Written by: Peretz Green

MESSAGE OF THE ARCHANGEL GABRIEL

You do not understand a good heart

You do not understand a good heart because your tefillin shel yad has not been instructing you well. It is your fault and not that of the tefillin, you have been pumping it for kedusha while you refuse the conditions of that sanctity. A good heart is a prerequisite to the sanctity of the tefillin shel yad, as it is in every act requiring kedusha. Aba Shaul’s scale did not convince you of Elazar ben Arach’s weight (Avot, 2: 11). Aba Shaul, too, had realised that you would not understand the equilibrium of Ben Arach’s choice. Therefore he explained the essential value of ‘a good heart’ in his own name (ibid: 9). Ben Arach’s good heart outweighed all the Sages of Israel. It was certainly for this reason that they did not accept it. No sage likes to be outweighed in wisdom. Let Ben Arach stay on his side of the scale.

Even if we are somewhat up in the air, the sages may have thought, at least we are together while he is only one. We can teach one to have a benevolent eye, to search for a good friend or even to foresee the consequences of an undertaking, but we cannot teach one to have a good heart, for this is out of our control.

And yet a good heart outweighs all the details, for it is the best of the best which leads to every good.

Nor can we exit from the teachings of the sages, of blessed memory. They exhorted us unto proper actions so as to activate the heart unto goodness. They taught us to teach our people what good actions must be taken, actions which are equally good for all Jews. But you cannot command another man’s heart what it should or should not feel. Man is not easily responsible for his feelings but he is responsible for his actions because he has the power to control them.

Therefore we teach the actions, reiterated the rabbis, and if those actions are accompanied by the Divine Gift of a good heart, then the blessing will flow with abundant love. But even if one performs the proper actions, while he does not accompany those actions with a loving heart, but even as one who was forced into doing them, those actions nevertheless will be attributed to his merit. For in that actions he defeated the evil inclination of his heart which, if given its way, would not let him participate in that good actions. Therefore he is victorious in those actions even though his own sentiment prods him to turn in the other direction. In this we may gain more for our people, speaking for the sake of defeating the evil inclination. We must not wait for the spontaneous good sentiments that might not come.

Someone has said in Donkey talk that the most amazing quality of the Sages of Israel, of blessed memory, is that they were right even when they were wrong. But now o sages give ear for sometimes when the Donkey is alert, I use my angelic powers to work my way into his pen. The holocaust is over, thank God, although anti-Semitism in the world is still a relevant feature which must yet be destroyed. The land of Israel is back and the Goel of Israel has already been chosen. The world has already entered the ‘Messianic Days’ of the Fourth Generation. In this long generation of 65 years, a good heart is the essence in judgement, for this the great parameter of the universal judgement at the time of the Final Redemption. Rahhamana liba baw’ei, the Compassionate One loves the heart.

The judgement of the Fourth Generation is for the whole world and in the whole world. The privilege of Israel is that the punishments of its particular Fourth Generation finished with the Holocaust and afterwards the beginning of its redemption was born. But now the world at large has entered its Fourth Generation and the sound of the Shofar of the Lord gets ever stronger and stronger throughout, until the great and terrible Day of the Lord. You may well wail at the Wailing Wall but there is no Sanhedrian to substantiate the commandments of the Torah.

When the New Pact of the Final Redemption comes the culminating point of the lack of true Torah is at hand, reason for which in the same prophecy in Jeremiah of the brit ha-hhadasha it is likewise announced that the New Pact comes because the Ancient Pact has been invalidated, as it states:

"Behold, days are coming, saith the Lord when I will make with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah a new covenant; not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day that I took hold of them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; for they have broken My covenant, although I was become their husband, saith the Lord. But this is the covenant that I shall make with the house of Israel, after those days, saith the Lord, I place My law in their inward parts, and upon their heart will I write it; and I shall be unto them for a God, and they shall be unto Me for a people. And they shall not teach anymore every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying: Know the Lord, for they all shall know Me, from the least of them even unto their greatest ones, saith the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin will I not remember anymore. Thus hath said the Lord, who bestoweth the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, who stirreth up the sea that its waves roar - The Lord of Hosts is His name: If these ordinances ever depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then also shall the seed of Israel cease from being a nation before Me during all time" (Jeremiah, 31: 30-39).

Why the great force of God’s oath that the seed of Israel shall never cease from being a nation before Him? Are there not enough promises for such in the Torah and Prophets? Yet here it is needed for re-establishing the Torah at the end of the Fourth Generation, for during the Fourth Generation itself the Pact of the Torah is considered broken and the New Pact of the Final Redemption is established. For fear lest it be thought that the New Pact comes to disqualify the Ancient Pact or that the ‘new people’ of the New Pact replaces the ‘people of Israel’, stands God’s oath to dispense with such thinking in such a way as to define Israel’s unending and unbroken bond with the God of Israel.

