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Die Zerstörung des Tempels von Jerusalem - Francesco Hayez (1867)

Forty Years
by Levi Chazen
Oct 26, '06 / 4 Cheshvan 5767

Forty Years and "Generation"

"The choice is ours, but let's make it quickly - for there is precious little time left. "

"And the rains were upon the earth for forty days and forty nights." In our parsha, we are introduced to the concept of 40 and its link with punishment. For forty days and nights, acid rain poured down on the earth, wiping out all forms of life except for Noah and his household.

Forty - the punishment of a world flooded for its sin.
 
And centuries later, as the Jews of the desert despised the pleasant Land and wept over their home in Egypt, the Almighty angrily decreed that the generation of the desert would not enter the Holy Land, saying, "And your children will wander in the wilderness forty years and bear your faithlessness."

Again forty.
 
We also find in the case of the punishment of stripes that the Torah teaches us: "Forty shall you strike him, he shall not increase." Again, forty as a punishment for a person's sins. The Midrash says:

And why does the Torah obligate forty stripes? For he (the sinner) violated a Torah given in forty days and brought death unto himself, who was created in forty days. Let him therefore be whipped forty times and be relieved of his punishment, as was done to Adam, who sinned, was deserving of death and was punished with forty. For the world was cursed with forty curses due to his sin: ten for Adam, ten for Eve, ten for the serpent and ten for the land.

But we also find that forty years is a grace period, a final opportunity to reverse needless disaster. As we find in the story of Nineveh: "In forty days Nineveh shall be overturned." A final warning, a last opportunity, a forty-day warning period.
 
We find in the case of both holy Temples, the First and Second, that there were also grace periods. A last opportunity to return to HaShem and be saved before the final destruction set in. In the awful final days of the first Jewish state, the L-rd tells the prophet Ezekiel: "And they shall lie again on your right side and bear the sins of the house of Judah, forty days, each day for a year." Rashi writes that from the exiling of the ten tribes until the destruction of Jerusalem, there was a period of forty years.
 
For forty years the prophet Jeremiah prophesied to the Jewish people, pleading for them to return to HaShem and better their ways. One final opportunity, but still, the call went unanswered.
 
In the time of the Second Temple, the doors of the Sanctuary would open and close by themselves until Rabbi Yochanan admonished them, saying: "Sanctuary, Sanctuary, I know that you are destined to be destroyed." The Sanhedrin exiled itself forty years prior to the destruction of the Temple and sat in the marketplace. And the western candle of the Menorah would not stay lit in the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple.
 
Rabbi Meir Kahane wrote:

It became clearer and clearer to me that once again in our day, it is also forty years, forty years of warning, admonition opportunity. The final chance. Forty years - the number may not be exact - it might be a few more or less, but the period is clear. A last opportunity to reverse needless disaster and to bring the Redemption with grandeur and majesty.

And time is running out. Could we be at the end of the forty-year grace period? Could it have started with the Six Day War back in 1967? Our rabbis teach us that that in the seventh year - the Sabbatical year - will be wars, and the year after, the Messiah will come. In our recent history, we find that the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the first and second Intifada all took place during a Sabbatical year. And now we are approaching (in late 2007) another Sabbatical year. Could this be the end of the forty-year grace period that started in '67?
 
The choice is ours: Do we make the great decision, with faith in HaShem, to bring in the Redemption gloriously, swiftly - or, G-d forbid, through needless suffering? Do we have the faith to leave the exile once and for all, or do we stay behind and suffer the consequences? The pieces of the puzzle are all falling into place: Iran, North Korea, Iraq and so on.

The choice is ours, but let's make it quickly - for there is precious little time left.

Based on the teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane z.t.l. H.y.d.

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