The meteoric fragments that struck Jupiter last week were a sign for all the world to see.
This, according to the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach, which last week issued a press release claiming the event was foretold in the Zohar, the 13th century Jewish mystical text.
Rabbi Shmuel Butman, chairman of the campaign and member of the Lubavitch Chasidic sect, said the smashing of fragments from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into the planet Jupiter coincides with the arrival of the messianic era.
Butman said the Zohar predicted that in messianic times the world would witness a “great fiery plume” streaking through space, striking a large planet “three times daily” and sending out “great flashes of light in all directions.”
Twenty-one fragments from the comet struck Jupiter between July 16 and July 22, at an average rate of three per day. The dazzling light show produced by the impacts was broadcast on worldwide television.
The comet is believed to have been traveling through space for 4.5 billion years.
Butman, a leader of the campaign to anoint the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as the messiah, said the world should know that redemption is near.
“You cannot dismiss something happening in the world and say, ‘well, it just happened.’
“Nothing just happens,” Butman said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
