The 2nd Exodus Is Coming Soon, Are You Going To Be On HaShem's Mercy Train? (11 minutes)

0:00the children of Israel were armed when they went up from Egypt. Now, the literal translation of "Hamushim" is armed—they had weapons. But another translation for that word is that it is one-fifth, twenty percent. And what Chazal is telling us here is that In reality, what that sentence is telling you, one of the reasons why the first word of this parasha is indicating something bad is because Am Yisrael was not happy right now to leave Egypt. Why? Because just a few weeks ago, 80% of Am Yisrael was killed by Hashem. Only 20% left Egypt. Why did the 80% get killed? Because they didn't want to do teshuva. They didn't want to leave the material world. They didn't want to learn Torah. They didn't want to do mitzvot. They didn't want to do it. So I said, okay, if you don't want to do it, you have no purpose in the world. At least the goyim, they have a purpose. Some of them have a purpose to help the Jews. Some have a purpose of going against the Jews. So they, I'm not going to kill them. Whether they're from Greece, or they're from Rome, or they're from America, or they're from all over the world.

1:25I don't have to kill them because they're not doing Torah. They're not obligated by the same level of Torah as you are. But you are a Jew. You are obligated to follow it. You have no choice. It's not free choice like people think. It's choice: you do it, you get a reward; you don't do it, you get punishment. It's not like people think that free choice is that if you... It's something like when you can do whatever you want, then Hashem is just going to deal with the consequences. He's going to forgive you. If you do what He says, He loves you extra. If you don't do what He says, then you face the repercussions. Okay, don't worry about it. That's what people's mentality is, and it couldn't be further from the truth. The choice that Hashem really gives us is that if you do what He says, you get a reward. If you don't do it, you get a punishment. So it's just like, for example, if somebody says, come to work and I'll give you $100. But if you don't come to work, I'm going to send my hitman, and they're going to beat you up all day. That's the choice that we really have. It's reward or punishment. There's no nothing. There's no, if you don't come to work, you get nothing. You could just take the day off. So, Am Yisrael here is very, very upset because only 20% survived. As a matter of fact, some of the sages say that only 1 out of 500 actually left Egypt, meaning a half of a percent. Not even a tenth of a percent.

2:481% of 1,000 is 10, so I guess 2 out of 1,000 actually left Egypt. My gosh, I actually read—where is it? Oh, here it is. In Me'am Loez, this is really mind-boggling. I never knew this. Even though I read it and took notes on it, I just never noticed it. or remembered it, is that actually one sage, there's a couple of sages in Mechilta and different Midrashim, that say it wasn't one out of five, it wasn't one out of 500, it was one out of 500,000 survived. So you're talking about one out of 500,000. That's too little. That pretty much means that Hashem nearly annihilated the entire nation. Why? They didn't want to do teshuvah. So, the estimate that they have here is that if the number of Jews that left Egypt was 3 million, which is the lowest estimate there is, the number is probably much higher, the original number that was in Egypt was somewhere around 300 million Jews.

4:11Obviously, this is a much larger number than the number of Jews available today. Some estimates are even higher than that. Nonetheless, when the Jews left Egypt, we learned something very, very important about Hashem. He’s not kidding. He’s not like mankind, where he might say to do something, and if you don't do it, he says, okay, you know what, no big deal. We talked about last time I was here, when he constantly mentions in the last few parshiyot and in this parsha again, I'm Hashem. I am God. When he says, I am God, he means, I am God, I keep my word. I don't change my mind. I'm not like mankind, where I say one thing one day and I change my mind the next day. I don't break my promises. I don't forget. If I say there's a reward and punishment, there's a reward and punishment.

5:12if you don't want to do what I brought you to this world to do, I don't need you. So when people say, listen, but it says in the Torah, God is merciful. How is He merciful if He killed, according to this sage, 499,999 Jews out of every 500,000 and only let one survive? How is that mercy? Now on one end, you can see, no, wait a minute, Chas Veshalom, maybe that's not mercy. But in reality, it is mercy. The fact that so many were bad, and He still didn't just give up on the whole nation like He did in the times of Noach. He technically had 499,999 reasons to destroy the whole world, not just the nation of Israel. And He only had one, maybe, reason to keep it. And even the ones that survived, it wasn't like they were tzaddikim. They were still at the 49th level of Tumah, the 49th level of impurity. They were just one level away, one sin away, from reaching level 50, which means they would be part of the 500,000. He would have to destroy them. They were one sin away. So even the ones that were left were not exactly in good shape. So technically, he had all the reasons, Hashem, to destroy everything.

6:37So the mercy in that time, you see, is that He didn't destroy it. Where's the mercy in our time? It's even more today than it was back then. Because, number one, Jews are not exactly all doing everything He says around the world. Many of us are not. But He doesn't punish us the same way. He gives us time. We violate Shabbat. No one's dying. You don't see people all of a sudden, you know, the guy drives, you know, turns on the car on Shabbat, and the car blows up. You don't see that. Someone smokes a cigarette on Shabbat, and all of a sudden his head blows up. You don't see that either. He's not punishing you. Or someone eats pork on Yom Kippur with some cheese on it. You don't see him choking to death. You don't see him choking to death. Someone even says things against Hashem; lightning doesn't strike him. He gives him more time, more time to eventually wake up because this is the last chance. There's no second chance. This was the first chance here in Egypt; that's why the punishment came right away. Here, He's giving us more time. He even has more mercy on us now.

8:00Because this is the last chance. The Mashiach is around the corner. Now, one of the things that got Hashem to have mercy on the 4 out of 5, or the 499,999 out of 500, letting the one live, is the fact that they had enough emunah. They didn't have a lot of emunah, which we'll learn from this parasha. But they had enough emunah to go into the desert without knowing where they're going. They're leaving a civilized country, if you will, even though there were reshaim and merushaim in Egypt. But in essence, they're leaving a place where there's food, there's commerce. They're not slaves anymore for several months because pretty much the... The kingdom was destroyed; they could go back to a normal life, possibly. But they're trusting Hashem to go into the desert, which, even if it's one person, it's most likely the person is not going to survive in the desert, let alone millions of people with no food. Where are you going to find water? Where are you going to find food? So this was enough emunah to get them out.

9:28And this is one of the things that's going to get us out. Emunah is one of the most important things that you need to work on every single day in order for you to survive the end of times. Right now, baruch Hashem, we're in a good situation. No one's attacking us. We're able to practice our religion, even publicize it on the internet, say what we want. We live in a wonderful country that, at this point, gives us freedom. The fact that some of the leadership in the country are not exactly pro-Jews is a different story, but nonetheless, Hashem is allowing us to practice our religion freely. Not like the people in the Holocaust, Hashem yishmor, what happened there. Or the people during the times of Egypt, where you weren't allowed to do anything. Everybody was in fear of worship. Or the times of Rome or Greece. where their purpose was to destroy Judaism, especially the Greeks. So right now, HaShem is making it easy for us to practice Judaism. He's making it easy for us to connect to Him. If we connect to Him, we have a chance of surviving. But if we waste our time and focus all of our attention on sports, money, women, men, and all the material in this world,

10:55That we're giving up on the biggest opportunity of a lifetime without realizing that it's our last opportunity.