Predictions of War
For 1500 years, from the days of Byzantium, through the Ottoman Empire, through the revolutionary Kemal Ataturk (who knew the Shema prayer by rote and who it is claimed that he and many of the Young Turks were descendants of the Shabetai Zvi-following Donmeh families ), up until the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom, Jews in Turkey experienced almost no persecution and flourished economically: "Turkey is a country that lacks for nothing. It is better to live under the Muslims than under the Christians!" (Rabbi Yitzhak Sarfati).
"Never trust Johnny Turk!" was a WW1 ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corps) adage, and among the confederation of nations that will attack Israel in the war of Gog and Magog is the "House of Togarmah" (Ezekiel 38:6), generally identified as Turkey. And on the cryptic verse "Warships will come from Kittim (identified as Cyprus by Saadia Gaon) to attack Assyria and Eber, and they too will be destroyed" (Numbers 24:24), the Targum Yonatan states: "Ships loaded with weapons and men will come from Constantina (Istanbul) and cause pain to the children of Eber (the 'Hebrews'), but their end is to fall by the hand of the Messiah and be destroyed forever", a path that Turkish PM Recep Erdogan may be following!
Torah historians view WW2 and the Holocaust as continuations of WW1 and the decline that it initiated in European Jewry. WW1 indeed began on the Jewish national day of mourning, Tisha' b'Av (9th day of the Hebrew Month of Av) 1914 - 5674... Adolf Hitler himself, one of the few lowly corporals to win the coveted Knight's Cross in WW1 for bravery, was conceived on Tisha b'Av 1888!
The Vilna Gaon held that the Germans were of the seed of Amolek (i.e. Amalek son of Eliphaz son of Esau son of Isaac and twin brother of Jacob), and because of this Rabbi Chayim Sonnenfeld refused to go out and see Kaiser Wilhelm when he visited Jerusalem in 1898 saying "The Germans exhibit the classic symptoms of Amolek - externally polite and friendly, but harboring a deep and bitter hatred of the Jewish people". The Gerer Rebbe stated that there were many descendants of the Amolekites amongst modern Germans.
"Men think that Berlin is the new Jerusalem. But the coming storm of destruction will emanate expressly from Berlin" (Rabbi Simcha Meir of Dvinsk, 1925). "The 12 million dead of the Great War? That was child's play. The real thing will start in ten years time!" (Chafetz Chayim 1929).
Many regret that the atom bomb came just too late to be used on German cities in 1945, and that the Morgenthau Plan was never implemented after the war: the destruction of all German industry, and the ploughing over of the German Plain, reducing it to a permanent agrarian society to ensure that a new generation of Teutons would never again be able to threaten humanity: "Should Germania of Edom they ever sally forth from their land, they will attempt to destroy the entire world" (Megillah 6). "Whoever dreams that he is in Egypt - his welfare will increase, in Damascus - he will be revitalised,.....in Germany - he will have sorrow" (Siddur Beis Yaakov)!
At their best, the Germanic peoples are without peer. But at their worst, history has repeatedly shown how their famed Gemutlichkeit can quickly change to their equally famed Furor Teutonicus. Never forget that the perpetration of the Holocaust required the full cooperation of the German scientists, doctors, judiciary, financiers, press, industrialists, railwaymen, Red Cross, church, and diplomats.
Let us pray that the new generation in the reunified Germany does not come under the category of "unity for the wicked is bad for them and bad for the world" (Talmud Sanhedrin 71). Ominously, Germany is depicted as being among the armies invading Israel in the War of Gog and Magog: "Gomer and ALL her armies" (Yechezkel 38:6): "Gomer is Germania" (Talmud Yoma 10). The word "ALL" is significant, because until 1990, it was not possible for a divided Germany to send troops from both East and West. Now reunified, they can!
Esau wasn't such a bad fellow. He is only considered a rasha (evil person) because his identical twin brother was such a tzaddik (saint) in comparison! Esau slew Nimrod (Talmud Bava Batra 16), the dictator of the ancient world who had tried to kill his grandfather Abraham: "If someone had killed Hitler, he'd be a hero and we wouldn't examine his past misdeeds too closely!" (Rabbi Avigdor Miller).
