MOSHIACH IN THE AIR

Three hundred years ago, in a little town in Russia, there is no running water; you fetch it from the river. People live in shacks, if they are lucky, on a few potatoes or a piece of bread a day, and there is the all-too-real threat of violent, antisemitic Cossacks.

Fast-forward to today. The carts lose their horses, water comes out of taps, people talk on telephones, planes fly, a journey of months takes a few hours, and at last a thing called AI can pretty much do whatever you ask. “This must be Moshiach,” the Jew from the past says.

Then he asks to see how happy these people are. Zoom in to Paris, where they are burning buildings. In Italy and Spain they are fighting in the streets. They have so much technology, so much knowledge, and they are more depressed than ever. What is missing? “They have everything, but they have nothing.” They do not have the Redemption.

Rabbi Mendel Haller, a shliach in Melbourne, told this story to more than a thousand shluchim last Motzei Shabbos at a banquet of the Kinus Hashluchim, the yearly gathering of the Rebbe’s emissaries in New York. It was, more or less, his answer to an Israeli professor in his community who wondered why a world that already has so much needs Moshiach at all.

***

We have heard many times that Moshiach comes when each Jew reveals the spark of Moshiach within him. What must be revealed is the essence of the soul itself, and that, the Rebbe says, is what Moshiach is: “the main intent is the revelation of the very essence of the soul . . . which is the truth of what Moshiach is (both the spark of Moshiach in each and every Jew, and all the more so Moshiach himself).”

שעיקר הכוונה היא . . . להתגלות עצם הנשמה ממש, שזהו אמיתת ענינו של משיח (הן ניצוץ משיח שבכאו"א מישראל, והן ועאכו"כ משיח הכללי)

Where does a Jew find that essence? Before he has done anything at all. A person who has just opened his eyes has not yet thanked G-d or given himself over to Him, and he may be in a state where he is not to think even a word of Torah. All he has is that he exists and that he is awake. That is enough. “Even before he brings about in himself the revelation of the yechida [the innermost of the five levels of the soul] . . . there is his very existence, the essence of the soul.” Knowing only that much, that he has woken up, shapes everything he goes on to do in serving G-d.

שגם לפני שפועל בעצמו התגלות בחי' היחידה . . . ישנה עצם מציאותו, עצם נשמה, ו„ידיעה” זו (רק – שניעור משנתו) פועלת ומביאה לכל עניני העבודה בפועל ממש

From that moment his whole day unfolds, and the Rebbe traces it: Modeh Ani, then the morning blessings, then davening, then on from the shul to the beis midrash, and then out into the world to his work, where he makes G-d a home in this lowest place. He rises, in the words of Rashi, like a lion, to seize the mitzvos: tzitzis, the Shema, tefillin. When his very self, the essence of his soul, shows in each of these things he actually does, Moshiach has come: “And this is the truth of what the coming of Moshiach is: that the essence of Israel is revealed in actual deed.”

וזהו אמיתת הענין דביאת המשיח, שהעצם דישראל הוא בהתגלות בפועל ממש

The Sages hint at this in a Mishnah. The Torah tells us to remember leaving Egypt “כל ימי חייך, all the days of your life.” Why the word “all”? To include the days of Moshiach: even then we will remember leaving Egypt. The Mishnah puts it as “להביא לימות המשיח,” literally, “to bring the days of Moshiach.” The Rebbe reads the phrase as one sentence: “כל ימי חייך להביא לימות המשיח, all the days of your life, to bring the days of Moshiach.” And all the days of your life means every moment you are alive, asleep as well as awake, because every moment you breathe. So bringing Moshiach goes beyond the times a Jew thinks, speaks or acts for it. His very life, חייך, is devoted to bringing about the days of Moshiach.

אלא עצם חיותו („חייך”) הוא להביא לימות המשיח

What does it feel like? The moment the essence of the soul wakes, a Jew “feels in the breathing of the air what Moshiach is: the air of Moshiach, and in the words of the Sages, ‘the spirit of King Moshiach.’”

מרגיש בנשימת האויר ענינו של משיח – אויר של משיח, ובלשון חז"ל „רוחו של מלך המשיח”

There is the light of Moshiach, and there is the air of Moshiach, and the air is higher. Light is what the world will see: Moshiach known through what he does, when he fights the wars of G-d and is victorious. Air, the atmosphere around us, no one sees at all. You simply live in it and breathe it. The air of Moshiach is Moshiach himself, his very existence, which is there even before he reigns, revealed as King Moshiach. And air is where light comes from. In Hebrew, אויר, air, is אור, light, with a י added, and a candle burns only where there is air around the flame; take the air away and the light goes out. So his existence is revealed first, and his deeds follow from it.

That is why “the main innovation of the coming of Moshiach is in the revelation of his existence.” Everything after it, the Redemption of Israel and all the days of Moshiach, grows out of it and is already inside it, “just as the renewal of the moon includes the revelation of its light, added moment by moment until the moon is full and whole.”

שעיקר החידוש דביאת המשיח הוא בהתגלות מציאותו . . . כשם שמולד הלבנה כולל התגלות אורה באופן של הוספה מרגע לרגע עד למילוי ושלימות הלבנה

And so a Jew’s life can bring Moshiach. Once he wakes up and affirms his life, his very existence is revealed, and it brings the days of Moshiach on its own, because everything those days will hold is already inside it, as the full moon is inside the new one.

שהחיות („חייך”) כשנתגלתה מציאותו מביאה (בדרך ממילא) לימות המשיח, כיון שמציאותו (חיותו) כוללת כל פרטי הענינים דימות המשיח

The Jew from the shtetl looked at a world that has everything and found it had nothing. Running water, planes and AI are all things a person has or possesses. What the world is missing is what a person is: the essence of the soul, revealed. It waits for no new invention. It is there the moment a Jew opens his eyes, before he has done anything, in the very air he breathes, and from that moment “his very life (‘your life’) is to bring the days of Moshiach.”

Sources
Rabbi Mendel Haller, banquet of the Kinus Hashluchim, Motzei Shabbos, November 7, 2026 (Vaad Kinus Hashluchim video; Chabad.info)
Sefer HaSichos 5752, vol. 1, pp. 130–132 (sections 10–11): the night of the second day of Rosh Chodesh Kislev, and Shabbos Parshas Toldos 5752
Devarim 16:3; Mishnah Berachos 1:5
Tehillim 150:6, as the Sages read it (the sicha's footnote 88)
Rambam, Hilchos Melachim 11:4
Tehillim 89:21