Rav Yaakov Hillel: The Jewish People’s age-old weapons of Torah and spiritual merit haven’t changed

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

Despite the fact that the sirens were quiet across Yerushalayim when Mishpacha went to sit down with Rav Yaakov Hillel, Rosh Yeshivat Ahavat Shalom, war was in the air as the Jewish people worldwide waited for Hamas to release innocents held hostage in Gaza.

A descendant of Chacham Avraham Hillel, av beis din in Baghdad, Rav Hillel was born in India, and then moved to England, where he studied in Gateshead Yeshivah before moving on to Ponevezh, where he became a close talmid of Rav Shach.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Rav Hillel founded his yeshivah, Chevrat Ahavat Shalom in Geulah — named after the yeshivah of the 18th-century mekubal Rav Shalom Sharabi — where he’s taught many gedolim from both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Torah worlds. The expansion of the Ahavat Shalom institutions has made Rav Hillel one of the preeminent Torah teachers globally, with yeshivos, a kollel network numbering thousands of avreichim, a beis din, a national kiruv organization, and schools under his leadership.

From the beginning of the war, Rav Hillel has spoken to different audiences, from yeshivos to schools overseas, and groups of evacuees from the Gaza area. In conversation with Mishpacha, he discussed the roots of the conflict with Yishmael, the ray of chesed that was apparent in the timing of the attack, acting to combat the spread of anti-Semitic hatred throughout the world, and what to share with children about these difficult times.

Above all, Rav Hillel reminded that amid the confusion of war, we shouldn’t lose sight of the centrality of Torah in protecting the Jewish People, whose miraculous survival is exemplified by the events of Chanukah.

“The attacks by Hamas are just one more stage in thousands of years of galut,” he says, “and only Torah can protect and save us.”

For two months now, the Jewish People have been under attack in a way that we’ve not seen for generations, both in Israel and around the world. How are we to understand the terrible events of Simchas Torah and the death struggle that we’re locked into with Hamas?

The only way to understand current events is through the perspective of Chazal, who tell us that there are four Exiles — Babylon, Persia, Greece, then the Romans. The Zohar adds a fifth, which is Yishmael before the coming of Mashiach, which will be a very difficult period. Rav Chaim Vital explains that Yishmael is more of a threat to the Jewish People because of his relative closeness to Am Yisrael through being the son of Avraham Avinu; and because he, like us, also has the merit of brit milah.

Chazal tell us that very name “Yishmael” foretells the future, which is that his descendants will oppress us and force us to cry out to Hashem. Which means to say that there is something unique about Yishmael: Unlike the previous exiles, in which generally speaking the persecution only came about when we refused to assimilate, when it comes to Yishmael, he wants to swallow us alive — assimilation isn’t an option. The Holocaust, in which the Nazis wanted to exterminate us, was the border between two eras — indicated by the fact that Hitler was urged by the Mufti of Jerusalem to complete his work. And as Rav Avigdor Miller explained, it was the result of hundreds of years of assimilation.

That is the context in which these horrific attacks happened: It’s the rise of Yishmael, as written hundreds of years ago by Rav Chaim Vital (Eitz HaDaat Tov, Tehillim 124, 1-2). His purpose in history is to bring Am Yisrael to teshuvah.