"Esau had the potential to have been one thousand times greater than Jacob, and if he had been worthy would have risen higher even than Moses and King David, and would have merited to have been the Messiah!" (Komarno Rebbe).
One of the great 'What Ifs' of history is what would have happened if Esau had not gone renegade, his departure from the Jewish camp being considered to have been an even greater loss than that of the Ten Tribes. That the Torah expended 43 verses in listing Esau's descendants, and even their concubines, showed God's enduring solicitude for them and hope that they might yet have been reincorporated in to the Israelite fold.
"You shall serve your brother": had Esau accepted Jacob's leadership very great achievements would have been possible and the history of the world would have been entirely different. Isaac blessed Esau that "you shall live by the sword" and the military prowess of his descendants who went on to rule Rome, Carthage, Bozrah, Mocha, Thrace, Tyre, Sparta, Anatolia, Seville (Spain) and Germania is renowned.
The Roman Emperor Antoninus came under the enlightened influence of Judah The Prince, and had the Roman legions at that time become the fighting arm of the People of Israel instead of its sworn enemy, the descendants of Jacob and Esau could yet have fulfilled the original Divine Plan of together conquering and Judaising the entire world.
The mystical significance of Esau and the potential of the sparks of the eight Edomite kings "who reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the Children of Israel" (Genesis 36) is foundational in Lurianic Kabbalah to the concepts of the Shattering of the Vessels, the World of Tohu, and of the very existence of evil in the universe
After 2000 years of crushing Exile, the paradigm of "death with honor" was a concept that the Jew had almost forgotten.
The Halacha is that usually "pikuach nefesh" (the preserving life) - even for a moment, overrides most other considerations. That Halacha can also be distorted e.g. where today, despite being well aware that one of those considerations is the Torah prohibition on voluntarily ceding parts of Eretz Yisrael overriding pikuach nefesh, most Orthodox still inexplicably back the long - discredited Land for Peace Israel-PLO suicide pact.
Controversy still rages as to whether the saintly rabbi of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Menachem Zemba, Halachically supported or opposed the Jewish uprising: resist and kill 200 Germans and be exterminated right now. Or surrender and live, only to be gassed in one year. It is a fact that the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto, which did not rise up, subsisted for another year before they too were liquidated.
Israelis used to ridicule the Jews of the Holocaust generation for not fighting back, citing how in the last days of the war two unarmed German guards were able to march 5000 Jews for 10 miles from one concentration camp to their deaths in another, without any resistance or attempt at escape whatsoever!
I WILL BRING WEAKNESS INTO THEIR HEARTS IN THE LANDS OF THEIR ENEMIES.
AND THE SOUND OF A DRIVEN LEAF WILL CHASE THEM EVEN WHEN NO ONE IS PURSUING....
YOU WILL HAVE NO POWER TO STAND AGAINST YOUR ENEMIES! (Leviticus - Vayikra 26).
Yet on Yom Kippur 1973, and again 50 years later on 7 October 2023 the Israelis themselves were chastened at their own passivity and at the inexplicable timidity, faint heartedness and self-restraint of the mighty IDF in the face of a puny foe, even as thousands of Israelis were reduced to body parts, let alone the thousands and thousands killed and wounded by Arab homicide bombers since Oslo in 1993 :
"FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE KILLED ALL DAY LONG; WE ARE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED" (Tehillim 44).
Before WW2 broke out, a group of Zionists led by Vladimir ("Ze'ev") Jabotinsky foresaw the upcoming Holocaust of the Jews. His followers were known as the Revisionists and later founded the Irgun. They proposed several practical solutions to fight Hitler. But one stands out: a Jewish army on the European Continent trained by what would later be known as the Allies. Jabotinsky had the backing of the Polish government, and could have recruited and armed over 300,000 Jewish fighters, so that the Jews could have protected themselves from the SS and the accursed Einsatzgruppen. But the Jewish Establishment ridiculed and opposed him, and a chance to save Europe's Jews went lost.
"I am convinced that no irreligious Holocaust survivor learnt anything from the Holocaust!" (Rabbi Meir Kahane).
