By Rabbi Josh Wander

For generations, Jews debated a fascinating question: How will the final Geulah—the Redemption—actually happen? Will it arrive supernaturally, with unmistakable miracles that overturn the normal order of the world? Or will it unfold gradually through apparently natural historical events, political developments, wars, diplomacy, human decisions and Jewish action?

It is an ancient and legitimate debate. But there is something almost absurd about continuing to discuss the question today as though we are still sitting in a beit midrash five hundred years ago speculating about some distant future. Hashem has spent the last several generations answering the question before our eyes. At some point, we have to stop debating what Geulah might look like and start looking at what has actually happened.

In 1917, after nearly two thousand years of exile, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael. Thirty years later, after the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history, the United Nations voted for partition, paving the international diplomatic road toward the establishment of a Jewish state. In 1948, against extraordinary odds, Jewish sovereignty was restored in our ancestral homeland. Jews began returning from the four corners of the earth—from Europe, North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union and beyond.

Then came 1967. In six astonishing days, the Jewish people returned to Yerushalayim, the Old City, Yehudah and Shomron, and most dramatically, to Har HaBayit—the Temple Mount. Places that generations of Jews could only dream about, pray toward and mourn from afar suddenly returned to Jewish hands.

One can debate whether each of these events technically qualifies as a “miracle,” but that almost misses the point. The process itself is staring us in the face. The Jewish people have returned to the Land. The desert has blossomed. Hebrew has returned as the spoken language of millions. Yerushalayim has been rebuilt. Torah has returned to Zion on a scale unimaginable only generations ago. The Jewish people have regained sovereignty, established an army, rebuilt ancient cities and gathered millions of exiles home. And somehow we are still sitting around asking whether Geulah will happen naturally or miraculously. Perhaps Hashem has already answered us.

The author of Eim HaBanim Semeichah, Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal HY”D, wrestled profoundly with this issue during the Holocaust. He had come from circles strongly opposed to the Zionist movement, but the catastrophe unfolding around him forced him to reconsider assumptions about how the return to Eretz Yisrael and the Redemption might actually occur. Rav Teichtal discusses the position of his great rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Shapira of Munkács, the Minchas Elazar, who expected the Redemption to come through openly miraculous divine intervention rather than through the political and practical activities then being undertaken to rebuild the Land. Rav Teichtal offers a striking explanation. Perhaps such an expectation was appropriate for someone on the extraordinary spiritual level of the Munkatcher Rebbe. But the Jewish people collectively were not necessarily on that level. Therefore, the Redemption could come clothed within natural events and through human initiative.

That distinction is enormously important because we often assume that miraculous Redemption represents the higher spiritual possibility, while a natural process is somehow second best. But perhaps that assumption itself needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps the greatest manifestation of Hashem’s will is not necessarily when He suspends nature, but when He directs nature, history and human beings toward the fulfillment of His promises.

Rav Avigdor Nebenzahl Shlit”a, Chief Rabbi Emeritus of the Old City of Yerushalayim, has made a fascinating observation regarding the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash. There is a famous disagreement in our sources over whether the Third Temple will descend miraculously from Heaven or whether the Jewish people will physically build it. Yet the Torah itself commands us, “ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם” — “They shall make for Me a Sanctuary, and I shall dwell among them.” The mitzvah is ועשו—“they shall make.” Rav Nebenzahl turns the common assumption on its head. If we are worthy, we will build it ourselves. If we are not worthy, then perhaps it will have to descend from Heaven. We instinctively imagine a fiery Temple descending from the heavens as the more glorious scenario, but this approach suggests almost the opposite. The greater spiritual achievement would be for the Jewish people to reach the level where we recognize our obligation, prepare ourselves, unite around Hashem’s will and actually perform the mitzvah with our own hands.

The miracle is not necessarily that Hashem does everything for us. The miracle may be that we finally become the people willing to do what Hashem commanded us to do. Perhaps the same principle applies to Geulah itself. Imagine a father whose child refuses to walk because he is waiting for his father to carry him everywhere. The father’s greatest success is not demonstrating that he is strong enough to carry the child. Of course he is. His success is teaching the child to stand up and walk. Hashem could have transported every Jew from exile to Eretz Yisrael on clouds. Instead, Jews boarded ships and airplanes. Hashem could have caused enemy armies simply to disappear. Instead, Jewish soldiers fought. Hashem could have lowered Yerushalayim fully built from Heaven. Instead, Jews laid stones, constructed neighborhoods, planted forests, built yeshivot and raised Jewish children here. Does that make the process less divine, or does it reveal something even greater?

The Rambam famously cautions us against pretending that we know precisely how the events of the Redemption will unfold. After discussing the Messianic era, he writes that regarding these matters, “no one knows how they will be until they occur” (Hilchot Melachim 12:2). The details were deliberately left uncertain, and a person should not make speculation about them the central focus of his religious life. But that raises a fascinating question: What would the Rambam say if he were living today?

