Will We Redeem Ourselves or Will We Be Redeemed?

0:00 Q: Is the Messiah something we generate or something that happens to us?

4:00 What the Messiah will do and how he will do it

7:15 Why do we study Torah these days if we don't truly have the Torah in exile?

8:30 What is the Torah about?

11:00 Why the Torah doesn't work outside of Eretz Yisrael

13:15 The most burning question is: "What is the Torah about?," i.e. "What is da'as Hashem?"

18:00 How can the Torah assert that man is in the image of God if people kill each other?

20:00 Are there fundamentally unbridgeable differences between human beings?

22:45 The Torah doesn't reveal truths as much as it gives a vision of what can be

24:45 Torah as a radical document suggesting what can be

26:45 In order to understand the Torah, we have to view it within a historical lens as well 28:45 We can't tell people they don't have Torah

31:45 Not everyone could be Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi who lived in the past and the future

36:00 Why there developed a concept of the Redemption as something that will happen to us miraculously

40:30 In the past, there was no way to talk about Redemption without using miraculous terminology

43:00 Why people believe in being passive; the great danger of hastening the End before its time45:15 Whether the world is ready for something depends on whether we are ready for it

47:00 Those who have no understanding of Redemption should indeed do nothing about it

50:30 Summary

This lecture is a project of the Jacob Lights Foundation