Mystics explain this cryptic passage as a remarkably prescient script, for the past and for the future. The 2,000 years of chaos are the years before monotheism made its appearance on earth. Abraham was fifty-two years old when he intuited that there had to be one God responsible for the creation of a carefully designed and stunningly intricate world. The date on the Hebrew calendar marking this great discovery, an insight that would decidedly alter the history of civilization, was exactly two thousand. (As an intriguing aside, the year Abraham was born, fifty-two years earlier, was 1948 - a year that many centuries later by the secular calendar would become the year of the establishment of the State of Israel.)

The years 2,000 to 4,000 represent the second period of two thousand years designated for Torah. In these years the children of Israel experienced Revelation at Mount Sinai and lived through the events recorded in the five books of Moses, as well as the later books of the Bible. It was a time of great intellectual and spiritual creativity, culminating in the codification of all of Jewish law in the massive work known as the Mishnah. It took all of the next two thousand years for the Jews to master the meaning of the words of God - and become worthy of the profound gift for the millennia to follow.

From 4,000 to 6,000, according to this tradition, the world should be prepared for good news and bad news. The good news is that sometime within this time frame - and, mind you, I'm well aware that we are drawing close to its outermost limit - the Messianic Age will at long last arrive, bringing with it peace for all mankind, universal recognition of God, and indescribable blessings. The bad news is that if this is the year 5,760 on the Jewish calendar, we still have a maximum of 240 years left on the "warranty" for earthly redemption.

Before that information shakes you up too much, you should know the more profound reason behind this 6,000-year outline for human history. God created the world in six days and then completed it with a Sabbath - a day dedicated to spirituality and the soul as opposed to the secular emphasis of the weekdays. Every thousand-year period corresponds to a day of creation. Six thousand years complete the cycle of the secular. According to tradition, the seventh millennium, the one coming in the year 2,240, will introduce a new Sabbath-like kind of existence different than any other mankind has ever experienced. Life will be so attuned to the holy, the sacred, the good and the Godly that it will be -how else can I say it? - out of this world.

That's why I know exactly where I'm going to be this year on the night of December 31. While millions of people will approach the Year 2K with mixed feelings of joy and trepidation, I'll spend it with family, ushering in the holiness of the Sabbath. Quite a synchronicity, isn't it, that this special millennium coincides with the day that reminds Jews of our own vision of the next thousand years? I can hardly wait for that other millennium, when we usher in the magical year of 6,000, the Shabbat of history.