Jewish Wrestlings with the Tragedy of Exile

From https://www.jewishhistory.org/a-mystical-view-of-exile/ – note that this is a Kabbalistic view, and it illustrates the very Jewish way of rationalising their experience as part of their calling for ‘tikkum ha olam’ – the restoration of all things promised in the Prophets.

A Mystical View of Exile

Jews were in exile to extract the “sparks of holiness” scattered throughout the earth….

After the calamities of the Middle Ages, particularly the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Jewish scholars began to re-examine the meaning of exile. The very concept underwent an evolution. Originally, exile was seen starkly as a punishment for sins. The Books of the Prophets, at least superficially as the masses understood it, explain it that way – it is like a prison sentence. The guilty person serves his time, and when it’s over he goes home.

That argument is easy to maintain for a short exile, like the first Babylonian exile, which lasted 70 years. But in the Middle Ages, that explanation was more difficult. What sin of the Jewish people was so great that it required such a long, bloody and painful exile – with seemingly no end? The Jews may have sinned, but if we compare the Jews’ behaviour to many other nations and religious groups in history, it is difficult to place them at the bottom of the ladder. We are not found to be that wanting morally or spiritually. The punishment seems disproportionate to the sin.

This sums up the core problem of Jewish history. Why are we so persecuted? What spiritual purpose does it serve?What purpose does this exile accomplish? If the exile lasts another hundred years, will we become better?

This was an issue that has gnawed at Jewish thought for the last 500 years. It’s not such a problem to us since we live in relative comfort and serenity, even if it’s false serenity. The experience of the exile, certainly in America, is pleasant. But to Jews who had experienced the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion, to Jews who had experienced the pogroms or the Black Death, to Jews who had been driven from their ancestral homes in Bohemia and Switzerland by the 30 Years War, etc. it was a very real problem.

At least part of the popularity of Kabbalah lay in the fact that it gave answers to these problems, albeit of a supernatural nature. The exile was transformed from being viewed as a punishment for the sins of the Jewish people into a vehicle for redemption (personal, national and global); only through darkness could light shine.

Jews were in exile to extract the “sparks of holiness” scattered throughout the earth, to extract sparks of goodness that lay with the souls of the people of the non-Jewish nations; to gather them together, build them into holiness and transport it all back to the corporate body of Israel, the Jewish people. We were in exile to achieve self-perfection; exile was part of a positive, creative and ultimately redemptive process.

This understanding breathed new purpose into the experience of exile. The Messiah was on his way; at any moment he could burst through. A Jew, even suffering in exile, thus inspired felt that he was engaged in a holy endeavour. As with all holy endeavours it could be costly and painful, but it would lead somewhere better and even utopian. There was no questioning the length of it, because it would take as long as needed to complete the process.

From https://mysteryofisrael.org/jewish-wrestlings-with-the-tragedy-of-exile/ – a Christian response

Notice these extracts from the above article:

    “What sin of the Jewish people was so great that it required such a long, bloody and painful exile – with seemingly no end? The Jews may have sinned, but if we compare the Jews’ behaviour to many other nations and religious groups in history, it is difficult to place them at the bottom of the ladder. We are not found to be that wanting morally or spiritually. The punishment seems disproportionate to the sin.”

    “What purpose does this exile accomplish?”

    “The exile was transformed from being viewed as a punishment for the sins of the Jewish people into a vehicle for redemption”

In this last sentence and what follows, we see the problem of the exile being collapsed into one aspect of a common Jewish answer to the so called, “problem of evil”:

    “only through darkness could light shine.”

This softens the blow of the traditional view of exile as punishment for sin. It doesn’t deny sin, but it makes sin, and evil in general, to be the means by which the nobility of innate human goodness can be applied towards some eschatological ‘re-assembling’ of the good, ultimately purged and freed of the power of evil through good deeds.

How much more optimistic of a properly “educated” and incentivized human nature could there be than this?!

Kabalistic Judaism is an enormous leap of faith in man as the ultimate co-operator to assist God to put the world right. At best, God can do no more than help us “get ourselves back to the Garden”. The golden age dawns when this elusive mutual endeavour has been achieved.

The Hebrew prophets who continually describe a golden age of peace held no such optimism concerning man’s role in bringing such an age into existence. Only an apocalyptic in-breaking of supernatural divine power would ever be sufficient to break unending cycle of wars and rumours of war.

