When I was growing up, my family and my out-of-town cousins would always spend Pesach and the Seder at my grandparents’ home.

It was tradition, but it was more than that. One house. One table. One shared world of jokes and songs that belonged to all of us. We looked forward to it all year.

Then my Zaidy z”l was niftar.

We spent one more Pesach together, and after that it slowly changed. My family made our own Seder. My cousins stayed home and made theirs. Nobody was angry. Nobody “broke up.” Life just did what life does when the center is gone.

Rav Hirsch notes a dynamic that feels painfully real: a family can love each other deeply, but when the parents are no longer the focal point, it becomes natural for siblings to meet less often and slowly drift. Relationships don’t always collapse. Sometimes they fade.

And when Yaakov passed away, that fading was not only a family dynamic. It was the first crack in the center that opened the door to Galut Mitzrayim. When there is no shared center, even love can’t hold people together the way a home does.

That’s why Yaakov’s opening word is so striking. He does not begin with advice. He begins with a command:

“הֵאָסְפוּ… וְאַגִּידָה לָכֶם… בְּאַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים” (Bereishit 49:1).

Gather yourselves, and I will tell you what will be at the end of days. Not an asifah of factions, but an asifah of family. Because Geulah is not built from scattered pieces. It is built when a nation can gather around one shared center again.

And Chazal reveal the tension beneath that gathering. Yaakov wanted to reveal the end, but the Shechinah left him, and he feared that maybe one of his sons was not worthy. They answered him with the sentence that still defines the Jewish people:

“שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה׳ אֱלֹקֵינוּ ה׳ אֶחָד.”

We are one. We are loyal. We are all here.

Then Yaakov gives the brachot, and the Torah insists:

“אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר כְּבִרְכָתוֹ בֵּרַךְ אֹתָם” (Bereishit 49:28).

Each shevet has its own bracha, its own nature, its own role. The goal was never sameness. The goal was harmony. Our differences are the beams of the house, not the cracks in the wall.

And that is the symmetry we are living right now. Just as Galut Mitzrayim began when we lost our center and began to drift, the Geulah Sheleimah will mirror the reverse. Hashem will gather us from the ends of the earth, and the scattered family will become one people again around one center: the Beit HaMikdash. The Shechinah departed Yaakov’s attempt to reveal the end, and now the Shechinah will once again be felt in Tzion.

And maybe that is what we miss most in Galut: not only the land, but the center. A table everyone comes back to.

And then we will be agudah achat, saying Shema Yisrael with one voice, and pointing together toward the day Yeshayahu promised:

“הִנֵּה אֱלֹקֵינוּ זֶה קִוִּינוּ לוֹ וְיוֹשִׁיעֵנוּ… נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה בִּישׁוּעָתוֹ”
(Yeshayahu 25:9)

Let us rejoice in His salvation.