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Elections, War, and the Path to Redemption

• 8 min read
Elections, War, and the Path to Redemption

What a week.

An election in Israel that nobody fully trusts, certified anyway. An election in America that handed Congress to the party most hostile to us. A "boycott ride" being organized right now in Philadelphia to drive Jewish businesses out of the city — scheduled, of all dates, for the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. War talk from the Gulf to the Galil. Everyone is asking the same question: what is happening to the world?

I want to offer a different question: who is the world happening to?

Because when you ask it that way, the panic drains out and something else comes into focus. Nothing that happened this week is new. אין כל חדש תחת השמש — "there is nothing new under the sun" (קהלת א', ט'). Our Nevi'im described these days long ago. We are not watching chaos. We are watching a script unfold, written before any of these governments existed, and Hashem — not a prime minister, not a president, not a court — is still the One running it. All of it, every headline, is for one purpose: to carry the Jewish people toward the geulah He promised us.

The strange mathematics of the news

Stop and think about how strange the news actually is.

We are a fraction of one percent of humanity. Israel is a country you can drive across in a few hours. And yet open any front page, any day, in any language, and there we are. Wars that kill hundreds of people a day grind on with barely a mention. Actual atrocities unfold on three continents to general silence. But a Jew, a yeshiva, a settlement, a draft law — that is world news, every single time.

The nations cannot explain this obsession. We can. Chazal taught that Eretz Yisrael sits at the center of the world, Yerushalayim at the center of Eretz Yisrael, and the Mikdash at the center of Yerushalayim (מדרש תנחומא, קדושים י'). That was never a statement about geography. It is a statement about what history is for. The world's attention keeps snapping back to us because, whether it knows it or not, the world's story runs through us. That is not a reason for fear. It is the deepest reason for calm there is: the One who made us the center has never once lost control of the stage.

Now look at this week through that lens.

What happened in Israel

While the entire campaign was consumed with the Charedi draft and with removing Netanyahu at all costs, something else happened almost unnoticed: the Arab parties nearly doubled their strength, jumping from 10 seats in the outgoing Knesset to 19 seats — the Joint List with 12 and Ra'am with 7. Nineteen seats out of 120, many of them held by people who openly reject the very legitimacy of a Jewish state, now sit as kingmakers over whether there will even be a government.

How did that happen? The allegations are not whispers. Likud's representative on the Central Elections Committee says the party flagged some 1,200 cases of suspected fraud, overwhelmingly at Arab-majority polling stations: ballot supervisors offered cash to look away, a supervisor in Majd al-Krum chased from his post on camera, a power outage in Rahat during which people allegedly voted twice. Police arrested Ra'am-linked activists on suspicion of electoral bribery. The committee chairman himself ordered a Shin Bet investigation into suspected foreign funding, saying "serious suspicions have recently emerged that require examination."

And then, today, with that investigation barely begun, the Central Elections Committee certified the results, announcing it found no irregularities that would affect the outcome.

I am not a judge, and I was not in those polling stations. But I remember Beit Shemesh.

In 2013, a Charedi mayor, Moshe Abutbul, won re-election in Beit Shemesh. When forged identity cards turned up afterward, a court threw out the results of the entire city and ordered 150,000 residents through a full second election — months of campaigning, millions of shekels — all in the name of election integrity. (Abutbul won again anyway.) That was the standard when the suspected beneficiary was a Charedi mayor. This week, with 1,200 flagged cases, arrests, and an open Shin Bet probe, the results were certified in eight days. Draw your own conclusions about when "election integrity" matters in the State of Israel and when it doesn't. I have drawn mine.

And why the rush to certify? Because everyone understands the arithmetic. Throw out the tainted ballot boxes, or send the country back to the polls, and the seats flow back to Netanyahu and the right. The people who spent three years lecturing us about democracy would rather seat 19 anti-Zionist Arab MKs than risk that. They would rather have this result than a clean one. Say that out loud and you understand the whole week.

What happened in America

The same night, Americans voted, and the networks have called both chambers for the Democrats — the House and the Senate together.

I'll say what I believe plainly, because dancing around it serves nobody: there is no question in my mind that there was cheating here too. This is exactly why President Trump made voter ID his number one demand from the very beginning — you want to vote, you show ID, like in every functioning country on earth — and why he warned over and over against the oceans of mail-in ballots. We have seen the gimmicks too many times: the stuffed envelopes, the ballots cast in the names of the dead, the "helpers" working the old-age homes and hospital wards, and now the talk of millions of illegal aliens voting in this election. Without voter ID there is no election integrity. There is nothing to even argue about.

