after everything we went through. That’s why, to me, it’s very difficult to deny that something extraordinary is happening.
The Navi Yechezkel speaks about Hashem gathering the Jewish people back from the nations and bringing them again into the Land of Israel (Yechezkel 36:24). That prophecy felt distant for most of Jewish history. Today Jews are actually watching it happen.
And there’s another pasuk that feels impossible to ignore right now:
“When Hashem returned the captives of Zion, we were like dreamers” (Tehillim 126).
Sometimes Jewish history today honestly feels dreamlike.
Ikvata D’Meshicha
The Gemara speaks about Ikvata D’Meshicha — the footsteps of Mashiach (Sanhedrin 98a).
I’ve always loved that phrase.
It doesn’t say the revelation of Mashiach. It says the footsteps. Before you see someone arrive, first you hear movement. You hear footsteps approaching. Maybe that’s what we’re living through now.
The Gemara in Megillah (17b) describes redemption unfolding in stages — first the ingathering of exiles, then the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and then redemption continuing to unfold from there.
And then the Gemara says something astonishing:
“Milchama nami atchalta d’geulah hi” — “War itself is the beginning of redemption” (Megillah 17b).
That doesn’t make history less painful. Jewish history is painful. But maybe redemption doesn’t only happen through obvious miracles. Maybe sometimes redemption unfolds through history itself — through the Jewish people somehow finding their way home again against every imaginable odd.
Maybe that’s why this period of Jewish history feels so emotionally overwhelming to so many people. We know we’re seeing something our grandparents could barely dream about.
Something Feels Different
I’m not saying we are living in complete redemption. Clearly, the world still has a very long way to go. There’s still suffering. There’s still hatred. There’s still war. Nobody looking honestly at the world could say everything is fixed.
But something about Jewish history feels different right now.
For centuries, Jews ended the Pesach Seder saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Now Jews are actually in Jerusalem. For centuries Jews dreamed of coming home. Now Jews are home.
And maybe that’s part of what Chazal meant by Ikvata D’Meshicha. Not that redemption suddenly appears all at once, but that at a certain point you begin to realize that the Jewish story itself has started moving in a different direction.