غاية التاريخ

The last in deed is the first in thought. The line is from a Friday-night piyut and it functions as a compressed theory of purpose. Whatever is built last is generally what the building was for.

The order of construction is not the order of intention

Nobody builds a foundation because they want a foundation. The foundation exists because of a room that does not yet exist, and the room exists because of a life someone intends to live in it. Read forward, construction looks like an accumulation of materials. Read backward from the finished house, every stage is explained.

The claim is that history has this structure. Read forward it is a sequence of events with no evident direction; empires, exiles, migrations, recoveries. Read backward from its completion, the sequence resolves into a process that was going somewhere.

This is not a claim that suffering was justified

It is important to be careful here, because the same idea in slightly different hands becomes obscene. Saying that history has a purpose is not saying that every event in it was a necessary means, still less that atrocities were instruments. The tradition does not say this, and the sources on Divine concealment during exile are considerably more anguished than modern summaries of them.

What is claimed is narrower: that the process as a whole is oriented, and that its orientation will become perceptible from its end. What is not claimed is that each element of the process was individually intended by that orientation. The difference between these two sentences is the difference between theology and cruelty.

Why Moshiach comes late

Because he is not an intervention that could have happened at any point. He is the completion of a process, and a completion cannot arrive before the process has run. The conditions he requires — a people that has been everywhere, a Torah that has been argued about for millennia, a world capable of being organised — are produced by the history that precedes him.

Which is why the tradition treats the length of exile as a subject for grief rather than for explanation, and simultaneously insists that nothing in it was wasted. Both halves are load-bearing, and dropping either one produces a distortion.