When Donald Trump, the man who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, brokered the Abraham Accords, and declared himself the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House, told Israel it could not finish the job against Hezbollah, the Jewish world went quiet with shock. The president who had thundered against Iran, who had ordered the killing of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, who had torn up the Obama-era nuclear deal, was now restraining the IDF, warning Jerusalem not to strike Lebanon, and sitting across negotiating tables from Iranian diplomats in Oman and Rome. Something had shifted. The question gripping Israeli security circles, American Jewish communities, and evangelical supporters of Israel alike was: what happened to this man?
Rabbi Mendel Kessin is not shocked. In a lecture posted to YouTube this week that has already drawn thousands of views, he offered an explanation that cuts beneath the geopolitical surface entirely, one rooted not in Beltway intrigue or Mar-a-Lago gossip, but in 3,300-year-old Torah text, the mechanics of divine providence, and what he calls the hanhagat ha-ketz: God’s specific mode of governance at the end of time. His conclusion is as stark as it is provocative: Trump has not changed because of business interests, Gulf money, aging advisors, or legacy-seeking. Trump has changed because God allowed it — as a direct punishment to the Jewish people for a sin being committed at this very moment by the Israeli government.
The Architect of End-Times Thinking
Rabbi Mendel Kessin is a decades-long expositor of the Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the 18th-century Kabbalist whose systematic theology of divine history underlies much of modern Orthodox eschatological thinking. Rabbi Kessin has spent forty years building a framework for understanding current events through the lens of torat ha-geulah, the Torah of redemption. His lectures, delivered in English and aimed at the thinking Orthodox and broader Jewish public, draw on the full range of rabbinic literature: Chazal, midrash, Zohar, the Vilna Gaon’s writings on Gog and Magog, and the Ramchal‘s Derech Hashem.
He opens the lecture with a framing that sets the register for everything that follows. “Do not think that the process, the messianic process to bring the Messiah, is stopped or terminated,” he said. “Not at all. What we are looking at is that the process became harder. Even in Egypt, when Moshe Rabenu came to Egypt to rescue, to redeem the Jews, it got much harder. But it didn’t stop. It got harder because what happened was necessary to continue the process. That’s really the way you have to look at this, and not give up hope.”
This is not, he insists, a moment for despair. It is a moment that demands clarity.
The Hanhagat Ha-Ketz: God’s End-Time Calculus
To understand why Trump turned, Rabbi Kessin says, one must first understand two divine priorities that operate with special intensity as history approaches its culmination.
The first is reward. At the end of time, free will disappears, and with it, the opportunity to earn sechar, divine reward. “Once it’s over, it’s over, and there’s no more free will,” he explained. “And if there’s no more free will, there’s no more reward, because that’s the major condition for reward; that you do something because you are a true cause.” God therefore creates conditions of maximum confusion and concealment precisely so that those who continue to believe accumulate extraordinary merit. “They get tremendous reward when the times are so confusing, and they still believe in God, and they believe in the messianic process.”
The second priority is inclusion. God wants every Jew to have a share in the olam ha-ba, the World to Come, which means creating opportunities for repentance and merit even in the final chapter.
These two goals explain why the end of days feels so disorienting. The Sages expressed this with their haunting statement: yavo v’lo er’enu, “Let him come, but I do not want to see him.” They did not want to be alive in the generation that would witness it. “They realized that to do these two ideas, more reward and everybody should have entry, it’s going to be incredibly difficult,” Rabbi Kessin explained, “because it requires a great deal of darkness, concealment, and mystery. And they don’t want to be there because it’s very difficult to struggle, to keep believing in God, to keep believing in His redemption. It’s going to be very difficult, just like Egypt. Did anybody believe after 210 years of slavery and suffering that they are going to be redeemed? Probably not.”
The Sin That Triggered the Punishment
The sin Rabbi Kessin identifies is not subtle, and he does not present it subtly. The Israeli government’s campaign to conscript haredi, ultra-Orthodox, yeshiva students into the IDF constitutes, in his analysis, a betrayal of the most consequential institution in Jewish civilization: Torah study.
“The greatest treasure in God’s treasury is His Torah,” he said. “We know that is the be-all and end-all of everything.” He invokes the classic rabbinic teaching that Torah study is k’neged kulam, equal in weight to all 612 other commandments combined. “Learning Torah is the greatest of all mitzvot. It is equal to all 612 other mitzvot. Imagine that. That’s how great Torah is.”
