Olam Haba or Mashiach: Which Is the Goal?

Hi, this is Rabbi Orlofsky with our question and answer series. What are our lives for? Are we here to prepare for Olam Haba? Are we here to bring Mashiach? Do the two connect? How can we live for both? Because it's a process. Meaning, Hakadosh Baruch Hu created the world and the world was perfecto. We had one mitzvah, which was a mitzvahs lo sa'aseh. Don't mess up the world. So, don't eat from this tree. When you eat from this tree, death will come to the world. Terrible things are going to happen. Don't eat from this tree. That was it. But, mitzvahs assei are mataking the world. They fix the world. There was nothing to fix. You didn't need any mitzvahs assei. And so, um just don't mess up the world. And had Adam and Hava not eaten from the tree, they were created on Friday, they would have gone into Shabbos and that Shabbos would have been Olam Haba. Now, the term Olam Haba is a little tricky. Machlokes between the Rambam and the Ramchal what we mean by Olam Haba. We assume that when we say Olam Haba, we're talking about the Olam Hanashamos, wherein we die and our soul goes up to Olam Haba and we just enjoy the spiritual pleasure of being close to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Okay. Um the Ramchal says Olam Haba is the world of Techiyas Hameisim. Meaning, if they never ate from the tree, they never would have died. So, what would have happened? They would have gone into a world of perfection. That would have been Olam Haba, according to the Ramchal. That would have been it. You wouldn't need the resurrection cuz everybody was still alive. There was no death in the world. And you would have just gone from one stage to the next. But you had to have spent some time in this world because of the problem of you will not enjoy the pleasure unless you earned it on your own. Otherwise, you're just uh a poopa. You're just taking that pleasure. Yeah? Uh you haven't earned it. When you earn it, it's that much greater. So, we had to have do something, but we didn't have to do a lot. Yeah? Of course, they messed up their one mitzvah, and that has led us on a 6,000-year detour. So, at some point, we have to get the world back to Gan Eden. A world where the world is in perfection. There's no hunger. There's no disease. There's no yetzer hara. There's no death. That's called Yemos Hamashiach. We have to get the world back to Gan Eden. Once we get the world back to Gan Eden, which is Yemos Hamashiach, then the world can go into Techiyas Hamaysim, and everybody who unfortunately was born at the wrong time can now come back and enjoy it. And uh they'll come back into this world, according to the Ramchal, and you'll have Olam Haba in this world. According to the Rambam, Techiyas Hamaysim is a certain period of time, and after that, you leave your body and then go to what we think of as Olam Haba. The Ramchal refers to that as Olam Hanashamos, where at this point, it's just a waiting room until Techiyas Hamaysim, and you come back down. According to the Rambam, that's the the ultimate uh the ultimate fulfillment. But, uh the Ramchal holds that the way Hakadosh Baruch Hu created the world, which is a human being in a physical body, is the ideal, and that's how we're supposed to come back down. So, uh that's the process. So, when you say you want Mashiach, what you're saying is I want the world to return to an Eden-like existence where there's no evil and there's no disease and there's no hunger and there's you know, there's no war, there's no everything is wonderful. Right? That would have happened by the way if we had gotten the first Luhos, the first set of tablets. >> [snorts] >> That would have we got those first Luhos, that would have accomplished that first level. And then when we went to Israel, we would have had That was the way it was supposed to have worked, but unfortunately it did not work out that way. So we're still waiting for the world to go back to the way the world was supposed to be. This is David Eliavsky with our question and answer series.