Exile or Diaspora? Two Paths for the Jewish Left

This essay is an expanded version of a talk I gave at a Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium gathering on theologies of liberation in different religious traditions, which was itself an expanded version of an essay I published in Jewish Currents a few weeks ago.

The book of Esther describes the fate of those Jews who found refuge in Persia following the destruction of the Temple and the exile from Jerusalem in the 6^th century. It begins by describing the feast of the volatile king Achashverosh, who “reigned over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces from India to Nubia” (Esther 1:1).

The feast takes place in Achashverosh’s magnificent palace, bedecked with blue and purple wool, and festooned with couches of silver and gold. Though the combination of blue, purple, gold, and silver might seem typical for any royal architecture, the Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – only describes two other buildings as being made with the same materials: the Tabernacle that the Israelites constructed in the desert, and the Temple in Jerusalem, which was itself modeled on the Tabernacle.

The Tabernacle and Temple represented, for the Israelites, the culmination of creation. The Tabernacle’s construction is described in language evocative of the opening chapters of Genesis, and the Temple was understood as offering God a permanent dwelling place. Accordingly, the destruction of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire was a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. The prophet Jeremiah, warning the Israelites about the impending doom, predicted that the land would be returned to tohu va-vohu, the primordial chaos that preceded creation.

Nevertheless, the prophets also promised that the Temple would one day be reconstructed, ushering in a new era of redemption, plenitude, and divine grace.

For the Persian Jews, living after the destruction of the First Temple, the design of Achashverosh’s palace must have been unsettling: Was this what their prophets had meant when they assured the Israelites that the Temple would be rebuilt?

The Talmud accentuates the unnerving similarity between the holy abodes of the Tabernacle and Temple, on the one hand, and Achashverosh’s palace, on the other, claiming that the castle was decorated with vessels stolen from the Temple,¹ that the king donned the garments of the High Priest,² and that the feast itself was a parody of a Temple sacrifice.³

Both the Book of Esther and the rabbis extend this disturbing comparison even further: The Hebrew root m-l-kh (“king”) appears dozens of times in the first chapter of Esther alone, emphasizing that Achashverosh, and not God, is seemingly in charge—a claim accentuated by the rabbinic assertion that Achashverosh’s dominion stretched across the entire world.⁴ Indeed, the Book of Esther is one of only two books of the Tanakh in which God’s name does not appear a single time.

The world of the book of Esther is both parody and nightmare: The destroyed Temple has not been rebuilt but instead replaced by a gaudy palace. God is absent, apparently superseded by a mad king. Though the Purim story takes place after the destruction of the First Temple, the rabbis, who lived after the destruction of the Second Temple, understood themselves as trapped in the same nightmare. In their words, “We are still Achashverosh’s servants.”⁵

This, for the rabbis, is what it means to be in galut, or exile: not simply to be physically displaced, but also to live in a world that is, at its core, out of joint—a world in which imperial rulers have usurped God’s authority, palaces and fortresses are treated as holy sites, and morality has given way to nihilism and the will to power. The rabbis went so far as to say that the Shechinah, God’s divine presence, is itself in exile with us.⁶ Though they understood the Shechinah as merely accompanying us, the Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, radicalized the claim, declaring that part of God was, like us, actually trapped in a world gone mad.⁷ As the Zohar, the primary book of Jewish mysticism states, “So long as the Shechinah is in galut, God’s Name above is incomplete, and nothing can be fixed. It is as if the Holy Name is missing something.” Crucially, for the Kabbalists, none of these exiles could be undone alone; the Jews could only be redeemed together with the rest of the world, whose redemption was in turn bound up with God’s.⁸

The Kabbalists did not just acknowledge these intertwined exiles, but also crafted rituals to intensify their experience of them.

Rabbi Chaim David Azulai, an 18^th-century Jerusalemite Kabbalist, declared that if one is awake at midnight, one should cry out:

Woe to me on account of the exile of God’s presence!

Woe to me on account of the destruction of the Temple!

Woe to me on account of the burning of the Torah!

Woe to me on account of the killing of the righteous!...

