The final struggle over the Land of Israel is not rooted in the physical. While it’s true that Yishmael appears to be the violent opposing force to the yidden’s ability to draw closure to the galus, exile, the fact that we could crush our enemies in a matter of days or hours means that the key to the final redemption is not found in our military might.
So what’s holding us back?
Most of us have heard the famous gematria where the letters making up Amalek (עמלק) equal Safek (ספק) or doubt. While this concept has been applied to our personal relationship with the almighty in a daily sense for thousands of years – it is important to to see its connection to the current national predicament in the Land of Israel at the End of Days.
Rebbe Nachman teaches that the Kingdom of Haman/Amalek will use as its weapon the insatiable desire for money and material success. This weapon hangs over each of us and has penetrated the very makeup of our national enterprise. All of us have become pulled into its clutches and it has turned us from a nation of idealists to an extension of the Western consumer empire.
This safek, doubt about where we are heading flows from our fear of losing the material goals we have grown accustom to setting for ourselves. Zionism has in effect become pacified by its material success. Amalek has gained control. It is this pacification that prevents us from finishing the journey home, because home is not just a piece of land, but rather a recognition that the Land is above the material equation so often used when sizing the value of whatever it is one wants. The Land of Israel and the Nation of Israel are not quantifiable. We seek quiet and “normalcy,” but the more we seek these things the more Yishamel rises and pushes against us.
Amalek uses material pursuits not as a means to build vessels for holiness in our world, but rather as an end to themselves. This shift creates the space for doubt and the malaise that exists within us and the world. This doubt causes the perception that there is a disconnect between the divine and the physical world, which has caused us to pull back leaving us to clutch the material as the only meaning we feel we have created in our lives.
We can only rescue the Lost Princess from the castle and restore the Divine Presence to our Land by first removing the desire for the “castle of pearls on a mountain of gold” in its entirety. Doing this, will restore the pursuit of material wealth to just a means to create real holiness. This will naturally fill our national collective with a unifying Divine goal reclaiming our soul and Land forever.