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