Woe to me on account of the pain of all of the worlds!⁹

The 16^th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, who lived in the Galilean town of Tsfat, insisted that each person “should send themselves into exile from place to place for the sake of Heaven, and thereby they will become a conduit for the exiled presence of God.”¹⁰

Perhaps counterintuitively, as Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin documents, nowhere was this attitude more pervasive than in the land of Israel itself.¹¹ Though the Kabbalists longed for a restored Jerusalem and an eschatological return of the Jewish exiles, they believed that such a return could only occur as part of a radical transformation of the entire world. To live in or travel to the land of Israel was not a means of reestablishing Jewish sovereignty, but rather a way of more deeply experiencing catastrophe – connecting to the destruction of the Temple and the exile of both the Jewish people and the Shechinah. Rabbi Cordovero, for instance, understood his travels in the land of Israel as miniature exiles. In his “Book of Exiles,” he begins his description of each new journey again and again with the words, “We exiled ourselves…”¹² The land of Israel was the place where galut could be most fiercely experienced, and the Kabbalists believed that only by confronting the fullness of that rupture could the work of communal, global, and divine redemption begin.

Later Jewish mystics offered even more radical claims. “One must always remember that they are a stranger in this world and not a resident,” writes Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin, a 19^th-century Polish Hasidic master. “The Jewish people has no place in the world.”¹³ The task of the Jewish people, Rabbi Tzadok argues, is to insist upon the truth of exile against any ideology or false messiah who would claim to have overcome it. Only by refusing to fit in – by refusing to treat Achashverosh’s palace as a rebuilt Temple, by denying that Persia, Europe, America, or even Israel itself – is the actualization of redemption can we commit to struggling against the brokenness of the world. To forget that we are in exile, Rav Tzadok argues elsewhere, is itself actually an even deeper form of exile: it means we have become so accustomed to the world as it is that we no longer recognize that it could be different.¹⁴

By contrast and with few exceptions, the Zionist movement understood itself as “negating the exile”—rebuilding a Jewish state in the land of Israel. “Exile can only drag out the disgrace of our people and sustain the existence of a people disfigured in both body and soul,” wrote Jacob Klatzkin. The exile’s “function will be to serve as a source of supply for the renaissance of our people in its homeland.”¹⁵

But, as Raz-Krokotzkin argues, Zionism could only “negate” the exile by first limiting the concept to physical territory and political sovereignty. He writes:

The Zionist perception of exile as the lack of realization of the political aspirations of the Jews and nothing more empties the concept of all of its deep contents in that it accepts the world order in its present form, adopts the modern system of values, and hopes for their realization also regarding the Jews.¹⁶

To detach the Jews’ exile from those global and divine exiles is to wrongly accept their inevitability. Only by severing their own exile from that of the world could Zionists hope to solve their own uprootedness by uprooting others. Only by adopting the violent logics of nationalism and colonialism – an alliance with British imperialism, the development of its own military capabilities, and the ethnic cleansing of a significant portion of Palestinians – could Zionism create a Jewish-majority state in an area with a majority-Palestinian population. Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza and decimation of the West Bank is simply this logic taken to its endpoint: an even more vast ethnic cleansing, sustained by state-of-the-art military technology funded by American empire.

It is important to note that Zionism does not bear sole blame for this “accept[ance] of the world in its present form” – Zionism’s embrace of the nation-state was inseparable from Europe’s genocidal violence and America’s willful indifference. The beneficiaries of Europe and America’s power are implicated in both the Holocaust and the Nakba and bear responsibility for ensuring the freedom and dignity of Palestinians and Jews alike.¹⁷

But that implicatedness does not absolve Zionism of its responsibility for the ongoing Nakba it has committed against Palestinians, nor does it obviate the need for forms of Jewish collectivity in both Israel/Palestine and the diaspora that can oppose such violence. How can we build forms of Jewish identity committed to safety and liberation for both Palestinians and Jews, without reproducing exile again and again?

The fact that Zionism’s opponents have also understood exile in mere territorial dimensions tragically testifies to the success the Zionist movement has had in redefining the term. Judith Butler, for instance, argues that “exile” necessarily implies a circumstance “that can only be reversed through ‘returning’ to the homeland,” and suggests instead an ethic of “dispersion.”¹⁸ A similar claim is made by those who suggest countering Zionism with the doikayt, or “hereness,” of the Jewish socialist Bund, whose watchword has long been: “Wherever we live is our homeland.” There is no doubt that dispersion and doikayt—as well as the revitalized notion of diasporism—offer a far more inspiring ethical vision than Zionism’s ethnonationalism. And given that many Jews who speak about exile today see Zionism as its antidote, it is no wonder that the term has fallen out of favor on the left.