According to Judaism’s boundless optimism in the potential of human nature, the messianic era waits for man to come around to a sufficient cooperation with God to finally end the exile, but for how long? How long can the messianic era, once it comes, be expected to endure apart from a radical change at the root of human nature?

This is precisely where we must make much of the promise of the Holy Spirit as indispensable to the hope of the nation then, “in that day”, and the individual now, in this day.

We must show in our Jewish evangelism that the hope of the nation is the same as the hope of the individual. That is the indispensable necessity of vital regeneration. “You MUST be born again!”

The prophets recognized that only the outpouring of the Spirit on the “whole” of the surviving nation (ALL Israel) is the indispensable necessity that marks the end of exile (see Isa. 32:15; 44:3; 59:21; Ezek. 39:29; Zech. 12:10). It is Zechariah who reveals the ground of this great eschatological event as a transforming revelation that will come to the Jewish survivors of the tribulation, as it came to Isaiah when he saw the Lord (Isa. 6:1-8; John 12:41 with Zech. 12:10; Mt. 23:39; Rom. 11:26 with Joel 3:16 & Rev. 1:7).

The NT will make explicit what was implicit in the OT, that the eschatological promise of the Spirit would be given on the basis of faith in “the blood of the everlasting covenant” in Yeshua’s atoning sacrifice. According to Paul, the apostolic proclamation was to be presented as the revelation of a mystery, fully foretold in “the scriptures of the prophets” (Acts 26:22), but kept secret until the appointed time when the Holy Spirit would be “sent down from heaven” (Rom. 16:25-26; Eph. 6:19; 1 Pet. 1:11-12).

We might ask how nearly our approach to evangelism conforms to Paul’s?

What follows is an overview of something that began with a text exchange with Adam this morning:

The exile (i.e., the Jews driven from the Land that God gave specifically to them as an everlasting possession) was once looked upon as a shocking and puzzling anomaly:

“Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?” (Deut 29:24 KJV).

For the Hebrew prophets, the healing of the nations would not come until All Israel would be All righteous (Isa 60:21), ALL back in the Land (Ezek. 39:28), dwelling in everlasting security, “never again” to be menaced by the enemy within or without.

Therefore, an Orthodox Jew who reveres the scriptures and interprets them literally MUST deal with the fact that so long as his people are not ALL back home in that particular Land, ALL preserved in abiding holiness by reason of a new heart and new spirit (Isa. 59:21; Jer. 31:34; Ezek. 37:26, etc., etc.), an apocalyptic end of unequalled distress yet awaits his nation. It is crucial that this be stressed in our witness.

This unequalled trouble (“the time of Jacob’s trouble”) will bring about the deepest national humbling and breaking in the nation’s history (Deut. 32:36 with Jer. 30:6-7; Dan 12:1, 7; Mt 24:21). It will accomplish the permanent end of exile in the spiritual rebirth / resurrection of the nation in “one day” (Psa. 102:13; Isa 66:8; Ezek. 39:8, 22; Zech. 3:9).

Only an ultimately climactic, ultimately transformational event could ever hope to reconcile the great tension that exists between the unconditional, unilateral covenants promised to Abraham & David and the many conditions necessary to secure the inheritance that would be subsequently introduced at Sinai. That built in tension pointed to a covenant that could not be defeated by conditions that would invariably be broken through human weakness. Unlike the covenant mediated by Moses, this covenant would be incapable of EVER being broken again (Jer. 31:31, 34; 32:40).

This is NOT because the stipulated conditions of obedience would be conveniently removed, but because all conditionality would be provided for, and guaranteed by the atonement of Messiah’s atoning blood and the promised gift of the outpoured Holy Spirit, poured out, not only on the perennial remnant, but on the whole of the newly born (Isa 66:8; Zech. 3:9), newly raised, holy nation of born-again tribulation survivors.

This covenant that would subsume, supersede, and fulfil all others is what the prophets would call, “the everlasting / new covenant”. It would not be fully enacted with “ALL Israel” until AFTER the unequalled trouble when the Deliverer would come out of Zion “to turn ungodliness away from Jacob” (Isa 27:9; 59:20-21; Joel 3:16; Rom. 11:26).