But beyond its status as the supreme mitzvah, Rabbi Kessin argues Torah study is the supreme form of national defense. “The greatest protection for a Jewish person is his learning of Torah itself,” he said. “When a person sweats to know the Torah, that protects him from everything; from enemies, from diseases, from bankruptcies. Therefore, learning Torah is not a luxury. It’s a definite. You need to do that. And it’s much more powerful than an army. Even though from our perspective, it doesn’t look like there’s anything more powerful than a tank, an aircraft carrier, a bazooka, or rifles or missiles, no. In the realm of reality that we don’t see, to learn Torah is the greatest form of defense, of protection that we can imagine, because it invokes the assistance of heaven to protect you. And you can’t beat heaven.”
The cosmological stakes, he adds, are total. “There are many chazal statements of the Sages that tell us that if there was ever a time that there is no Torah being learned on this planet, the planet would be wiped out.” The yeshiva world is not a drain on the war effort. It is the foundation upon which everything rests.
The Israeli government’s push to draft yeshiva students, therefore, represents not merely bad policy but a cosmic transgression, one that crosses a line no foreign oppressor ever fully crossed. “We know the Romans, the Greeks, everybody else, whatever they said to the Jewish people, it is forbidden to learn Torah,” Rabbi Kessin noted. “They are the ones who try to stop the Jewish people from doing mitzvot and learning Torah. But now, Jews are stopping Jews from learning Torah.”
The prosecuting angel, the kategor in the heavenly court, has filed charges. “You are a brother that has betrayed your own brother,” Rabbi Kessin said, voicing the prosecution. “You’re not only betraying God, you are betraying your brother, in terms of what they should be doing, because you have a collective responsibility to assist the learning of Torah. That’s how great and that’s how important that is. So you’re not doing that. On the contrary. Therefore, because you’re not doing that, I’m going to pronounce a judgment against you.”
The verdict, rendered through the ancient principle of middah k’neged middah, measure for measure, is devastating in its precision. “You are betraying your brother,” Rabbi Kessin continued, in the voice of the prosecution. “Therefore, I will turn that which you call a brother against you, measure for measure. Who is that brother that you refer to, other than the Jewish people? And the answer is Trump. He’s Esav. He’s a brother.”
Esav Is Your Brother: The Torah’s 3,300-Year Prediction
Rabbi Kessin then delivers what may be the most striking element of the lecture: a claim that the Torah itself predicted Trump’s betrayal of Israel millennia before either America or Donald Trump existed.
He directs his listeners to Bereishit, Genesis 32, the night before Yaakov, Jacob, was to meet his brother Esav after twenty years of separation. Esav was approaching with four hundred men, and Yaakov, terrified, prayed. The prayer contains a phrase whose grammatical structure Rabbi Kessin finds electrically significant: “Hatzileni na miyad achi miyad Esav,” “Save me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esav.” (Genesis 32:12)
“The Torah calls it that Esav, that Jacob prays against Esav, and he says, ‘from the hands of my brother,'” Rabbi Kessin explained. “Take a look at the beginning of the verse. He’s actually calling Esav his brother and he’s praying to God to save him from Esav as his brother. Well, who does that sound like? That is a subtle message. There will come a day when Esav will be your brother again in the future, and he will try to do what? Kill you. So you’re going to pray: ‘Please God, change his mind. Save me from that.'”
Both Netanyahu and Trump have publicly called each other brothers. Rabbi Kessin does not treat this as diplomatic warmth. He treats it as the fulfillment of a biblical formula. “The Torah refers specifically to Esav, miyad achi, miyad Esav, from the hands of my brother, the hands of Esav, and you have called Trump your brother. It’s amazing when you think about that: a direct reference that you can actually pray for salvation from Esav as your brother. And this is it. Everybody is now praying that Trump reverse himself the way he used to be.”
He is careful to note the limits of what he is claiming. Trump does not know any of this. “It’s very possible that God has taken away his free will,” Rabbi Kessin said. “And since He has taken away his free will, this is what Trump does. Once God takes away your free will, you have no choice. So, the brother Jew against the other brother Jew. I’m going to take away Trump’s free will, and he is now going to be your enemy, because he’s going to stop you from actually protecting yourself. It’s a punishment because of what you’re doing to the Torah, which God wants the Jewish people to occupy themselves with, no question. Because it’s incredibly important.”
“It’s shocking,” he added, “because it looks like Trump has changed. But really, God is giving this punishment because of what the Israeli government is doing. They have no idea of the commotion they’re making in heaven.”