And yet, what is lost in the transition from exile to doikayt and diasporism is the intertwining of collective, global, and divine alienation. If we insist that wherever we are is where we’re meant to be, we risk imagining that we can unlink any one form of exile from all the others. In other words, we risk a certain complacency. If we affirm our rootedness, might we not be tempted to settle for simply redeeming our little corner of the world? If we declare a particular land to be our homeland, might we not lose sight of the violence used to claim and control that land? If we cease our insistence on exile, might we not one day mistake Achashverosh’s empire for redemption?

The Kabbalists, by contrast, recognized that it is only when we make ourselves feel less at home, jar ourselves into mourning, and deepen our alienation that we are forced to confront the scale of the crisis around us.

I do not mean to romanticize exile. As Edward Said wrote, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,”¹⁹ and I do not long for Jewish vulnerability or suffering. Nor do I want to equate an ethics of and commitment to exile with the lived reality of forced displacement and violence facing Palestinians. And I don’t mean to obscure the fact that many of us in this country, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have significant privileges – many of us are living, as theologian Dorothee Sölle frames it, in Pharaoh’s household.²⁰

But all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, need forms of identity and politics that estrange us from the totalizing claims of state sovereignty, nationalist violence, racialized oppression, and capitalist exploitation.

As Israeli scholar Haviva Pedaya argues, structures of oppression seek not just to negate and obscure the reality of exile but also to “negate practices of exile”²¹ – to prevent us from mourning, attending to the ruptures and cracks, and blowing them open.

Only the avowal, again and again, that this world is fractured, that God Godself is shattered in a shattered world can stop us from accommodating ourselves to that brokenness. None of us can be home until all of us are.

1. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 49.

2. BT Megillah 12a.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. 11a.

5. Ibid. 14a.

6. Ibid. 29a.

7. Zohar III:147b-148a.

8. E.g. Avodat Ha-Kodesh 2:38: “The king Messiah, may he be revealed soon, will return the crown to its former glory… and then the purpose of creation will be completed and the world will return to the true natural goodness and perfection it had before Adam’s sin.”

9. Moreh Ba-Etzbah 45.

10. Tomer Devorah, ch. 9.

11. See Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin, Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra: Tsfat Ve-Ha-Tarbut Ha-Tzionit, (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press/Hakibutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2022).

12. See Sefer Gerushin.

13. Kometz Ha-Mincha 1:94, 2:10.

14. Pri Tzadik, Fourth Drash on Purim.

15. Jacob Klatzkin, “Boundaries” in The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 322.

16. Amnon Raz-Krokitzkin, “Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of ‘The Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” trans. Aviv Ben-Or in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty, eds. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 398.

17. Consider Isaac Deutscher’s words: “It was because the peoples had turned against capitalism only in a half-hearted and half-witted manner that they turned against the Jews… All this has driven the Jews to see their own State as the way out…the world has compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state and to make of it his pride and hope just at a time when there is little or no hope left in it. You cannot blame the Jews for this; you must blame the world. But Jews should at least be aware of the paradox and realize that their intense enthusiasm for “national sovereignty” is historically belated. They did not benefit from the advantages of the nation-state in those centuries when it was a medium of mankind’s advance and a great revolutionary and unifying factor in history. They have taken possession of it only after it had become a factor of disunity and social disintegration.” Isaac Deutscher, “The Message of the Non-Jewish Jew” in Isaac Deutscher The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 39, 41.

18. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6.

19. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 173.

20. Dorothee Sölle, “Resistance: Towards a First World Theology,” Christianity and Crisis vol. 39, no. 12 (July 1979), quoted in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 7.

21. Haviva Pedaya, Halicha She-Me’ever Le-Trauma (Tel-Aviv: Reisling, 2011), 225. Pedaya is specifically discussing Zionism, but I think her argument is more broadly applicable.