End Times expert Rabbi Mendel Kessin is well-known for connecting world events to their end of days significance. In a recent lecture, he spoke about the “upheavals, eruptions and catastrophes” currently playing out in America. “We’re watching a tremendous amount of instability in the world. I’m sure everyone is wondering, ‘What is happening and why is this happening?’” he noted.

His explanation is based, in part, on the Biblical precedent of the story of Noah.

Hashem said to Noach, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth. Genesis 6:13

Kessin shared a teaching from Bereshit Rabba, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis written over 1500 years ago. In that text, it is taught that, at the point when legal contracts were drawn up to formalize the relationship between two men or between a man and an animal, God finally decided to bring the flood and destroy the world. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he noted.

There were ten generations between Adam and Noah. The Jewish mystical understanding, according to Rabbi Kessin, is that those ten generations were meant to repair the spiritual damage caused by Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden.

To Adam He said, “Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ Cursed be the ground because of you; By toil shall you eat of it All the days of your life: Genesis 3:17

In Jewish thought, water is compared to spiritual light. Had the ten generations succeeded in rectifying the sin of Adam, the world would have been flooded with the spiritual light of geula (redemption). However, since sin still prevailed on Earth even after ten generations passed, God brought a flood of water in order to “restart” the entire enterprise.

Rabbi Kessin argued that Western culture has reached a level of sexual depravity similar to that which was the catalyst for the Biblical flood. “Now we can understand what is happening today,” he noted, implying that mainstream acceptance of what was historically considered to be sexually deviant has reached the point where the world requires another “restart”.

Kessin connects a number of current events to this stage of the messianic process, most notably the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US in 2015, a move that declared same-sex marriage to be a right protected under the US Constitution.

“Which is exactly what happened in the time of Noach (Noah). Now God is not going to bring a flood because He swore to Noach that He would not destroy the world,” Kessin taught.

Hashem smelled the pleasing odor, and Hashem said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done. Genesis 8:21

This time, promised Kessin, the wiping out of sin won’t happen with a flood of water, but with redemption itself. 

In the balance of the lecture, Kessin makes the case that daily news events, such as the multiple attempts to hinder President Trump, a personality Kessin has often called “a messianic figure”, the COVID-19 plague, “the economic dissolution of America” and the race riots where groups like Antifa are “using blacks to create chaos – rioting, looting, arson,” are markers of the end of civilization.

Toward the end of the lecture, he posed the question, “Are we watching the end of the galus (exile)? Are we witnessing the end of the love affair that Jews have with America? It’s very possible that’s exactly what we are watching,” he asserted.

In a related thought, Kessin predicted that the current government in Israel will collapse over the pressure to accommodate the millions of American Jews who are now planning to make aliyah (immigrate to Israel).

“We are really in a messianic process. God has pressed the restart button. But instead of the restart destroying civilization, the restart is to change civilization into the era of the Messiah, of the Moshiach. And that, really, is what is happening,” he concluded.