משבר ואמונה, ההיסטוריה המשיחית, יא. גולה וגאולהCrisis and Faith, IV Messianic History, 11 Exile and Redemption
א׳
1If we divert our attention from the spiritual and religious problems of the day and try to focus on the external political situation of the Jewish people, what do we behold?
ב׳
2Once again, and even more dramatically, the moral and spiritual exhaustion of the human race leaps into view. The most glaring manifestation of the international collapse of values today is to be found in the United Nations. The U.N. has become a shameless organization of international hypocrisy, and thus the dangerous derider of truth, justice, and human decency. It has become the source from which the poison of international demoralization seeps into the councils of governments, paralyzing them, and rendering them impotent to deal effectively with the all-encompassing problems that threaten the very survival of man on this globe. Nothing could be more natural than that this spiritual debacle of the human race should be reflected in the situation of the Jewish people. As in the past, so today, the plight of Israel, of the Jewish people, is the moral barometer of mankind. This is a heavy burden to bear, but we have every reason to be proud of it.
ג׳
3With the Hitler era, something entirely new entered Jewish and world history. Whereas during the specifically Christian era of Jewish persecution the genocidal criminality was normally limited to localized communities, from the beginning of Western civilization’s Nazi phase the threat to Jewish survival became total. The crisis is all-comprehensive. The survival of the Jewish people in its entirety is at stake. This is what we sensed anew in the trying weeks that preceded the Six-Day War in 1967. We realized what the State of Israel meant for all of us. We could not have survived another holocaust. With the Yom Kippur War, we awoke to the same realization that total crisis was upon us. The truth is that, ever since the days of the European holocaust, the Jewish people the world over has been confronted with the ultimate question of Jewish existence. In the days of my rabbinate with the Jewish Community in Berlin under the Nazis, I would occasionally preach on the concept of Am Olam, the Eternal People, and would define it as the colossus of time in confrontation with the colossi of space. However, now that everything seems to be in the balance, can we still speak of ourselves as the Am Olam, with the same kind of self-assured faith and faithfulness? Already there are authors who write about the last Jew and the end of the Jewish people. Of course, one could have done the same—and perhaps with even greater justification—in the year 69-70 C.E., when we had as yet not withstood two millenia of exile. Yet we are still around, and have had—in spite of everything arrayed against us—an incomparable impact on the entire course of world history. But since this is another phase of the total crisis, we had better look to our faith, attempting to understand it anew in the light of these darkened horizons.
ד׳
4Since the earliest days, two concepts were essential to our self-understanding. They have accompanied us throughout our long history and we have lived with them through the ages. Precisely because of that, we have taken them so much for granted, so that by now we are hardly able to appreciate their mysterious—perhaps supernatural—quality. The two concepts are Galut and Ge’ulah, Exile and Redemption.
ה׳
5The idea of Ge’ulah is, of course, identical with the idea of Messianism, the faith that, no matter how long the Exile may last, one day the Jewish people will return to Zion and Jerusalem and find redemption in their ancient homeland. Such faith is not easy to explain. How was it possible for an entire people to hold on to this kind of an irrational faith during all the generations of their manifold exiles? The entire course of world history contradicted that faith. In the light of world-historic realities, in the midst of the bitter Galut experiences, the faith was an absurdity. But no less unique and inexplicable than the faith in Redemption “at the end of times” has been the exile history of the Jewish people. In the course of human history numerous nations were uprooted and exiled from their homeland. But as the result of such catastrophies, they disintegrated and ultimately disappeared from the face of the earth. The only exception is Israel. True, faith in Ge’ulah gave us the strength to endure in Galut. However, as we have indicated, that faith itself requires explanation. It will not do to explain a puzzle with an enigma.
