Rabbi Rael Blumenthal

A month after October 7th, I had the painful privilege of visiting Israel.

Together with a group of Rabbanim, we drove through the streets of Sderot. The city was eerily quiet. Most of the residents had been evacuated.

I remember sitting with the mayor of the city, who had just returned from petitioning the Knesset for more funds to cover the hotel costs of everyone who had left.

We asked him whether he thought they would return to Sderot.

“This is their home. They will return—but not before Hamas is completely destroyed. For too long, we lived with rockets overhead. The Iron Dome protected us. But it is not normal, and it was never normal. This needs to be the end.”

Until November 2023, Hamas was insurmountable. Every five or ten years, our brave soldiers “mowed the lawn,” knowing that the filth and weeds would regroup and return.

Somehow, since then, we have learned that Hamas can be defeated.

But Hezbollah would always be an existential threat. With their highly trained forces, advanced weaponry, and massive arsenal, Hezbollah was insurmountable.

Until they were not.

One day, we said, someone will make a movie of the beeper and pager attacks. The world will marvel at the brilliance and genius of the Jewish people.

But even so, we could never defeat the head of the snake. Iran would always be able to threaten us, bait us, and terrorize us.

Until we learned that they too could be defeated.

There have been heavy costs to these wars. Painful costs.

Even as we in Boca are preparing for Pesach, our family and friends in Eretz Yisrael are forced to drop everything over and over again. Every Israeli is feeling the pain, trauma, and stress of two and a half years of unrelenting war.

Yes, they are resilient. But they are tired.

They, like us, are asking: When will it be over?

Klal Yisrael is not hungry for victory. We are hungry for normalcy.

So let’s imagine it.

Let’s imagine that all of our enemies have been destroyed. What does life look like for the Jewish people when there is no longer a state sponsoring terrorism?

Perhaps we can dream even further. What does life look like for us—and for the world—when antisemitism is finally eradicated from human consciousness?

Can we imagine a time when we are living in safety and security?

When we have finally defeated the final boss, what happens then?

To this question, the Vilna Gaon (אבן שלמה יא:ו) explains:

Once we have defeated Esav and Yishmael, we will yet have one challenge to complete: the removal of the Erev Rav.

Who exactly are these Erev Rav? People are often eager to point fingers at one particular group or another. But the truth is, the Gra explains, the Erev Rav is not a person, but a collection of character traits:

There are five types of Erev Rav: – Those who pursue machlokes and lashon hara
– Those who are consumed by their desires
– Those who are hypocrites
– Those who chase honor in order to make a name for themselves
– Those who pursue money

The worst of them are those who cause machlokes. Mashiach will not come until they are eliminated from the world.

In the deepest way, the Erev Rav is part of each of us. When we left Egypt, we carried these negative traits with us. It has been 3,500 years, and we are still shlepping them along.

All this is to say that the final boss is us. It has always been us.

No doubt, it is almost impossible to imagine a world in which we have all defeated these insidious traits. This battle seems truly insurmountable.

But then again, defeating Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran was unfathomable three years ago.

Despite all of our progress, we are bound by the same mental chains as our ancestors. Chazal tell us that no slave ever escaped Mitzrayim. On this, the Beis Yaakov explains: No slave ever imagined that the world outside of Egypt could be better than life as a slave in Mitzrayim. There were no walls or fences preventing their escape—other than the walls they built within their own minds.

So how do we escape? How do we break the chains that make us feel like we will never defeat the negativity inside ourselves? How do we leave our personal, communal, and national Mitzrayim?

The Haggadah reveals the secret:

חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם

You have to imagine it.

Despite the Mitzrayim that we are currently experiencing, we are obligated to see ourselves on the other side of it.

Who would I be if I actively sought out shalom rather than machlokes? What kind of life would I live if I weren’t chasing my desires or running after money? Can I develop a deeper sense of honesty and integrity? Can I give kavod to others rather than seeking it for myself?

It dawned on me this week that perhaps this avodah is uniquely ours right now. While our brothers and sisters in Eretz Yisrael are eradicating the evils of Esav and Yishmael, we are obligated to get a head start on destroying the Erev Rav within ourselves.

Our task in this war is as clear as it is daunting this Pesach it is time to defeat our oldest and most challenging adversary.

Hashem took us out of Mitzrayim. Now it is time to take Mitzrayim out of us.