Prepared Remarks of Rabbi Hillel to the Babylon Judea Joint Distribution Committee - A Bit More

  To my esteemed colleagues and honored guests,

It is so wonderful to be back in my mother's home country. I have always felt as though this Babylon of Judean dreams is as home to me as Judea. The Babylonian dream guarantees freedom of worship for however many or few gods. How much more secure is that than Judea, where even the worship of one god is under threat forever?

When I first met Herod, he was ruthless, flawed, Machiavellian, always testing what he could get away with, full of dangerous mischief, but he was human and strove half-mightily to be a better king and do what's right. He is now the prince of darkness. The Romans have their Pluto, Jews have our Herod. 

Yet through it all the Kingdom of Judea is suffused with unaccountable light. God promised us the Land of Israel, and in His own way, He kept his promise in full. The world is full of unaccountable darkness and unaccountable light, and the maintenance of both is Hashem's will: unknowable, unaccountable to all.

But we can interpret, we can guess, and perhaps the guessing game is our purpose. Perhaps the ability to interpret, to connect the find connections between world of God to the world of man, is the Jewish people's essence. We are God's middlemen, his portfolio traders, his lawyers and doctors and engineers, the white collar workers who tend the world's accounts and set up the deals and make the trades. We are the beta testers, we are the variables in God's experiments. We are those who know half the truth, who dwell in God's ambiguity while the rest of mankind dwells securely in various places within the abyss of not knowing.  

Without the Jewish people, there is no 'this world.' There is only the world to come, but we bring parts and partials of the world to come down to earth. We establish the new within the old and the old within the new. We sometimes bring the alpha, we sometimes bring the omega, but only God knows the divine alphabet from Aleph to Taf. 

If all this sounds very hermetic, not to worry. There are moments in your lives when such mystical jumble will seem as clear as a sunny day and others when they seem even more obscure than they do currently. This is the essence of God's kingdom, where nothing makes sense and it all seems like a load of shit. Forgive my language but you know it as truly as I do: an Israel where Herod is king makes no sense and leads us into the desire to curse all the earth. Yet the earth is a blessing, where all good things are possible. So far as we can determine God's will, it is that we see the good within the bad just as we are tempted to see the bad within the good.