ו׳
6Perhaps even more surprising than the faith and the history is the nature of the mourning in our exiles, the emotional intensity with which the Jewish people, year in, year out, through the many centuries, wept for the loss of Zion and Jerusalem. On Pesaḥ, reciting the Haggadah, we speak that declaration of identity between the generations: “In every generation, a Jew is obliged to see himself as if he, in his own person, had been redeemed from Egypt.” In the course of time, the sentence has received many penetrating interpretations. Yet I doubt that there have been, at any one time, too many Jews who succeeded in looking upon themselves as if, indeed, they themselves had been participating in the Exodus. But, as I recall the intensity of the mourning, the weeping, wailing and lamenting all through the ages up to our own age, it becomes obvious that in every generation Jews in their multitudes have conducted themselves as if they themselves had lost Zion and Jerusalem and were personally exiled from the holy land; as if they had witnessed the Ḥurban, the destruction, with their own eyes, as if it had happened to them directly. Possibly this wholly personalized Avelut (mourning) asks even more for an explanation than the faith in Redemption itself.
ז׳
7Consider the Jewish stance in history. On the one hand, there is Avelut, mourning of a kind that made manifest complete identification with the past. In every generation, we saw ourselves as if we ourselves had been exiled from Zion and Jerusalem. On the other hand, by the unwavering faith in Ge’ulah, we have always identified ourselves with the future. We were so sure that one day the Redeemer would come that at times we felt as if something of the promise had indeed been fulfilled. After the mourning period of the Drei Wochen (Three Weeks) and Tisha B’Av (the Ninth of Av), there follows Shabbat Naḥamu, the Sabbath of Consolation, which we have observed in every kind of exile as if indeed we had been comforted. The celebration of the Seder and the observance of the festival of Pesaḥ, Zeman Ḥerutenu, the Season of our Freedom, often in the midst of the most abject oppression, has given the Jew a very real sense of personal redemption. Or again, in the joyous liberation from the burdens of the past year as the holy day of Yom Kippur comes to its climactic close, the Jew is granted, in anticipation, a measure of the bliss of the fulfillment of the times. The weekly Shabbat, too, has granted rest and peace Me’en Olam Haba, as if from the world to come. On the one hand, complete identification with the past, the origin of our Exile; on the other, complete identification with the future through anticipatory faith in Redemption. On the one side, mourning; on the other, consolation. Past and future, exile and redemption, embracing each other in every present moment. In all the exiles, the Jew has lived in the past and the future more than in the present; they were more important than the present. We have drawn the past from behind and the future from before us and sunk them into the contemporary moment in which we found ourselves in each generation. Thus, living with the past in memory and with the future in faith, we have saved the present from the domination of time. In every generation we have succeeded in establishing the present moment as a point in eternity. Without it we could not have remained on the stage of history.
ח׳
8Still, how was it possible for us to accomplish this? It may very well be that the secret of our eternity is hinted at in the nature of our national mourning, to which we have already referred. It is a matter of general experience, and the rabbis expressed it by saying that it has been decreed that as time passes the dead be forgotten. As time passes pain and sorrow subside, the wound heals. One is able to forget. Yet, we have never been able to forget the death of the second Jewish commonwealth. On the contrary, ever since the Ḥurban we have been declaring: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” What kind of a loss has this been that could never be forgotten?
ט׳
9One of the most tragic experiences in the life of one of the fathers of the Jewish people may perhaps provide the explanation. Our father Jacob mourned for his son Joseph all through the years. He believed that his son was dead. Why could he not forget? The explanation the tradition gives is: it is a law of life that as the years pass the dead are gradually forgotten. Joseph, however, was not dead. Jacob’s endless mourning contained within itself a glimmer of hope. Similarly, in the case of the national mourning of the Jewish people. The very fact that through the centuries the Jewish people have not been able to act naturally and to forget meant that, somehow, the mourning carried within itself the intimation that in spite of the Ḥurban there was no death. This kind of mourning that time could not soothe contained the seed of a hope, of the tiding of new life, of the coming redemption. Only an eternal people can hold on to its past with such intensity and save it from sinking away into unredeemed oblivion. Something of the very reality of Ge’ulah has been present in the Galut. The heart of the nation always knew throughout history, with some mysterious awareness that could never be doubted, of life eternal. There has never been an exile in which a measure of the redeeming force and vitality of the promised future has not been present. In every one of his exiles, the Jew strove, built, and created. This redeeming vitality, present in all exiles, has been the source of our mysterious faith in ultimate redemption. In actual fact, an advanced share of Ge’ulah has forever accompanied the Galut.
