Menachos 29 relates that Moshe asked Hashem why he was putting crowns on the letters of the Torah. Hashem answered that in the future there will be a Rabbi Akiva who will darshen halachos from the crowns atop the letters. Moshe asked to see him, and so Hashem dropped him into R' Akiva's shiur in the 8th row from the front. Moshe couldn't understand the shiur and was upset until he heard someone ask R' Akiva the source for a din and R' Akiva answered that it is halacha l'Moshe m'Sinai.
Why was Moshe placed davka in the 8th row?
R' Noson Gestetner suggests that this is an allusion to the gemara that speaks about the last 8 pesukim of the Torah. How could Moshe have written about his own death? According to one opinion he wrote it "b'dema." Some interpret that word to mean that he wrote it in tears, but the GR"A interprets it to mean a mixture, like the word dmai. Ramban writes in his intro to chumash that the Torah in its original, pristine form in shamayim is a code of letters that spell the shem Hashem. Hashem took those letters and put them in an order to spell the words that we read in olam ha'zeh. When it came to the last 8 pesukim, Hashem could not leave the Torah incomplete, so he gave those pesukim to Moshe, but he only revealed it to him in the encoded form as Torah appears in shamayimm, but not the actual words that describe Moshe's olam ha'zeh death. It is those jumbled letters that Moshe wrote.
The same is true of the torah of R' Akiva. Moshe was given everything at Sinai, including the halachos R' Akiva taught, but the source was a jumble, it was something he could not make sense of through the prism through which he saw Torah. He was in the 8th row of the shiur, meaning that for Moshe, the torah of R' Akiva was like those last 8 pesukim. R' Akiva saw Torah through his own prism and was able to unravel the code.
Everything in the world is contained in Torah. What happened Shmini Atzeret 2 years ago is somehow also a part of Torah; it's the number 8 like the 8 pesukim that are a jumble that we cannot make sense of, it's like those 8 pesukim written b'dema in the other sense of the word, meaning tears. We may not be able to unravel the jumble, but that we know contains within it shem Hashem, His presence.
As I write these words the entire Jewish word is awaiting v'shavu banim l'gevulam, we are awaiting Hashem saying, "kashe alaei p'reidaschem," the seperation of the hostages is too much to bear already and they will return home. We pray as well that Hashem this year will declare "kashe alai p'reidaschem," the seperation of all of us from Hashem, from our nation, from our homeland, in this galus has gone on too long already.