These days are part of a period of semi-mourning in the Jewish year. It's a time of preparation for Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av. Essentially, it's the day on which great tragedies occurred in the history of the Jewish people. It's a dark day, as if it were something dry and harsh. That's what exile is like, but why?
The other day, in a conversation about Torah, someone asked me a question whose explanation might help us understand something about this exile. The question was this: We read stories in the Torah in which God is shown to be revealing: why isn't He so revealing today?
In fact, this week we read the parashah Devarim (Words), the first of the last book of the Torah. Regarding this book, our sages say that "Moses spoke it of himself," meaning that the first four books of the Torah were spoken by Moses as God's messenger, where God spoke to Moses and Moses to the Jewish people, while in the last book, Devarim, Moses spoke with Divine Inspiration (Ruach HaKodesh).
The difference lies in how the Torah permeated Moses' life: in the first four books, Moses prophesied the Torah. It was something in itself, and Moses was something in itself. In the book of Deuteronomy, the Torah and Moses were one; the Torah had descended to clothe itself in Moses and become part of his very being.
So why was this descent in the transmission of the Torah necessary? At the end of the forty years of wandering in the desert, Moses recounted the entire Torah to the Jewish people who were about to enter the Land of Israel. These people were going to have to plow, sow, harvest, and perform other tasks, leaving behind the comforts of the desert, where bread fell from heaven, water flowed from a miraculous well, and other conveniences that meant people didn't have to exert themselves in the slightest to live.
This transition from the desert to the Land of Israel was, on the one hand, a profound spiritual descent and, on the other, a further step toward fulfilling the purpose for which God created the entire universe: to have a dwelling place for Himself. This dwelling place can only be attained by engaging with and refining the world around us (through Torah study and the observance of mitzvot), as it were, by being in the Land of Israel and not in the desert.
Therefore, for people who were going to be more in contact with the material reality of life, a more "real" transmission of information was necessary, a Moshe who would speak the Torah from his own mouth, more "lowered" for the reality that people lived, more "humanized".
With this explanation, we can better understand our question: as generations pass, we descend more and more spiritually, and at the same time, we "conquer" new places for this dwelling that God desires; we bring God to new places. If God were revealed as He was in the time of the desert, we wouldn't be able to do the work of revealing Him in the most remote places on earth (or, since man is like a small world, in the most remote and dark places of our own lives), because He Himself would already be revealed!
That is why exile is dry, harsh, and dark: God is hidden, but that is part of the system. Like a father playing hide-and-seek with his young son: the father's concealment generates excitement in the son to search for and find him. This idea should serve as a source of strength and hope for us, so that the more hidden God is, the closer we are to the Final Redemption. May this Tisha B'Av be transformed into joy and rejoicing with the coming of Messiah NOW!