The appropriate word has not yet been coined. After all, can you think of a word that describes Polish leadership barring the Israeli Prime Minister from setting foot on their blood-soaked soil to mark a Holocaust anniversary? What phrase portrays world leadership, not one of whom stayed home in protest? How would you label a post October 7 international court that determined Israel's guilt of war crimes? Will you be able to paint in words, for your children, the deafening silence of world opinion watching the release of hundreds of merciless terrorists for one innocent Jewish hostage? "Audacious"? "Chutzpa"? "Ginormous chutzpa"? "Colossal audacity"? Are we even close?
Truth be told, we do have the phrase. Now we understand it and live it. The prescient phrase of Chazal found in the last mishna of mesechta Sotah has now come to life. There we learned that our final redemption unfolds in a world of increasing audacity: "בְּעִקְּבוֹת מְשִׁיחָא חֻצְפָּא יִסְגֵּא".
Harav Eliyahu Dessler (Michtav Mei'Eliyahu, volume 3, page 215), the wildly creative Kelmer talmid who became the mashgiach of Gateshead and later of Ponevezh, postulates that this indescribable impertinence is borne out of a profound guilt. That guilt, he submits, happens when unbridled conceit and entitlement doesn't allow us to be guided by the truths of heart and conscience. It was that "chutzpah yasgi" that exiled us or accompanied our exile, and consequently we need to suffer it in order to merit our redemption.
However, where Harav Dessler sees consequences and self-awareness, Harav Kook (Ikvei Hatzon, 120, following the insights of Rav Tzadok) sees promise and vision, and concomitant growing self-confidence. He explains that times of redemption are informed by "holy chutzpa, sacred audacity". Is it not audacious for a people, homeless for close to two millennia, to be unquestionably certain that we will have a full-blown redemption? Is not wildly impertinent to believe that we, mortal men, will once again make Hashem's presence and sovereignty patently clear and His morality commonplace? Apparently, times of unabashed immoral impertinence can unleash and model, and then nurture, the required holy conceit that we need to recognize that we are living the visions of age-old prophecies and are destined to see them all come true.
It all began at Sinai. Is it not immodest to demand of Moshe Rabbeinu that he no longer acts as the intermediary, that we need to directly imbibe Torah from Hashem? Were we not driven by holy entitlement when we declared, רצוננו לראות מלכנו" - it is our will to see Our King", that we could live in the non-corporeal and then return to the finite and physical?
Indeed, Rav Nachman of Breslov finds the source for all this sacred snobbery in the words of Chazal (Beitza 25b) "The Torah was given to the Jews because they are עזין. Whereas this is usually rendered to portray the Torah's softening impact on an otherwise tough group, the great Rav Nachmam Breslover teaches otherwise, explaining: "just as one who is impertinent has no place within our Torah... So too one who lacks self-awareness and is devoid of self-esteem and does not have the holy haughty ambitiousness will also not find his place in Hashem's Torah".
May the deeply troubling and unspeakable audacity of our times become one of the many great signs of the unfolding redemption, and may we merit to see that redemption speedily.