Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Terumah, describes a plethora of seemingly banal details about the Tabernacle’s construction. But hidden among this minutiae, we also find a profound societal critique. The portion begins with God encouraging Moses to solicit gifts from the Israelites to use as building materials: “Gold, silver, and copper; blue [tchelet], purple [argaman], and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair,” as well as animal skins, fine wood, and oils. Though the combination of gold, silver, tchelet, and argaman might seem ordinary in the description of grand architecture, the Bible describes only two other buildings as being made with the same materials: the Temple in Jerusalem, which itself was based on the Tabernacle, and the palace of King Achashverosh, made famous through the story of Purim. For the Persian Jews of Shushan, living after the destruction of the First Temple, the design of Achashverosh’s palace must have been unsettling: Was this what the 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 from the Temple, that the king donned the garments of the High Priest, and that the feast itself was a parody of a Temple sacrifice. 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. Indeed, the Book of Esther is the only book of the Bible in which God’s name does not appear a single time. Such a world 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nightmare: The destroyed Temple has not been rebuilt but instead replaced by a gaudy palace; God is absent, apparently superseded by a mad king; the Torah has been overridden by legalized licentiousness. 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.”

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 powers 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. Though they understood the Shechinah as merely accompanying us, the Kabbalists radicalized the claim, declaring that part of God was, like us, actually trapped in a world gone mad. Crucially, for the Kabbalists, none of these exiles can be undone alone; the Jews can only be redeemed together with the rest of the world, whose redemption is in turn bound up with God’s.

The Kabbalists did not just acknowledge these exiles, but also crafted rituals to intensify their experience of them: waking at midnight each night to mourn their state of exile, the murder of the righteous, and the victory of evil or wandering from place to place to emulate the Shechinah’s displacement. Perhaps counterintuitively, as Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin documents, nowhere was this attitude more pervasive than in the land of Israel itself. The Kabbalists did not understand traveling there as a journey to a lost homeland, nor as a means of reestablishing Jewish sovereignty. Rather, they saw the land of Israel as the site of ultimate catastrophe—the destruction of the Temple and the exile of both the Jewish people and the Shechinah. The land of Israel was the place where galut could be most fiercely experienced, and the Kabblists believed that only by confronting the fullness of that rupture could the work of communal, global, and divine redemption begin.

Statist Zionism, by contrast, set out to “negate the exile”—but it could only do so by first limiting the concept. As Raz-Krokotzkin argues, “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.” To detach the Jews’ exile from those cosmic and divine exiles is to wrongly accept their inevitability. According to Raz-Krokotzkin, such an attitude toward exile is inseparable from Zionism’s colonial violence against Palestinians: Only by severing their own exile from that of the world could Zionists hope to solve their own uprootedness by uprooting others.

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.” A similar claim is made by those who suggest countering Zionism with the doikayt, or “hereness,” of the 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 galut to doikayt 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—like Zionism—that we can unlink any one form of exile from all the others. In other words, we risk a certain complacency. 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. But if we instead 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 palace for the sacred Tabernacle and Temple?

Theodor Adorno, writing in exile from Germany in the wake of the Holocaust, argued that the only responsible philosophical approach “in the face of despair” is to “contemplate all things . . . from the standpoint of redemption.” In other words, we must constantly take stock of how far our world is from being whole: We must declare, again and again, that a different world is possible. Accordingly, Adorno calls for “perspectives . . . that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” Seeing ourselves as being in galut allows for a perspective that maintains that wherever and whenever we live, there are “rifts and crevices” for which we are responsible. It insists that so long as Achashverosh still rules, we are all in exile and that none of us—including the divine—can be at home until all of us are.

Aron Wander is a rabbinical student, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.