Together with the prophecies of a bitter future for the Jewish People in exile, we find a number of promises that assure us of our eventual redemption and joyful return to our land. Time and again during the long years in the Diaspora, these prophecies infused our people with renewed strength and good hope. If we review these predictions, we will see that they promise of events that could not have been foreseen in advance; even so, they have come about. Among these promises is the pledge that the Jewish nation will live forever. The continued survival of the Jewish people as a distinct nation goes against all rules of history. According to conventional thought, the Jewish People should today be only a memory of the past, not a living, vital people looking forward to a future of continued growth and accomplishment. In the past, Israel had its full complement of enemies and adversaries. As we know only too well, also today, there is no dearth of antagonists of our nation. Despite it all, the Jewish People remains alive and well, against all odds. This on-going miracle is considered by some Jewish thinkers as being even greater than the Ten Plagues which afflicted the ancient Egyptians. What is more, G-d promised His people that this would happen thousands of years before the actual events took place: But even with all this, while they are in the land of their enemies, I will not have been revolted by them, nor will I have rejected them, to make an end of them, to annul My covenant with them, for I am … their G-d (Leviticus 26:44). If we leaf through the pages of Jewish history, we find repeated instances in which the prophecy “And the land of your enemies will consume you” (Leviticus 26:38) was realized. Despite it all, the Jewish People was never totally annihilated Here we have yet another instance of a prophecy which is being fulfilled in our times before our very eyes. A second example: The Torah predicts that the Jewish nation will remain relatively small in numbers: G-d will scatter you among the nations, and you will remain few in number among the nations where G-d will lead you (Deuteronomy 4:27). At the same time, we are promised that Israel will never die out or disappear from the face of the earth: So has G-d said, Who makes the sun shine by day and establishes the laws of the moon and the stars at night, Who agitates the sea, so that its waves roar, the L-rd of Legions is His Name: If these laws can be removed from before Me – the word of G-d – so could the seed of Israel cease to be a nation before Me forever (Jeremiah 31:34-35). Just as we have no doubt that the sun, the moon, and the stars will be there in the sky tomorrow, next week, next year, and even a century or two from now, so, too, can we be certain that the Jewish People will always be there to see them. This promise is repeated many times in the Scriptures. We today are witnesses to its fulfillment. An additional promise we find is that the Torah will never be entirely forgotten; it will always continue to live among a portion of the Jewish People: “It shall be, when many evils and distresses come upon it (the nation of Israel), this song (which follows directly, namely, Deuteronomy, Chapter 32:1-43) shall speak up before it as a witness for it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of its seed…" (Deuteronomy 31:21) Rashi, the foremost commentator on the Torah, comments on this verse: “Here we have a promise that the Torah will not be forgotten completely from the descendants of the Jewish People.” There is no comparable phenomenon in all of human history. A people who were scattered over the face of the earth for nearly two thousand years has nonetheless continued to carry with it, intact, the unaltered text of its Holy Scripture. No natural explanation can be given for it. Time after time, foreign nations have tried to wean us away from the Torah with promises of social acceptance, culture, wealth, influential positions, and more. At no time in our history did all of the Jewish nation succumb and forgo it precious Torah, no matter what the price. So, too, did many cruel tyrants attempt to coerce the Jewish People to abandon the Torah, but to no avail. At least a portion of the people remained loyal to Torah in every generation. There is no rational explanation for the tenacity the people of Israel have displayed in their devotion to the Torah given them at Mount Sinai, apart from the fact that, over three thousand years ago, Heaven promised it would be so: And as for Me, this is My covenant, said the L-rd: My spirit, which is upon you, and the words which I have placed in your mouth will not depart from your mouth and the mouth of your descendants, and the mouth of your descendants descendants, declares the L-rd, from now until the end of time.” (Isaiah 59:21) The Torah went into exile among the nations together with the Jewish People. There it, too, suffered many upheavals and difficult times together with them. It is interesting to note the pattern which repeats itself throughout Jewish history. Again and again, we witness the downfall and destruction of a Torah center in one location, but, at the same time, we inevitably also find the rise of a similar center elsewhere. As a result, there was never a period in our history during which the Torah was not studied intensely at some spot on the globe. In this way, the divine promise has been fulfilled for nearly two thousand years in exile. “In every generation, they rise up against us, to annihilate us” and to eradicate our Torah, but G-d saves us from their hand each time, just as He promised. The physical preservation of the Jewish People and the centrality of Torah throughout the centuries are also miracles of the highest order. There is no comparable phenomenon in the history of mankind. From the time of the Greeks, who tried to impose Hellenistic culture on our people, throughout the centuries of exile, with the crusades, the Inquisition, right down to the recent attempt of communist Russia to impose its atheism on us, at least a portion of the people have always remained loyal to Torah. No other ethnic group has been exposed to such a diversity of foreign cultures and yet retained its own distinct ethos, unchanged and undiluted. In our own times, there are many religious Jews among the outstanding leaders in the sciences and the arts who continue to practice the faith of their Forefathers, just as the Torah has taught us to do for over three thousand years. The pattern of their lives, the precepts which guide them in day-to-day living, are exactly the same as those their forebears received at Sinai so long ago. With unswerving pride and loyalty, the Jewish People has preserved them, intact, throughout the ages, just as the Scriptures declared they would. G-d promised us that the Torah would always be the light to guide us, and so it is, right down to our times, and we are witness to the fact that it is so, for the bond between the Jewish People and their Torah is eternal, as the Torah promised.