The New Pact of the Final Redemption is universal and the Torah itself is ‘universalised’ by way of it. At that time the Judgement of the Higher Tribunal of Israel, the judgement of which is in conjunction with the traditional laws of the Torah, so to speak for the sake of comprehension, is ‘non-functioning’ and Judgement is ceded to the Higher Tribunal in conjunction with the New Pact brought by the Final Goel. This too is a great charity of the Lord, for if the Higher Tribunal of Israel was judging Israel in accordance with tradition, terrible decrees would fall upon the Jewish people, God forbid.

Instead the universal values of the New Pact are applied to all and the great majority of Jews who do not follow or follow very scantily the tradition are judged by the universal values of the New Pact and are saved by it from harsh decrees.

There was a similar type of Justice at the time of Yeshua, but Christianity could not take hold of God’s oath to His eternal love towards the Jewish people, and so they turned the Scriptures inside out and read it from the other side. Nevertheless many universal values did go out for the nations through that mission. But also the Higher Tribunal of Israel could not ‘cede’ its Judgement to any hypothetical Tribunal of the nations because Christianity was outside of the Second Commandment. Therefore the harsh judgements of the destruction of the second Temple and of the long and bitter exile could not be avoided.

The Final Redemption, however, looks towards the positive which is coming in and after the Fourth Generation. The direction is not towards exile but towards the great promised redemption. The time is coming when Israel will know and will feel its own sanctity, when it will follow the derech eretz loved by God and loved by people. Then will it be meritorious in judgement and it will have thrown off its prejudices, however justified, of the past. In that period Israel will realise its true role in relation to the peoples of the world.

Plagues of darkness will stamp out the arrogant and the evil-hearted throughout the world, but the good-hearted, the humble and the merciful shall be saved, whether of Israel or of the nations. Then also Israel shall arrive at the evaluation of Aba Shaul and to the choice of Elazar ben Arach and they will see the prophetic message that it contained. A time will come when the choice of Ben Arach will outweigh all the Sages of Israel. There will be a time of judgement when on the scales of the balance the goodness of the heart will outweigh all other details of the Law.

Ben Arach was on that plate of the balance by himself because that judgement comes at a particular and unique period in history. At that time Israel has already come back to its land but chaos reigns. The Jewish people are divided into a thousand currents and no one accepts the authority of the other while the gap between the religious and non-religious is an ocean and politics is corrupt. At that time, Israel, for its own good, is judged with the same parameter as for the nations, each person according to the goodness of his heart.

The Teacher Haim often retold the story: It happened that King Solomon was extremely happy because of the many things that he had accomplished. He had been anointed king. God had spoken to him in a dream. He had established the largest and most peaceful reign ever known in Israel. And most of all, he had built, for the Lord and for the people, the great Temple at Jerusalem, and the priestly laws of the Holy Torah were finally put into practice in the House of God.

King Solomon meditated on his great fortune and on the great merit which had befound him. In his profound enthusiasm his heart desired to know what great place his soul had gained in the other world above, and in his personal prayer he asked the Lord that it be shown to him in a dream. And so it was; he saw that night in his sleep a marvellous vision of great honor, in an incredible place of spiritual pleasures, unlike anything in the world. He noticed, however, in his dream that there was another place far above his, with glorious and marvellous pleasures even greater than his own. And as he looked at that elevated realm above him, he was shown the blessed soul of an elderly woman, the soul of whom had merited to that higher paradise.

When King Solomon awoke, although he was grateful for that extraordinary vision, he was blatantly upset in his desire to know what that elderly widow had accomplished here in the world to have received such a high reward. What great acts had been done that had raised her up to a place before God even more than king Solomon who had built the holy Temple for the God of Israel? He prayed to know it.

That night he was again shown a vision in which that elderly woman explained to him that she, in life, had been extremely poor. It happened one time that she noticed that a neighbour, also a very poor elderly widow as she, was cold and didn’t have with what to cover herself. And even though this lady also had nothing to her name in her small empty house, she managed to find knitting needles and some spools of wool and made for her neighbour a warm heavy sweater. So much had this act of compassion found favour in the eyes of the Lord, that He placed her in a marvellous paradise, after her death, a paradise even more elevated than that of King Solomon in all his splendor. Such is the incommensurate love of God for the compassion of a good-hearted person.