י׳
104
י״א
11Normally, we think of Galut as a phenomenon of Jewish history. It is, however, vital that we understand what Galut has meant in the foundation and formation of Judaism. Galut did not start with the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jewish people to the four corners of the world. It stands at the very beginning of the road. Even before there was a Jewish people there was already Jewish exile. It all started with the call to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.” This is how the path of the first Jew began—exile and promise. When the father of the nation-to-be was still childless, it was already decreed and revealed to him: “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and afterwards shall they come out with great substance.” (Genesis, 15,13) Once again, even before there was a Jewish people there was already Exile and the promise of Redemption. Not only did this exile not destroy the sovereignty of the Jewish people but, on the contrary, it was through Exile that Abraham became the father of Israel and it was in Exile that the children of Jacob became the people of Israel, the children of Israel of history. It happened in Egypt that they were for the first time referred to as a people, when Pharaoh said of them: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.” In our Egyptian exile we became a nation. What is the significance of all this?
י״ב
12There are two kinds of exiles. There is a national exile which begins with Ḥurban, with the destruction of the sovereignty of the people and their dispersion into alien lands. However, prior to national exile, and more fundamental and universal, there is cosmic exile. National exile is a phenomenon in the history of nations; cosmic exile bespeaks the spiritual quality of the universal human condition at any one time in history.
י״ג
13What do we mean by “cosmic exile?” God has His plan for the world. The entire creation is infused with a divine purpose that longs for and seeks its realization in the cosmos in general and in human history in particular. Since, however, mankind has its own goals such as passion for power, desire for domination, for possessions and pleasures, such egotistic human drives deny the divine purpose in the creation of man. As a result, God’s own purpose finds itself in Exile in the history of mankind. So long as the divine plan remains unrealized in history, the history of mankind tells the story of—what Jewish tradition calls—Galut haShekhinah, the Exile of the Divine Presence. God Himself is, as it were, a refugee in the world of men. It is this exile that is prior to, and at the root of, every national exile. It is on account of this that the history of the Jewish people begins with Exile. The call that went out to Abraham was a call for identification with the divine plan in history. This, however, compelled him to leave everything behind and to join the Exile of the Divine Presence in history. But by way of this identification with the divine purpose and the divine Galut, he became Abraham, the father of a “multitude of nations.” The Egyptian exile was of similar significance for his descendants. Egypt was one of the phases of the exile of the divine plan in history. To have been in Galut at the very beginning of their way meant that the starting point of the way was identification of the children of Jacob with the Exile of the Divine Presence. Yet it was through this identification that they became the people of Israel, Am Eḥad, one people in the world. The association of the children of Israel with the cosmic Galut, sharing in it right from their beginnings, made them the Jewish people.
י״ד
14However, precisely on this account, Exile is not only misery and disaster, but also challenge and responsibility with life-giving and life-sustaining meaning. The symbol of the Roman occupation in ancient Israel was the city of Caesarea. Comparing the symbol of Caesarea with that of Jerusalem, the Talmud says: If they tell you Caesarea and Jerusalem both are settled or that both are destroyed, do not believe it. But if they say Caesarea is settled and Jerusalem destroyed or Jerusalem is settled and Caesarea destroyed, believe it. For when one is safely established, the other cannot be so. (T.B., Megillah, 6a). In this manner, the Talmud expressed the confrontation between two principles in history. In the world of triumphant Caesarea there is little room for Jerusalem, the Holy City, just as in the world of established Jerusalem, there is no place for the Caesarea of the Caesars. At the time just preceding the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth, there was a very real choice before the people: either find a place in the world order of the Roman Empire which was wide open to them, or identify themselves with the destiny of the Shekhinah, of the Divine Presence, with the divine exile that was unavoidable within the pax romana. The Jewish people chose between these two possibilities. The result of their choice was the Ḥurban, the destruction of their state and their dispersion. But it is only because of that choice that the people of Israel are still the people of Israel and are still around in the world of men.