And the Republicans had one job — pass that reform while they held the power to pass it — and they dropped the ball. Not Trump. Trump said it from the beginning: if we don't pass this, we are going to have big problems, because the Democrats have no problem cheating and lying. The Democrats understand they are in a war, and in a war they will do whatever it takes. The Republicans keep trying to be the good guys, playing by rules the other side threw out long ago. You cannot play by the rules against a side that doesn't have any. That is why they got creamed, and I don't see them coming back from it anytime soon. For the next two years the Democrats will run the House and the Senate, block everything Trump tries to do, and drive him up a wall — with the media, bought and paid for with billions in globalist money, cheering every minute of it.

And here is the part that requires no speculation at all. The new Congress includes voices more hostile to Israel and to Jews than any in living memory. And in Philadelphia — the city of the Liberty Bell — organizers are promoting a bicycle "boycott ride" past Jewish-owned restaurants under the slogan "these Zionist establishments must go," timed for the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Both of Pennsylvania's senators, a Democrat and a Republican, condemned it. It is happening anyway. Jews marked for boycott, business by business, on that date. The Tucker Carlsons of the world just got louder, and the Jew, as always, is the ready-made scapegoat. If you needed proof that we are living inside Jewish history and not watching it from outside, there it is.

Where does this go next? I'll tell you what I see, and I'll tell you plainly that it is one Jew's opinion — we are not nevi'im, and anyone selling you certainty about next month is selling something. I believe the pressure around Iran is building toward a decision, and sooner than people think. I believe leaders on all sides have their own reasons to want it resolved. Is this the beginning of the final war the Nevi'im describe? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. What I know is that the world has been accelerating toward something for years now, and every acceleration has ended with the same lesson.

The lesson of Mitzrayim

Here is that lesson, and it is the whole point of this piece.

In Mitzrayim, Moshe Rabbeinu announced the geulah — and then everything got worse. The straw was taken away, the quotas stayed, and the Jews stopped believing that any messenger could save them. And precisely then: ויזעקו, ותעל שועתם אל האלקים — "they cried out, and their cry rose up to G-d... and G-d heard their groaning" (שמות ב', כ"ג–כ"ד). Not when they trusted in a deliverer. When they finally cried to Hashem Himself.

That is the design, and it has not changed. Every support we lean on is being kicked out from under us, one by one, in public. The Israeli government? We never put our faith there, and this week reminded us why. The American government? Look at Philadelphia. The courts, the committees, the networks, the strongmen, the alliances — each one is being revealed, in real time, as something that cannot save us. This is not Hashem abandoning us. This is Hashem clearing the room, until there is no one left to cry to but Him. Not the IDF. Not Trump. Not any party or politician. רבונו של עולם, אין לנו על מי להישען אלא על אבינו שבשמים — we have no one to lean on but our Father in Heaven. The final geulah will come the way the first one did: when we say that, and mean it.

So what do we do?

Not what some of our hotheads want to do.

Yes, bnei yeshiva are being arrested for the crime of learning Torah, and Shamayim keeps its own ledger of that — it is not forgotten and it is not small. But our Gedolim have told us clearly that blocking highways and raging in the streets without their guidance is not our way. The state may abandon its own restraints; we do not abandon the Torah's. We don't win by out-shouting them. We have never once won that way.

We win the way the center of the world wins. With achdus — at all costs, especially now, especially with the millions of our brothers and sisters who voted differently, think differently, and have been taught their whole lives to resent us. Every hour spent blocking a road could be an hour spent showing one Jew the beauty of Shabbos, the warmth of a Torah home, the face of a true ben Torah. That Jew is not our opponent. He is the reason we were put at the center. Bring one closer and you have done more for Klal Yisrael's security than any coalition negotiation ever will.

None of this is written to frighten you. It is written to steady you. The headlines will get stranger, because the script says they will. Let the nations read the news and tremble. We read it and recognize it.

Strengthen your emunah. Daven like it depends on your davening, because it does. Learn another blatt. Do another chessed. Love another Jew, davka the one who is angriest at you. And when you cry out, cry out to the only One who was ever really in charge.

The world is not spinning out of control. It is spinning around a center.

And the center is us — held, every moment, in His hands.

May Hashem guard His people wherever this week finds them, turn the hearts of our brothers toward Him and toward each other, and bring the geulah sheleimah speedily in our days, amein.

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