The Iran Catastrophe: Why Trump Is Failing His Mission
Rabbi Kessin turns to Trump’s Iran diplomacy with the impatience of someone watching a gifted surgeon operate on the wrong organ. In his framework, Trump occupies a specific role in the divine architecture of redemption: a figure assigned to remove Iran. The Abraham Accords, the Soleimani strike, and the maximum pressure campaign were all steps toward that culmination. The ceasefire negotiations, the reported memoranda of understanding, the restraint placed on Israel regarding Lebanon represent a catastrophic abandonment of mission.
“God wants him to remove Iran, and he’s not doing that,” Rabbi Kessin said. “He’s playing around. It’s ping-pong.”
Iran will never surrender its uranium, he argues, for reasons that are not political but civilizational. “The war is not with Iran. It’s with Islam. That’s the war. And Iranians are Shiite Islam, and they will never deliver their power. They hold that they are the beloved of Allah, and therefore they will never lose; they are superior to everybody else, especially the infidels. Iran’s identity, the way they see themselves, is they are destined to rule. They’re into power and the maintenance of that power. Nobody gives up their identity. And Trump is asking them, by giving up the nukes or the uranium, to give up their identity of people who are all-powerful. They’re not going to give up. Islam does not lose. Islam will be victorious. That’s what they believe.”
The historical record makes this plain without any theological framework at all. “In 47 years that they’ve ruled Iran, they have no history of any kind of capitulation to an agreement,” Rabbi Kessin said. “They don’t follow agreements. They always cheat, they always violate, and they make you look like an idiot. Their signature is worthless. That’s their history. What more do you need? You want to know somebody’s behavior? Just look at the way he behaved in the past.”
Rabbi Kessin places Iran’s moral standing in an unambiguous category. “These people are level-ten evil. We’re not talking about mischief. We’re talking about torture. They killed men, women, and children. They just butchered 45,000 people — their own people, who were protesting because the economy is falling apart, protesting for a normal democracy. For that, they were shot in the head and butchered in cold blood by the IRGC. I call their level of evil Hitlerian. That’s what Hitler does; he will incinerate you, he will butcher you, because that’s what he believes is correct. That’s his religion. We’re looking at religious fervor. We’re not looking at a thought or an idea. We’re looking at a command of God.”
Given all of this, he finds Trump’s negotiating posture inexplicable. “You keep offering ceasefire after ceasefire, but they violate again and again,” he said. “You wrote in your book The Art of the Deal that the worst thing you could do when negotiating with an opponent is show you’re desperate, because then you’re finished. He knows you’re desperate. He knows you’re going to come to some kind of deal that he wants. You keep offering ceasefires over and over, even though they violate again and again. So what are you showing them? That you’re desperate. You’re violating your own book.”
The ceasefire window, Rabbi Kessin warns, is being used for a single purpose. “They have enough uranium, I think, to make eleven nuclear bombs,” he said. “I don’t know how long it takes to assemble a nuclear weapon, but I’m sure you can do it in a couple of weeks if you put many people to work on it. They’re going to mount it on a missile and they’re going to say, very simple: if you attack us, we’re going to nuke London or Paris or maybe Rome. If they ever say that and they have the wherewithal to do it, the whole world will be unbelievably frightened, because we know they’re going to do it. Then they’ve finished you off. You can no longer do anything to them for fear that they’re going to take out several European capitals.”
The strategic logic is, from the Iranian perspective, airtight. “They know they’re finished — Iran, they know they’re finished — unless they come up with a sufficient threat that you should stop bombing them,” Rabbi Kessin explained. “They don’t mind committing suicide. They don’t mind if the entire Iran dies. They couldn’t care less. I believe that’s really what they’re working on.”
The Bribe That Blinds the Wise
Why would a man as shrewd as Trump fall into this trap? Rabbi Kessin offers a psychological and spiritual diagnosis simultaneously.
“You’re 80 years old,” he said, addressing Trump directly. “How long do you have to live anyway? You’ve got fame, you’ve got money, and you’ve got tremendous accomplishments, tremendous things you’ve done in your life. But there’s something you don’t have. And I believe that’s what’s motivating you. You need a legacy. You want to go down in history as the greatest president of all who made peace. Maybe you’re also aspiring to a Nobel Peace Prize. But I believe the fact that you want a legacy is very important for you; to have Iran make peace, so you could say you actually made peace in the Middle East. Which I feel is a complete fiction. It’s a delusion because you’re dealing with an enemy that is Hitlerian. But you want a legacy desperately. And the Iranians are smart people. They pick that up right away.”
This hunger for legacy constitutes a form of bribery; not financial, but the more dangerous kind the Torah addresses directly. “As it says in the Torah: do not take bribery, because it blinds the eyes of the wise,” Rabbi Kessin said, citing Devarim 16:19. “It doesn’t say it blinds the eyes of the stupid. It blinds the eyes of people who are wise. Even wise people fall to bribery. And I believe basically you fell into bribery.”