ט״ו
15In other words, this Ḥurban was not just disaster. It was choice! We chose to side with the divine plan for man, which was denied in the world of Caesar. The destruction of Jerusalem and of the state was not a disaster that overwhelmed the Jewish people with the blind force of a natural catastrophe. What happened was the result of a free choice of unparalleled heroism in human history. True, it brought exile down upon our heads. Yet this consciously determined embracing of Jewish destiny granted us our eternal share in life. The source of our suffering has also been the source of our survival. And so, too, has it been to this day, the source of our timelessness.
ט״ז
16There is this difference between national and cosmic exile. National exile—the dispersal of an entire people from its homeland—is stagnation, loss of vitality, decline, and, ultimately, disappearance. This is the law in the world of Caesar. But in the cosmic exile of the divine purpose there is never stagnation, never irreversible stagnation. The realization of the divine purpose may be again and again tragically delayed, but it cannot be defeated. This exile is forever a process—often one of roundabout paths beyond immediate human understanding—towards its realization. As the Kabbalists would say, the fall is often the prerequisite for the rise. The Exile of the Divine Presence in history is a continuous progression toward Redemption. Because we have identified ourselves from the very beginning with the cosmic exile, which indeed constitutes the essence of our being, we have been able to find the certainty of our redemption—and often a measure of its fruition in anticipation—at the very heart of our various exiles. This is the secret of Israel eternal.
י״ז
17Our Exile, then, is twofold: national and universal, the exile of the people, and the exile of the Shekhinah in which we share. Because of that, Jewish messianism is also twofold. The Talmud teaches that the only difference between the present world and the days of the Messiah is the freedom from alien subjugation. But Isaiah prophesied: A nation will not raise the sword against another, nor will they learn the art of war any longer. Both are right; both redemptions are needed; national redemption for the national exile, universal redemption for Galut haShekhinah, for the exile of God in human history. Jewish history seeks redemption in a twofold drive. It drives for national redemption among the nations, as well as universal redemption for all the nations. For this reason every form of national redemption can only be Atḥalta deGe’ulah, the beginning. Only universal redemption may be acknowledged as Ge’ulah Shelemah, redemption completed and time fulfilled. No separation between the two is possible. Jewish history has been moving on a double track. At times, we are warned “not to force the end;” at others, as at the time of the return from Babylon, we are punished for not having “gone up like a solid national phalanx.”
י״ח
18The phase of the Exile in our times has to be recognized as total crisis because of the radically new event—the total threat—that entered Jewish history. It is usually referred to as the Sho’ah, the Holocaust. This is probably not the right term. In our exiles, we have experienced numerous holocausts—during the crusades, the Black Death, the Chmelnicki pogroms, the massacres in the Ukraine at the end of the First World War, etc., etc. This catastrophe, however, was different from all of them, not just in degree, but in kind, in its essential quality. The proper name for it is not Sho’ah, but Ḥurban, annihilation. For the first time in our history, the Exile itself was destroyed. After every other national catastrophe, there was still enough strength left in the Jewish people to continue, to rebuild and to recuperate. As we have indicated earlier, something of the awaited redemption was present in every one of our exiles. This time what happened was radically new. In our generation, the generation of Nazism, of humanity’s betrayal of all the values without which life itself becomes absurd indeed, the Galut haShekhinah (the Exile of the Divine Presence) reached its nadir, its most tragic intensification in history. Since Jewish existence interlocks with the Galut haShekhinah, we too were forced down to the depth of suffering and martyrdom and at the end of it we were left completely exhausted. Even that spark of Ge’ulah which was present before in every Galut and which alone enabled us to continue, to rebuild and to create anew, was extinguished this time. Our faith was shaken to its foundations.
