The Very Core of Our Existence

Omer Day 36

In a 1976 essay entitled “Der Goles Yid un Yiddish,” or “Yiddish, the Language of Exile,” the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer writes with concision, depth and brilliance about the intertwining roles and functions of exile on the evolutionary development of the Yiddish language and the Jewish people. The essay appears now in Old Truths and New Cliches: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by David Stromberg. It’s published by the Princeton University Press.

Isaac Bashevis Singer photo by Yousuf Karsh

“It is an accepted tenet of both our religious and secular literature that the exile was a calamity for the Jewish people. ‘And because of our sins we were exiled from our land.’ Three times a day Jews pray that their eyes may see God’s return to Zion. Some of the extreme Zionists have expressed the opinion that the almost two-thousand year period of the Diaspora was nothing more than an error and a void in our history. Others have even tried to belittle what Jewish have created in exile: the Talmud, the Midrash, the Commentaries, the Zohar. Of course, the religious Jew would never concur. The exile might have been a punishment or a state of imprisonment, but within this frame great spiritual works were produced. The ghettos teemed with saints, mystics, geniuses.”

Waiting for the Messiah was and remains a tenet of faith for the religious Jew. If the Torah unequivocally states that Jews were exiled from the Land of Israel for sinning against God, then the two-thousand year faith tradition exemplified by the spiritual and religious doctrine of Judaism posits that the Jew is still in exile, goles in Yiddish.

Zionism was meant to change this reality. If waiting for the Messiah to redeem the Jew meant being subjected to the continual attacks and slaughter and pogroms and genocide of exile, Zionists were having nothing of it. Zionism, George Mosse taught his students, “was a revolution against the rabbis.” No more prayer; no more waiting for God to intervene and save the Jews from the perfidy of powerlessness.

But in seizing power, what is forfeited, Singer asks. “Only because the Jews enjoyed a minimum of worldliness could they acquire a maximum of piety,” he wrote.

Reading these words in the midst of this horrific war that has seen the horror of Jews as victims of Hamas pogroms within their own sovereign borders and seen Jewish soldiers and settlers inflict a hellscape of death upon innocent Palestinians, one is forced to reckon fundamentally with notions of exile and home, with powerlessness and power.

This End of Days, Jewish messianic ethno-nationalism of the Israeli settler movement imprisoned in an interminable death grip with the End of Days, Islamic jihadist ethno-nationalism of Hamas is proof that we are all still in a painful, as yet resolved, exile.

This is one of the challenging and difficult arguments advanced by Shaul Magid in his recently published The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, published by the Ayin Press. The Messiah is indeed far, far away. Don’t be fooled by the lunacy of violent, religious nationalists, whatever their language, whomever their God. Are any of us home when destruction of innocent life abounds as it does?

I followed the thread to Singer in Magid’s book and all day have returned to this line by Singer: “I cling to Yiddish because this language expresses my hope for redemption. When all nations realize that they are in exile—exile will cease to be. When majorities discover that they too are minorities, the minority will be the rule and not the exception…People must be both themselves and integrated parts of a whole, loyal to their own homes and origins and deeply cognizant of the origins of others. They must possess both the wisdom of doubt and the fire of faith. In a world where we are all basically strangers, the commandment, ‘And thous shalt love thy stranger’ is not an altruistic wish, but the very core of our existence.”

I’m grateful to Magid’s essays for leading back to Singer and for the fact that they are a necessary argument for those willing to be profoundly challenged by what are now considered to be some worn out assumptions for resolving this seemingly irresolvable conflict.