Does Ariel Sharon’s Death Bode the Second Coming?

Does a note left by a venerated Orthodox Rabbi shortly before his death indicate that the Apocalypse and the ’1000 years of peace’ are just around the corner?

Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri died in Israel in 2006 at the age of 108. At his funeral 24 hours later it is estimated that 2 or 3 hundred-thousand people flooded the streets of Jerusalem to pay tribute to the “mystic sage.”

On Sept 24th 2001, he prophesied that “On Hashanah Rabba the actual war of Gog and Magog will commence and last for some 7 years.” Auspiciously, on the eve of Hashanah Rabba on Oct 7th 2001, the United States began strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. A year later during Rosh Hashanah in October 2005, he raised his head after a a period of deep concentration and declared, “The soul of the Messiah has attached itself to a person in Israel” and he would honor his promise to guide his people through a “time of trouble.” In his last prophesy before death, he declared that he had met the Messiah, and he will come shortly after the death of Ariel Sharon.

Rabbi Kaduri wrote a note while dying and requested that it be opened and read a year after his death. On January 28, 2007, the note in Hebrew was opened and read, but proved to be confusing to many of the Rabbi’s followers:

Concerning the letter abbreviation of the Messiah’s name, He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid.

This I have signed in the month of mercy,
Yitzhak Kaduri

“Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim” is the phonetic pronunciation of the Hebrew phrase in bold. The initials of this phrase spell “Yehoshua,” which is another way of spelling the name Jesus. The members of Kaduri’s Ultra-Orthodox semniary, Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva, scrambled to explain that the Rabbi had not left the exact instructions for decoding the message. Among the deflated comments appearing on web forums were “So Rabbi Kaduri was a Christian?” and “The Christians are dancing and celebrating.”

The note received scant coverage in Israeli news, with a few sources insisting the note’s authenticity, but others decrying the note as a forgery. Two of Kaduri’s followers interviewed by Israel Today attested that the note was authentic, but they had “no idea how the Rabbi got this name of the Messiah.”

Kaduri’s son, Rabbi David Kaduri asserts the note’s inauthenticity, claiming that in September 2005 when the note was written, his father’s physical condition made it impossible for him to write. David Kaduri did however also confirm that in his last year, his father had talked and dreamed almost exclusively about the Messiah and his coming. “My father has met the Messiah in a vision,” he said, “and told us that he would come soon.”

Source: Disinfo.com