י״ט
19At this fateful hour in Jewish history there was only one remedy left for the destruction of the Galut, and it had to be as radical and revolutionary as the destruction itself; national redemption in the sight of all men through the restoration of Israel’s sovereignty in the land of Israel. Redemption was long overdue. It had to come. Without it, we would not have been able to continue. The rise of the State of Israel, after two millenia of such Exile and at the moment when it occurred, has become the reviving force, calling back to life the “dry bones” of the shattered Galut. Divine Providence had no choice but to grant us a measure of national redemption to meet the national Ḥurban. However, therein lies too the cause for this new phase of the total crisis that has broken over us since the Yom Kippur war. The national redemption, because it had to come for the sake of Jewish survival, was running ahead of Galut haShekhinah, of the redemption of the Divine Presence from its exile in the affairs of men and nations. The national redemption of the Jewish people came without a corresponding measure of universal redemption. This is the root of Israel’s present problem. In our days, a civilization that has been drifting ever since its spiritual and moral collapse in the era of Nazism is once again being tested. What a degradation of the dignity of man that formerly proud nations can be treated today by oriental potentates like big daddy treats his little children to whom he grants pocket money according to whether they please him or displease him! Is a darker eclipse of human values imaginable than when the conscience and the standard of values of formerly great nations are determined by the amount of oil Arabia is willing to allow to reach them? What a demoralization of international order, what a derision of international justice! International cynicism is eating away the last shreds of the moral fibres of human society, already sickened by the universal catastrophe of Nazism. Mankind is on the road to universal chaos. As in the days of Nazism, with the selling out of the Jewish people to Hitlerism, the world was moving fast towards the second World War, so today with the cynical willingness of formerly great nations to sell the State of Israel and the Jewish people for a barrel of oil, the world is approaching the day of reckoning, the hour of the thermonuclear Armageddon.
כ׳
20We concede this is indeed a metaphysical interpretation of Jewish existence. But Jewish survival testifies to the fact that we are a “metaphysical” people. As in the time of triumphant Nazism, so today the plight of the Shekhinah in human history is dramatically reflected in the destiny of Israel. If it were otherwise we would not be Jews. Because our destiny has been linked to Galut haShekhinah, to the Exile of the Divine Presence, once again in this hour of the total demoralization of the international order the crisis is total. Once again everything seems to be in the balance. But just because the crisis is total, the promise too is total. God’s own destiny in human history is linked to our own destiny. He needs us no less than we need Him. This is probably the deepest meaning of the idea of being “a chosen people.” God has joined His fortunes among men to our fortunes, as we have joined our destiny to Him on this earth. He let it be said by the mouth of His prophet, “Ye are My witnesses, saith God.” And the rabbis commented: “If you are my witnesses, I am God; if not, I am not God.” But since God will be, so must the witness too. This is the source of our suffering, the source of our dignity, the guarantee of our survival till the end of days. We have reached a juncture in world history when the existence of the Jewish people cannot be separated from the existence of the State of Israel. And the future of the people of Israel is inseparable from Ge’ulat haShekhinah, from the redemption of God Himself from His man-created exile. Because of that, Israel will still dwell in Zion and Jerusalem long after the wells of Arabia had been forced to surrender their last drop of oil.
כ״א
21The question, of course, is: what is our function, the function of the Jewish people, in such a scheme of history? It would seem to us that no matter what our reaction to the scheme may be, we shall remain the witnesses. What God has started with us He will complete. Too much remains unfinished; too much awaits its justification; too much waits for its redemption. God will not die in His exile. As far as we are concerned the question is: shall we just endure our destiny or willingly embrace it? We shall not escape it. This is the lesson that we must learn from the Yom Kippur war. The State of Israel has been forced back into Jewish history. If the tragedy of the Yom Kippur war will bring home to us the futility of our desire to become a “normal” people and will induce us to recover the ethos of the Jewish stance in history in the context of Galut and Ge’ulah, it may yet be turned into a triumph of our struggle for survival within the messianic wave of world history. Only in that context can it be said that the state of Israel has come to stay. Of course, it is going to stay. The attempt to break out of that context has failed. It is going to fail again and again. The God of history will not let us go. We are not being asked. There is no escape for Israel from the historic destiny of Israel. The question again is: shall we only endure it, or shall we find the ultimate meaning of our human existence in it by embracing it with resolute determination and dedication. There has hardly ever been a more worthwhile moment in history to be a Jew in the classical context of Galut and Ge’ulah than at this time of moral and spiritual exhaustion of the human race.