The Rambam was warning Jews not to speculate with certainty about events that had not yet happened. But what happens once they begin happening? Would the Rambam, standing in modern Yerushalayim, look around at millions of Jews gathered from virtually every corner of the earth and insist that we still cannot recognize anything? Would he hear Hebrew spoken by Jewish children in the streets, see Jewish sovereignty restored after nearly two thousand years, watch the Land become fruitful again, see Yerushalayim rebuilt and the Jewish people return to the mountains of Yehudah and Shomron, and dismiss all of it because we were once told not to speculate about precisely how Redemption would unfold?

Of course we still cannot know what comes next. The Rambam’s warning remains completely relevant when we attempt to predict the future. We do not know the timetable. We do not know precisely how Mashiach will emerge. We do not know which events will happen naturally and which may occur miraculously. But there is an enormous difference between predicting prophecy and recognizing its fulfillment. Before sunrise, one can argue about precisely how the dawn will appear. But once the eastern horizon begins glowing, continuing to debate whether morning will arrive becomes increasingly detached from reality. That may be exactly where we stand today.

For thousands of years, Jews read the prophets describing the ingathering of the exiles, the restoration and fruitfulness of the Land, the rebuilding of Yerushalayim and the return of Jewish national life to Eretz Yisrael. Our ancestors could debate how those prophecies would materialize because they had not yet seen them happen. We are living after Balfour, after 1948, after the ingathering of millions of Jews and after 1967. We are watching realities emerge that our ancestors could only describe using the language of prophecy and prayer.

The Rambam said that we would not know how these things would happen until they happened. Perhaps we should pay greater attention to the second half of that equation: they are happening. The intellectually honest question is therefore no longer merely, “How will Geulah happen?” It is also: How much of what generations of Jews waited for must occur before we are prepared to acknowledge that Geulah is already underway? The Rambam certainly taught us humility about predicting the future, but humility should not become blindness toward the present. We may not know what the next chapter looks like, but that does not require us to pretend that we haven’t already turned the page.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest obstacles to recognizing Geulah. People are waiting for the supernatural spectacle and therefore fail to recognize the extraordinary events occurring through seemingly ordinary mechanisms. A British declaration is just politics. A UN vote is just diplomacy. A war is just military history. An airplane full of olim is just transportation. A Jewish farmer working the soil is just agriculture. Yerushalayim expanding is just urban development. Each event can be explained naturally when examined in isolation. But stand back and look at the entire picture. A nation scattered for nearly two thousand years has returned to its ancestral homeland, restored its ancient language, reestablished sovereignty, gathered millions of its children from across the earth, rebuilt its ancient capital and returned to the very mountains upon which its prophets walked. If you cannot see Hashem’s hand in that because the clouds did not split open, perhaps the problem is not the absence of miracles. Perhaps the problem is our definition of a miracle.

This is where the distinction between the natural and miraculous begins to collapse altogether. A natural mechanism does not mean a godless mechanism. Hashem controls kings and governments just as surely as He controls seas and storms. A diplomatic declaration can be an instrument of Divine Providence. A military victory can be an instrument of Divine Providence. An airplane can become the vehicle through which the promise of the ingathering of the exiles is fulfilled. The fact that we can explain how something happened does not explain away why it happened.

We should certainly believe that Hashem can overturn nature in an instant, and there may yet be extraordinary supernatural events ahead of us. Jewish tradition leaves room for possibilities far beyond anything we have witnessed. But we cannot use our expectation of future miracles as an excuse to ignore present responsibilities. If we convince ourselves that Hashem must bring the Geulah entirely from Heaven, then we conveniently relieve ourselves of responsibility for bringing Jews home, settling the Land, strengthening Jewish sovereignty, rebuilding Yerushalayim, preparing for the Mikdash and fulfilling the mitzvot that become possible as Jewish national life is restored. We become spectators waiting for Hashem to finish a process in which He may be waiting for us to participate.

For generations our ancestors prayed for the return to Zion. We have lived to see those prayers materialize into airports, highways, apartment buildings, farms, yeshivot, army bases and crowded streets filled with Jewish children speaking Hebrew. It may not look like the pictures of Geulah we imagined, but that does not make it less Geulah. Perhaps the great question is no longer whether Redemption will come naturally or miraculously. Hashem appears to have already demonstrated that He is perfectly capable of bringing the miraculous through the natural. The question now is whether we will recognize it, and once we recognize it, whether we will finally understand what “ועשו לי מקדש” — “They shall make for Me a Sanctuary” teaches us.

There are moments when Hashem performs miracles for His children, and there are moments when Hashem gives His children the extraordinary privilege of becoming His partners in making them happen. If we are worthy, perhaps we will not sit around waiting for Heaven to do our work for us. We will get up and build.