As riots spread from Paris to Tirana, Rabbi Mendel Kessin says Europe is living out Isaiah’s vision of God treading the winepress of Edom. The UN walkout on Netanyahu, he says, sealed the verdict.
A city hall burned in Limoges. Rioters broke into the Ohalei Yaakov synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement and left holy books scattered across the floor. Jewish-owned shops went up in flames in Marseille, and a Reuters photographer captured the Palestinian flag flying beside the French tricolor over Place de la République. Since mid-September, a wave of protest that began in France has spread to Spain, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Albania, Greece, Germany and Austria. Nearly 1,800 people were arrested across France in a single weekend, according to Reuters, and Barcelona police arrested 128 people after a night of riots and looting.
Governments and economists blame the cost of living, housing shortages and budget deficits. French unions have called a general strike for November 5, Spanish unions for November 11, and a German youth movement calling itself “Gen Z regelt” has summoned nationwide protests for October 31. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has already been forced into snap elections set for November 29.
Rabbi Mendel Kessin, whose weekly lectures on the divine plan and the end of days draw a worldwide following, told his audience this week that the economic explanations miss the story entirely.
“We’re not looking here at the downfall of a nation,” Rabbi Kessin said. “We’re looking at the end of a civilization.”
“There’s something going on now which I think everybody should certainly be aware of, and that is the nations of the world,” he said. “There’s a tremendous unrest, or I should even say upheaval, in Europe. Tremendous. We’re not looking here at an incident.”
“There certainly looks like we have an acceleration of what is going to happen at the end of time,” Rabbi Kessin added.
Rabbi Kessin said the scenes from Paris, Marseille, Milan and Barcelona were written down more than 2,700 years ago by the prophet Isaiah, in a vision of God returning from the land of Edom with His garments soaked in blood. That leaves the question of why the prophet saw the final judgment of Edom as a man trampling grapes in a winepress, and what that image has to do with the streets of Europe in the autumn of 2026.
The Winepress of Edom
The 63rd chapter of Isaiah opens with the prophet watching a terrifying figure approach.
“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with crimsoned garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, stately in the greatness of his strength? ‘I that speak in victory, mighty to save.'” (Isaiah 63:1)
The prophet asks why the garments are red, “like him that treadeth in the winevat,” and God answers:
“I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the peoples there was no man with Me; yea, I trod them in Mine anger, and trampled them in My fury; and their lifeblood is dashed against My garments, and I have stained all My raiment. For the day of vengeance that was in My heart, and My year of redemption are come.” (Isaiah 63:3-4)
Rabbi Kessin explained that Isaiah was afraid. A royal figure in blood-red garments represents middat hadin, the divine attribute of strict justice, and the prophet feared that judgment was coming for Israel.
“God tells him, don’t worry, it’s all just and righteous,” Rabbi Kessin said. “What appeared to be incredible brutality is really the administration of justice.”
“When God comes to you in a garment soaked in blood, what are you afraid of? That He’s after you. It’s middat hadin,” he said. “God is coming to you as a judge to exact punishment.”
The key phrase, he said, is God’s complaint that no one stood with Him. “Nobody assisted me to do justice. I did justice, and I did it alone,” Rabbi Kessin said, paraphrasing the verse. “That means everybody else was not interested in justice. That is an accusation of mankind.”
“It’s like somebody kills in front of you, and you say to people around you, ‘Let’s get him. Let’s stop him.’ And they do nothing and they all walk away, not interested,” Rabbi Kessin said. “They themselves are guilty.”
Rabbi Kessin then asked why Isaiah chose the image of a winepress at all. His answer pointed to a specific country.
“If Edom is Europe, what country is famous for its wine? It’s France,” he said. “So God is using imagery that’s familiar with that location in Edom, so everybody will understand what country I just stepped on.”
“God is alluding through a hint that I’m coming from France, and I stepped on them, which means I’m crushing their civilization because of what they did,” Rabbi Kessin said.
Esau’s Three Faces
To explain why Europe stands in the crosshairs of Isaiah’s prophecy, Rabbi Kessin traced a lineage the Sages laid out in the Talmud. Esau, Jacob’s brother, became the nation of Edom. The Sages identified Edom with Rome. Rome adopted Christianity, and Christianity shaped Western civilization.
