Question

Rabbi Michi, hello (this is Or from the WhatsApp group).
I wanted to discuss something that’s been weighing on my heart (it’s also connected to articles you wrote).
I’ll say in advance that this may come out a bit harsh, and I’m just exposing what’s going through my mind. It’s clear to me that God is upright; I just want a solution to this issue.
When the Jewish people were in the desert, and afterward in the Land, there was in practice a monarchical regime.
In today’s terms, that’s a form of government we do not view positively.
And true, one can understand “you shall set a king over yourself” not as a commandment, as Abarbanel wrote.
But I’m talking about something deeper: the fact that there are the priests, who are on top; after them the Levites; and then the masses, who support them.
And seemingly this is difficult: that God commanded a kind of society that today we look at the way we look at the products of monarchy and nobility—people holy from the womb, and the masses plain from the womb.
And then the Temple was destroyed as a punishment, and seemingly the people were freed from that social structure.
Along with it, the sacrificial service also ceased. It is hard that God would command the killing of animals as a commandment, even if it was to distance people from idolatry, since He could have arranged things differently so that they would worship Him. And supposedly there is a lot of evil in the world regardless, but it is hard that specifically such a thing would come to reveal God.
So I ask myself: what did the people pray for all those years? For a Temple in which animals are slaughtered? For a non-egalitarian social structure so far removed from democratic states?
For lashes for someone who eats pork? (Let’s say that if he says he was compelled by hunger, etc., maybe he wouldn’t be punished.)
So either the people really prayed for this from a pure religious motive, with self-nullification. Or it simply became a huge myth that people are not really connected to.
Or the people simply connected this point to the true redemption—the return to the Land and freedom from subjugation to the kingdoms.
And redemption in the World to Come—the return of God to His people in His revelation, something that cannot be spoken of in words because we know nothing of what God’s knowledge is.
It seems that over the course of history the people connected return to the Land, the Temple, and the World to Come,
when in practice what the people prayed for was motivated by the World to Come, which is itself the redemption.
And in fact the redeemer—the Messiah—is God (of course without a body), and not a human being who will restore the sacrifices.
This fits even better with Abarbanel’s approach, according to which there is no commandment at all to appoint a king (“you shall set a king… like all the nations around you”—a derogatory expression), especially when you look at the Book of Prophets, where the whole idea is that a king over Israel is a negative thing, and God despises this in Samuel’s prophecy.
Seemingly, wouldn’t it be better for Judaism to accept the hiddenness of God’s face as a revelation of His face in some cases? Just as we would not want to carry out the wiping out of Amalek, we would not want to fulfill these commandments either. And there is no point complaining about it, because God intentionally arranged things so that we cannot, because it does not fit the morality of the people at the stage they have reached—having developed morally over the generations along with all humanity. And today these commandments do not fit the delicate human soul and are far from all the above. And that is why God arranged things this way. And in practice, we should invest effort in true redemption, which is knowledge of God, which is the true redemption—the World to Come. (And if He decides on a Temple, that is His right, because God is righteous in all His ways.)
 
Thank you