The prophet Isaiah promised a strange future (Isaiah 66:23): It shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, saith the Lord. The sages asked: how can that literally happen? Shall every Jew, from every edge of the world, travel to Jerusalem twice a month forever?
Rabbi Levi answered with a vision of scale. "In the future, Jerusalem will be as wide as the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will be as wide as the whole world." The city will no longer be a point on a map; it will be the map itself.
But the sages pressed the question further: how will people travel from the ends of the earth every new moon and every Shabbat? Rabbi Levi answered by reading another verse from the same prophet (Isaiah 60:8): Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?
Clouds will come, Levi taught, and carry every Jew through the sky to Jerusalem for morning prayers. When the service ends, the same clouds will carry them home. The doves flying to their windows in the evening are the worshipers returning at dusk, each one to the doorway where the day began. The midrash (Pesikta) pictures the messianic future not as abolition of distance but as its gentle cancellation: the whole world pivoting toward one courtyard, carried there on wings of sky.