Rav Eliezer Shach stated in 1990: Hashem kept count of each and every sin in a running count over hundreds of years, until the count amounted to six million Jews, and that is how the Holocaust occurred. If we do not accept this as a punishment, then it is as if we don't believe in Hashem. After He exterminated the six million, He began counting again. Now things are quiet and good for us because the new count has not reached its conclusion. However when it does then there will be a new period of judgement...."
On the other hand the Lubavitcher Rebbe held in 1991: "These are matters that do not come as punishments for sins, but rather because this was simply Hashem's decree without reason or any explanation in any intellectual or reasonable way -
'BE SILENT, THIS IS WHAT I THOUGHT TO DO, IT IS A DECREE THAT I HAVE MADE' (as Hashem stated at the death of Rabbi Akiva, Talmud Menachot 29). The destruction of six million Jews in the cruellest and most horrible way, cannot possibly be a punishment for sins. Even Satan himself could not calculate sins so great in that generation to justify such a punishment. We have no explanation in light of the wisdom of the Torah at all for the Holocaust."
Eilu v'eilu divrei Elokim chayim? (THESE ARE THE WORDS OF THE LIVING GOD).
'From Berlin the assimilation and Torah defection started, so from Berlin the destruction came; as the Jews tried to get lost among the Gentiles, so were they tracked down by the researchers of the Zentralstelle
(Central Office for Jewish Emigration directed by the German Nazis) back to the third and fourth generation; because married Jewesses exposed their hair for the first time in history, so was their hair shorn off; because they so revered the German doctors, so did the German doctors experiment on them to death; because they were so enamoured with German gemutlichkeit (geniality), so were the Germans permitted to show their other side, the dreaded Furor Teutonicus (Teutonic Fury), Because they trusted in the secular Jewish leaders, so those very leaders betrayed them in their hour of need....etc etc" (Rabbi Avigdor Miller, "Rejoice O Youth", Fifth Day, 1962). Indeed Rabbi Miller's theoditic (vindicating Divine Goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil) later book "A Divine Madness - a defense of Hashem in the matter of the Holocaust" (2013), was not universally well received in the Orthodox world.
"THE GERMANS STARTED WORD WAR I. THE GERMANS STARTED WORLD WAR II. MARK MY WORDS: THE GERMANS ARE GOING TO START WORLD WAR III!" (British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore)
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who was once a KGB colonel, and has become a fervent born-again Russian Orthodox Xtian who talks apocalyptically of martyrdom with his enemies if Russia is attacked. He seems to be a Judeophile.
Yechezkel 38 and traditions from the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Dovid Luria, Rabbi Shimshon of Ostropol and Rabbi Moshe Shternbuch, indicate that war involving the Black Sea, Russia, Moscow, Tobolsk, Turkey, the Bosphorus, Dardanelles, Crimea, and the Strait of Kerch might be portents of Moshiach. The name 'Ukraine' derives from Ekron in the Tenach, the original Ukrainians being of Philistine origin (Sefer Hadras Chen, Rabbi Noach Weintraub), and who in the future are destined to be uprooted - Ekron te'aker (Tzfaniya 2): "The Ukrainians have no right to a state nor independence!" (the Yenuka of Stolin).
In the year in which The Messiah will be revealed, all the nations of the world will provoke each other. The king of Persia (Iran) will provoke the king of Arabia (Saudi Arabia). The king of Arabia will go to the King of Edom ... to take counsel, and the king of Persia will threaten to destroy the entire world" (Midrash Yalkut Shimoni Yeshaya 59).:
"Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a heap of ruins" (Yeshaya 17).
Persia is depicted (Yechezkel 38) as one of the nations that will be confederate with Gog and Magog in attacking the Land of Israel. "40 years before the Messiah son of David, there will appear the Messiah son of Joseph who will be slain by the King of Persia in Jerusalem" (Midrash Pirkei Hechalot 39). "If you see a Persian horse tethered to a grave in Eretz Yisrael, look out for the coming of the Messiah!" (Midrash Shir Hashirim Rabbah 8)!