“That’s really what Western civilization is,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Western civilization, which is Christianity, which is Rome, which is Edom, which is Esau.”
He said Esau carried three defining traits, and each one settled into a different branch of the modern West. The first is ga’avah, arrogance. “That nation is Russia,” he said, pointing to its atheism under communism and its imperial pride. The second is mirmah, deceit. “Esau was known as a fraud, an impostor. So he becomes Europe. Europe is a very fraudulent place, full of deception.” The third is ta’avah, the drive for pleasure and appetite, which Rabbi Kessin assigned to the United States.
“Russia, certainly under communism, tremendous atheistic ideas, tremendous arrogance,” he said of the first. Of Europe, he said, “The fact that they butchered so many people over the thousands of years, how many Jews they’ve killed in spreading the religion of Christianity, condemns them in a terrible way.”
He noted that Esau also excelled in kibbud av va’em, honoring his father and mother, a trait he said lives on in America. “It’s only basically in America where you have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. That’s ingrained in their nature.”
Rabbi Kessin has developed this framework of Esau’s three faces in earlier lectures, including his teaching on the role of President Trump and the United Nations at the end of days.
Why Nations Vanish
Rabbi Kessin grounded his reading of current events in what he calls the divine plan. God created two realities, Olam Hazeh, this world, and Olam Haba, the World to Come. The Jewish people move the world from one to the other through three tools: mitzvot (commandments), teshuva (repentance), and yissurin (suffering).
“This is the wherewithal of how we change reality from Olam Hazeh to Olam Haba,” he said. “This is it. There is no other way.”
Every commandment draws down sparks of holiness, he explained. Every sin hands those sparks to the forces of evil, which feed on them. When the Jewish people repent or endure suffering, they pull those sparks back out.
“We both vie for the same energy source, namely the sparks of holiness,” Rabbi Kessin said. “If we don’t take it down, then it’s transferred to him, and that gives him enormous power. We’ve got to take away his food, so to speak.”
That process, Rabbi Kessin said, explains why the great empires of the Jewish exile are gone. Israel passed through Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, each one a test powered by the forces of evil.
“What happens to those nations that represent the temptations of the Satan? They collapse. They disappear,” he said. “That is why you do not see any of the nations of antiquity at all. We have taken out the sparks. We are the cause of the collapse of the nations of antiquity.”
A Mission Betrayed
Rabbi Kessin cited the Rambam (Maimonides), who wrote in his laws of kings that Christianity and Islam served to spread the concepts of Messiah, Torah, and commandments to the distant islands and to many nations, preparing the world for the true redemption.
According to Rabbi Kessin, God granted Christianity its astonishing success precisely for that task. “What were the odds that somebody crucified on a cross, killed as a criminal against Rome, would become a world religion, one of the greatest forces on the earth? There were no odds. But it happened. Why? Because He had a task for the Christians.”
The task never included killing Jews. “He did not want them to try to be a rival to the Jewish people and, as a result of the rivalry, to kill the Jews,” Rabbi Kessin said. “What happened? They developed a tremendous jealousy, and as a result of that they became rivals, and once they became rivals they condemned the Jews, and they killed them.”
He listed the record: pogroms, expulsions, Crusades, the Inquisition, burnings at the stake, the Holocaust. Then he offered a calculation. Historians estimate roughly nine million Jews lived in the Roman era, alongside an estimated 25 million Chinese. Today there are 1.4 billion Chinese and about 16 million Jews.
“This has been the history of Christianity with Judaism for thousands of years,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Pogroms, expulsions, Holocausts, Crusades, Inquisitions.”
“There should be about 500 million Jews,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Where are the rest? And the answer is they’re all dead. That’s how many people were killed in all those things. Do you think that’s what God is going to let go unpunished? No, not at all.”
Ishmael, the Guardian at the Gate
Rabbi Kessin said God answered Christian persecution by raising up a counterweight. The Talmud (Bava Batra 16b) teaches that Ishmael, son of Abraham, repented during his father’s lifetime. Rabbi Kessin taught that in the merit of that teshuva, God gave Ishmael’s descendants a share in spreading belief in the One God, on one condition.
