The Time for Teshuva is Now

Hashem1.net (who's having issues with his site, but has his latest on his home page) quoted Rav Shmueli who said not to think that there is more time until the Ge'ula - it can come suddenly. We should therefore do Teshuva now before the gates of Teshuva close (when the Ge'ula comes). He also said not to rely on our military weaponry since they won't help.

Here is a video with English subtitles of what he said




Rav Pinchas Winston has a couple of great posts about the To'eva parade and what it means in the scheme of things.

Money quote:

...Thus, the parade represents not just the potential for disaster, but the potential for redemption as well. Whatever kedushah the Klipot are after on the day scheduled for their march, it is kedushah that is meant for us, the Jewish people. Realizing that and taking advantage of the moment can not only divest the Klipot of any spiritual sustenance, but it can greatly increase the strength of the side of Torah … and trigger who knows what in the upper worlds.
After all, if a Mekubel were to get up and announce that on such-and-such a day, the Jewish people must greatly enhance their level of holiness, and that if we do, it will open doors in the upper worlds, and perhaps bring the Final Redemption immediately or close after, what would be response?
“Which Mekubel said it, and on what authority?”
“How many other Gedolim agree with him?”
“Didn’t he say something like that before, and nothing happened after?”
In other words, we would resist the invitation to get more involved in redemption, citing other personal priorities as an excuse to ignore than mandate of the moment. We tend to belittle the messenger in order to minimize the importance of the message and the moral obligation to make good on it.
God only knows this too well. On the other hand, He doesn’t want us to miss the opportunity of a lifetime, perhaps of all of history. Therefore, if we remain unmotivated by a positive event, then He often sends a negative one to which He knows we will respond. You have to always wonder about that angle when crisis come around and ask, “What might this crisis be a trigger for?”

Running Out of Time

The answer to that question might be coming faster than we think. For example, when Pharaoh dreamed and Yosef interpreted them, Pharaoh had to ask, “Why two dreams about the same idea?” Yosef knew the answer to that question as well:
“God is telling Pharaoh that not only is He carrying out His plan of plenty and famine, but that He is doing it quickly.”
Not that God was in a rush and had to get things in motion so that He could move on to His next appointment. Being eternal, God has all the time in the world, literally. Rather, for the sake of the Jewish people, for the sake of world history, God was speeding things up, and letting Pharaoh know about it so that he would work fast as well.
In the past, when such the parade was arranged and then cancelled, we usually had an entire year to pray that it wouldn’t happen again. This time, however, we barely had a month before it hit the headlines once again, so impatient are the Klipot to invade the kedushah of Jerusalem. Or more accurately, so quickly is God bringing about the next stage of Jewish history, for which this event is obviously a trigger, that He did not want to wait an entire year this time to raise the issue all over again.
Had God not made Pharaoh dream and give Yosef the interpretation to those dreams, Egypt would have been caught flat-footed like all the rest of the nations when the famine finally came. If people don’t pay attention to the Divine messages expressing urgency in our time, then we too will be caught flat-footed, forced to kick ourselves as we wonder why we never saw it coming. ...