The failure carries personal danger. Trump survived four assassination attempts, including the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in July 2024, where a bullet passed within millimeters of killing him, through what Rabbi Kessin describes as open divine providence. “He was saved by the bullet,” he said. “You know why? Because God wants him to remove Iran, and he’s not doing that.” That preservation was purposeful, and its purpose is not being fulfilled. “God can say: I saved you from a bullet with an open miracle in front of the entire world. Why? So you can assist the Mashiach Ben Yosef, assist to remove evil. You’re not doing that. You’re playing around.” The failure to execute the mission does not leave Trump in a neutral position. “My feeling is he’s endangering himself, he’s endangering his family, because he has to do his job, and that is to remove evil from the world, and he’s not doing it.”
The Merit That Protects the Left, And How God Plans to Remove It
There is a final layer to Rabbi Kessin’s analysis that addresses a question his listeners inevitably raise: if the secular Israeli left is so deeply opposed to Torah, why do they succeed?
The answer lies in accumulated merit. For decades, Israeli governments, including secular ones, funded the yeshiva world. That support generated enormous z’chuyot, merits, that have shielded those same governments from the full consequences of their other actions, including the removal of Torah education from the general Israeli school system. “They have tremendous amount of sins, where they remove the Torah from the actual curriculum of the Israeli school system,” Rabbi Kessin said. “But it’s very difficult to stop them because they have the merit of sponsoring and supporting yeshivot. So what God wants to do is to remove the merit that they have, which protects them from judgment. How? He allows them to stop support of the Torah.”
The political victory of the anti-draft forces, in other words, is not a triumph over the Torah world. It is the mechanism by which God strips their protectors of the shield that has kept them in power. “It is critical to remove the merit of what’s called the erev rav, so God can terminate their power,” Rabbi Kessin said. “And I believe that’s really what’s happening.”
Lashon Hara and a New Book
Rabbi Kessin closed his lecture with a personal announcement he frames as directly connected to the themes of redemption and national fate. His 1988 lecture on lashon hara, harmful speech, has been transcribed, endorsed by leading rabbinic figures, and published by Feldheim Publishers under the title The True Power of Speech: The Key to Both Worlds.
“The destruction of the Beit Hamikdash happened because of a single sin that transpired,” he said. “The sin is the concept of lashon hara, harmful speech. Now many years ago, actually in 1988, I gave a shiur describing the pnimiyut, the internal idea or principle of why lashon hara, speaking harmful speech, is so devastating, how it destroyed the Beit Hamikdash, [and] why it doesn’t bring the Mashiach.”
The book is now available in Jewish bookstores. “What the shiur is really all about is: when you speak lashon hara, detrimental derogatory speech, what happens according to the divine plan? What happens to your mazal? What happens to your good fortune and the good fortune of your family?” The inverse is equally powerful: “If you avoid speaking lashon hara, it actually brings forth severe repercussions, either way, on this behavior, speaking or not speaking. When I say the key to both worlds, it’s not only that it will bring you peace and harmony and goodwill in this world when you don’t speak lashon hara, but it’s the key to the World to Come.” He called it one of the most consequential investments a person can make. “I guarantee you that if you do that, it will profoundly affect your life and the life of your family.”
A Warning and a Prayer
At its core, Rabbi Kessin’s lecture is a document of prophetic urgency. The confusion of the present moment, an American president restraining Israel, Iran negotiating from contempt, the yeshiva world under legal assault from the Jewish state itself, is not the unraveling of the divine plan. It is the plan, operating under conditions of maximum concealment, testing the faith of a generation that will be remembered for how it responded.
The prescription is not passive. Torah study must be defended as a national priority. The Israeli government must reverse course on the haredi draft. And Trump must abandon the fantasy of a legacy built on Iranian promises. “For your sake, for your family’s sake, for the sake of the Jewish people, for the sake of the entire world, you’re the man right now,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Take out Iran, because they will destroy the world. As I once brought down from the Midrash, the Midrash says that Iran will threaten the entire world, and it’s your job. I believe that’s your mission: to take out these people.”
And for those watching from outside the corridors of power, Rabbi Kessin returns to Yaakov’s prayer in the darkness before the encounter with Esav. Hatzileni na miyad achi miyad Esav, “Save me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esav.” (Genesis 32:12) It was a prayer for one man facing four hundred enemies on the road to Canaan. Rabbi Kessin hears it as the prayer of this generation, addressed to the same God, about the same brother, on the same road home.