Rabbi Kessin described Ishmael’s plea before God. “Please give my people, the Arabs, also the merit of getting away from paganism,” he said. “And God said, ‘I will do it because you did teshuva. You repented. I will give your descendants that emerge from you also the ability to promote God.'”
“They will be My weapon, My instrument to stop the Christians from destroying the Jews,” he said. “So He gave Christianity a mortal enemy.”
For 1,500 years, he explained, that rivalry played out in the Muslim conquests of the Middle East, the Crusades, the long struggle over Spain and the Ottoman sieges of Vienna. Yet Islam never conquered Christian Europe. Muslim armies were turned back at Tours in 732 CE and at the gates of Vienna in 1683 CE.
“Had they taken over Vienna, which was the gateway to Europe, then Christianity would have ceased to exist,” Rabbi Kessin said. “They would have taken over the entire Europe.”
“God said no. I have to have two distinct religions,” Rabbi Kessin said. “One has to promote My name throughout the world, which the Christians did.”
Rabbi Kessin stressed that Muslim rule brought real persecution to Jews, including second-class dhimmi status, but said it never approached the scale of Christian violence against Jews in Europe.
“There was no question that there was persecution by the Arabs, but nowhere near the butchery of the Catholics, of the Christians,” he said. “Burned at the stake, what are you kidding me? For what?”
The Gates Opened from Inside
What changed, according to Rabbi Kessin, is that Europe opened its own gates. He pointed to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit more than a million asylum seekers, and to the immigration policies that followed across the continent.
“God put into the mind of the leaders of Europe to allow immigration by the Arabs in European countries,” he said. “For 1,500 years, they were never able to get into the Christian countries. For the first time, they’re in those countries.”
Rabbi Kessin was scathing about Merkel. “It’s just incredible how stupid, and I have to say this, was that decision,” he said. “Maybe she feels guilty for what the Germans did to other people, so now she wants to come across as a kind woman. And then once she did it, it opened up to Europe. France did it, Spain did it, they all did it.”
He was blunt about the consequences. “They will not assimilate in your country. They will gather together amongst themselves,” he said. “France, it’s only a matter of time until they burn down the Louvre.”
“How’s France going to feel when their Louvre burns down, when they destroy their Eiffel Tower?” he said. “They want to take the nations of Christianity over. They think it’s a mitzvah, what Allah wills. They want to introduce Sharia law. It’s only a matter of time until it happens to England.”
Rabbi Kessin said the current unrest is far more than a student movement. “The people rebelling, they’re not students. Many of them, and they’re well funded, many of them are Arabs, Islam.” He framed it as measure for measure. “You don’t want Jews, and that’s what you’ve demonstrated for 1,500 years. Great. I will give you Muslims. Let’s see how you get along with them.”
Reporting from France has documented the Palestinian dimension of the riots. The Times of Israel reported that Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were a recurring motif in most of the violent protests, vandalism, and looting. French journalist Paul Amar charged that Jewish-owned shops were directly targeted while Muslim-owned stores were spared. France’s Jewish Community Protection Service, known as SPCJ, said it had found no evidence of selective targeting and urged caution about unverified claims. In Italy, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said the French unrest was fueled by the difficulty of integrating second-generation migrants into the school system.
“It’s not just in Paris,” Rabbi Kessin said. “It’s in Marseille and all the other French cities, and it’s in Spain, Barcelona. It’s in Portugal. It’s in Italy. It’s in Germany. It’s in Belgium. It’s in Greece. It’s Europe. And it’s only started now.”
“What you’re watching is Isaiah 63,” Rabbi Kessin said. “God says this is vengeance, and the time of My redemption has come.”
The Warning at the UN
Rabbi Kessin tied the prophecy to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s September 24 address to the UN General Assembly. Nearly 70 delegations walked out as Netanyahu approached the podium, some booing and jeering, after the Palestinian mission urged member states to empty the hall. Netanyahu called the departing envoys “moral cowards” and told the remaining delegates that accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.
Rabbi Kessin said Netanyahu was fulfilling a role far larger than he knew. Before anyone can do teshuva, he explained, they must hear the charge against them.
“The way I see it, he was compelled. This wasn’t an accident,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Not that Netanyahu knows this, but certainly he did it for his own reasons. He’s warning the world of the end of time, and he’s giving them a chance to do teshuva. Before you do teshuva, you have to understand and know what you’re accused of.”
