The Elimination of Exile, Part 1
The Rambam says, “If a man will stay in a place where the Jewish people will be lost with the passage of time…this is a sickness of reasoning and spirit.”
The Elimination of Exile, Part 1
We find in Succha 52b that God “regretted” creating the exile. We must understand the reason for this ‘regret’. After all, exile is the climax of Divine punishment for Israel’s rebellion against their Father in Heaven. Sifri(Ekev;43) taught, “You shall perish quickly from the good land which the L-ord gives you (Deut.11;17); After all the suffering I bring upon you,I shall exile you.”
Exile is severe, for it is equal in weight to all other punishments combined.”
And in the festival Mussaf we say; “Due to our sins we were exiled from our Land.”
Thus the clear purpose of the exile is to punish Israel with the severest punishment possible – exile from their land, loss of their state.
From the above we might ask why God “regretted” creating the exile since He wished for the Jewish people to repent their evil deeds after being exiled.
If, however, the exile did not make the people repent, God had every reason to ‘regret’ that He not only punished His beloved children terribly but that the punishment was of no avail. Even how much more “mournful’ He must be since the punishment not only did not help but made them worse.
We must understand the great tragedy of the exile –‘regretted’ by God every day.
Not only has it not restored most Jews to repent their sins but has opened the way to mass assimilation and mixed marriage and a general casting off of Torah and Jewish identity.
Even for many good loyal Jews, some of them learned and God-fearing, the long exile has distorted and obscured the original concepts of Torah. This is due to the descent into exile and the absence from the Land of Israel and the full Jewish life that can be lived only there.
Most people observe the mitzvot to the letter, as scrupulous about the light ones as about the severe, yet due to the long exile have forgotten the vital Jewish concepts of a nation, state and their own land as a way of life.
They have ignored the brilliant words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe; “God told Ya’akov that ’I will make you into a great nation there’-in Egypt- but God did not tell Ya’akov that he was wrong for wanting to stay in the Land of Israel. This teaches us that even when the Jewish people are in exile to the extent that they become a ‘great nation’; one must always feel the deep pain and remorse that we are still in exile away from our Home Land. (Gutnick Chumash-Bereishit p327)
To our dismay not only are these words forgotten but throughout the Diaspora these exiled Jews have turned Judaism into a religion only.
The very fact of our having lost our land has transformed us from our original Divine role as a “holy nation “ living in a “holy land” into some kind of “religious” entity, comprised of congregations in synagogues and communities.
We have made the individual Jew “bigger” than the nation. The curse of the exile which befell us almost 2000 years ago has distorted the very definition of a Jew. The Jew sank into a morass of forgetting the main concept of God’s Torah- the definition and identity of the Jewish People, the centrality within Torah of nationhood and a Land.
The tragedy of this phenomenon is that the punishment of exile has become a type of comfort zone – Heaven forbid.
For those who insist that only when the Mashiach arrives will all the Jews leave the Diaspora, let them recall the words of the RAMBAM in his famous “Letter of Forced Conversion”
“Those who seduce themselves and say they will stay in their places (in exile) until the king Mashiach comes to the lands of the West, and then they will depart and go forth to Jerusalem- I don’t know how the decree of destruction will be stayed from them. Rather they are transgressors, and they cause others to sin… For there is no set time for the coming of the Mashiach on which to depend, saying that he is close or far. The obligation of the commandments is not dependent on the coming of the Mashiach. Rather, we are to busy ourselves with the Torah and precepts, and to strive to fulfill everything we can…,however if a man will stay in a place where he sees that Torah will eventually wane, and where the Jewish people will be lost with the passage of time, and where he cannot stand by his faith, and he says,’I will stay here until Mashiach comes and survive where I am,’ this is nothing but an evil heart, and a great loss, and a sickness of reasoning and spirit. This is my opinion, and Hashem knows the truth.”
‘Harsh’ words? Let’s face it. Which Jewish community in the Diaspora does not face the potential danger that the Rambam describes in his letter.
Anyone can see the enormous increase of antisemitism the world over- often becoming increasingly violent.
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The author can be contacted at babchon@telkomsa.net
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