[Avodah] What does "Redemption/Geulah" mean?

kennethgmiller at juno.com kennethgmiller at juno.com
Tue Apr 10 09:51:38 PDT 2012


In recent weeks and months, I've been working on trying to understand the concept of "redemption/geulah".

Based on phrases like "the Final Geulah" and "connecting Geulah to Tefilah", I've gotten the impression that Geulah is a very big deal. It seems to mark an elevation in the status of a person or a people.

But when I look for examples of Geulah, it seems to be a notable event, but not as big of a deal as I thought it would be. Let's call it "a small deal", perhaps. For example, Avraham Avinu went from being a nobody, to being a major world power, financially and militarily, and theologically, chosen by HaShem to be the father of a great nation. But I don't recall that ever being referred to as a Geulah. In contrast, Nisan is said to be a time of Geulah, but of the 15 wonderful things listed in Dayenu, only the first eight happened on Pesach. Furthermore, of those eight, I think only one ("gave us their money") can be considered an "elevation", whereas the other seven merely repaired the injustice of the slavery.

This is NOT to suggest that I'm ungrateful that the slavery was repaired, but frankly, perhaps we'd be better off not having been slaves to begin with. Keep in mind that I'm only looking at the first 8 items in Dayenu. They were a necessary prelude to the 7 items which cam later: getting the Shabbos, our Achdus at Sinai, receiving the Torah. *Those* things are the real "big deals" of the story, but they come *after* the Geulah, and I don't recall them being *part* of the Geulah.

I hope you won't mind if I compare this, l'havdil, to two stories in popular culture, in which "redemption" is the main theme. In "The Shawshank Redemption", the protagonist is framed for his wife's murder. After several decades in jail, he escapes from jail with a lot of money and retires very wealthy, but I'm guessing that he'd prefer his wife not to have been murdered. The second, "Les Miserables", is often described as "a story of redemption", in which the protagonist was jailed for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He too broke out, impersonated someone, and became a successful businessman. But he was always on the run, afraid of being recaptured, and I think he wished that he had never been jailed to begin with.

L'havdil, I can't help making comparisons to Yetzias Mitzrayim. Yes, we came out ahead financially. But, standing on the other side of the Yam Suf, not knowing about the Torah that lies in our future, was this worth all that slavery? If this is Geulah, then I think Geulah is closer to "relief" than to "greatness". In fact, I saw something this week which seems to support this-

In this week's English Hamodia, Kinyan L'Shabbos magazine, page 5, South Africa's Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein quotes Rav Yitzchak Kossowsky, the Av Beis Din of Johannesburg from 1933 to 1951. Referring to the Midrash about charus and cheirus, he writes: "From this Midrash, we see that the concept of cheirus is something far more transcendent and powerful than mere chofesh. Cheirus, said Rav Kossowsky, based on this Midrash, is the eternal freedom from the ordinary laws of history, by which nations come and go... He said that this is why Chazal chose the term 'zman cheiruseinu' to describe Pesach, rather than 'chag geulaseinu', the festival of our redemption. Geulaseinu would have implied solely the redemption from the Egyptian slavery, which has since been replaced with other oppressions and redemptions; whereas cheiruseinu describes the eternal, transcendent, and indestructible dimension of Klal Yisrael."

Does anyone else have this feeling, that Geula is a good thing, but not an extremely great thing?

Akiva Miller

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