“He laid out an accusation against many of the nations that pursue and accuse Israel,” Rabbi Kessin said. “It is now up to them to listen to the charge and to ask themselves, maybe he’s right. Let’s examine the facts. Instead, they walked out even before he spoke.”
“What Netanyahu did is he accused them of falsehood,” he said. “The false accusations that Israel is nothing more than genocide, which of course is absurd for anybody who looks at the reality of the Middle East. So what was it? It’s a warning.”
The walkout, he said, sealed the verdict. “When God does take vengeance, He will be able to say to them: I warned you. I gave you a chance. All I asked you was to listen to what he says and verify if there’s any truth in it. Instead you walked out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He connected the empty seats directly to Isaiah’s complaint that there was no helper. “Was there any supporter? No. They walked out instead of assisting me.”
Rabbi Kessin also pointed to the recent Flydubai flight incident, which he called a public miracle that raised the standing of the Jewish people before the nations, alongside Israel’s widely admired intelligence penetration of Iran. “The Jews will look better and better,” he said.
“The world respects heroism, especially of that caliber,” he said. “Already the world sees the Jews as one of the greatest intelligence agencies. It’s just incredible how they know everything going on in Iran.”
Russia, America, and the Grid
Rabbi Kessin said Esau’s other two faces are faltering as well. Ukraine’s survival exposed Russia as “a paper tiger,” he said. “If it wasn’t for their nuclear missiles, people would laugh at Russia.”
“Just go to Russia and check out their grocery store. There’s nothing there. Only the very rich can afford,” he said. “Putin needs to make peace because he’s losing the youth at an incredible rate. Does this sound like a formidable enemy?”
He reserved his sharpest words of concern for America, and some of them for President Trump. Rabbi Kessin said Trump was spared the assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, for a mission: to remove the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “You don’t negotiate with Hitler,” he said, criticizing the administration’s diplomacy with Tehran. “Yes, he did tremendous economic success. That’s very nice. But the real success is [to] do what God assigned you to do.”
“Everybody knows you can’t trust these people,” Rabbi Kessin said. “Every five-year-old can tell you what they’re going to do. Tragically, they have made him look like a fool.”
With the US midterm elections days away, he warned about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and pointed to New York under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “They are destroying the United States,” he said. “New York is going to be a has-been.”
“This is not a Democratic party. They stole the name of the party,” he said. “How can anybody vote for the Democratic Socialists of America? It’s ridiculous.”
He also warned that America’s enemies no longer need an army. “You know how you could take out America in one day? The electric grid,” he said, describing the possibility of an Iranian cell inside the country striking unprotected infrastructure. “No heat, no phone, no banks, no stores, nothing.”
“It is now possible for Iran, in a sleeper cell in America, to take out the system. I’m sure they know where the electrics are,” he said. “We live in a very dangerous time.”
Rabbi Kessin said he believes America will be spared because of what it has given the Jewish people. “They have done so many good things for the Jewish people by allowing the Jews to learn their Torah, to practice their religion,” he said. “Americans basically are decent, and they want righteousness. They want truth and justice. God needs a country that fundamentally wants righteousness.”
“Let’s hope that God has rachamim, mercy, on America because of all the chessed, the kindness, that they’ve done,” he said. “But right now Europe is being slaughtered. We have no idea how extensive this is going to become.”
The Year of Redemption
Rabbi Kessin closed by returning to the second half of Isaiah’s verse, where the day of vengeance stands beside the year of redemption. Isaiah places the two in the same breath because they are the same event: the judgment of Edom for two thousand years of Jewish blood is the opening of the geula, the final redemption.
“Enough is enough,” Rabbi Kessin said, voicing God’s words to the nations. “What they did to My children over the thousands of years, enough is enough.”
“Vengeance really means justice,” he said. “They were supposed to do something limited, but not kill for 1,500 years. Burning at the stake in Spain, the Holocaust, six million Jews in the ovens. Now it’s time.”
“We’re in the messianic times, and it’s moving very, very rapidly,” he told his listeners. “Get back into the groove of spirituality, because the Messiah is right around the corner.”