Because the Hebrew prophets entertained no such optimism concerning the intractability of fallen human nature, they cast their focus on a future apocalyptic event of ultimate divine intervention, comparable to the power of the original creation, the supernatural birth of Isaac, or the resurrection of the dead. Nothing less would avail. “Not by might not by power but (ONLY) by My Spirit, says the Lord.”

So the very concept of the Day of the Lord grows out of the logic of what we might call the crisis, or dilemma of the covenants.

To know both the extravagance and the certainty of the unilateral promises to Abraham and David, and to compare this to the hopeless weakness and predictability of the human condition is to raise the searching question: “what’s it going to take?” Surely nothing less than “the God who raises the dead” (2Cor 1:9).

Herein lies the unspeakably glorious resolution that the mystery of the gospel will reveal after Christ’s ascension at Pentecost. The shed blood of the Lamb of God would be the means by which the gift of the Spirit would secure the blessings of the everlasting covenant for “all the seed” (Isa 45:24-25 with Ro 4:16).

So contrary to popular replacement presumptions, the ultimate goal of the everlasting covenant does not reach its climax with the crucified and risen Messiah but with the age ending resurrection of an internationally impaled Jewish nation at His return.

That question: “What’s it going to take?”, must be pressed! It should be a pivotal point to be made in our apologetic to Israel.

This is because, according to any plain reading of plain language, an unparalleled time of devastation looms over the fledgling nation locally, and world Jewry internationally. Nothing could be clearer: Covenant chastisement cannot end until the exile has ended with every Jew filled with the Spirit, safe at home in his own Land (Ezek. 39:28-29).

With any opportunity, we must be careful to stress that while this time of unequalled trouble will touch everyone everywhere, it will be centred around the age old, “Jewish question”. When its implications are duly unpacked, this question is divinely designed to evoke an even more central question, namely, the Jesus question, and the question of the nature of justifying righteousness (Acts 13:38-39).

Before coming to the question of Jesus, we should point out that the fate of the nations hangs in the balance over an ancient covenant contention, namely Yahweh’s (“quarrel” KJV) controversy with “My people” (Lev 26:25; Mic 6:2; KJV).

Even God’s “controversy with the nations” (Isa. 34:8) will be over how they see and interpret His controversy with His people (Joel 3:2; Ezek. 38:17), since both points of great divine contention revolve around the greatest and most decisive of all questions: “whom do men say that I, the Son of Man am? … what think ye of Christ?” Not only that Jesus is the promised Messiah, but that His is the only acceptable perfection of righteousness imputed to the believer that can stand in the judgment (Isa. 45:24; 54:17; Jer. 23:6; Dan. 9:24; Rom. 1:17; 3:21; ;1 Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9)

The question of why a future great tribulation must yet come upon the Jewish nation locally and the Jew internationally, leads to the issue of the Holy Spirit received by faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross, as the only resolution to the perennial problem of covenant failure for both Jew and gentile. This is the resolution that the gospel reveals to the praise of the glory of His grace in Christ.

To summarize:

According to the prophets’ manifest interpretation of the divine covenants of Abraham and David, the world can never know abiding, unthreatened peace, until ALL (not some but ALL) the Jews are safe in their own Land, not only home, but “home free”, home to stay in an “everlasting righteousness” that extends to the entirety of an entirely saved Jewish population, unto children’s children (Isa. 4:3; 45:17, 25; 44:3; 59:21; 60:21; 65:23; 66:22; Jer. 31:34; 32:40; Ezek. 20:40; 37:25; 39:22, 28-29; Zeph. 3:13, etc.).

The question why this should be so leads to the greater “glory of the story”. The end time proclamation that will bring the Jew at last to “consider” what the nation has been so reluctant to consider (Deut. 32:29; Isa 1:3; 42:25 with Jer. 23:20; 30:24) will be no less effective to reach the gentile, according to the approach of Rom. 16:25-26.

These are the divinely ordained questions that an anointed and empowered ‘maskilim’ (those who “understand”) will be prepared to answer at a time when all the great questions of the faith will be pressed upon the nations, as the question of Jesus was pressed on first century Israel (Dan. 11:32-33, 35; 12:3, 10; Mt. 24:14; Rev. 7:9, 13-14; 14:6).

Extracted from https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5809724/jewish/Messianic-Era-Geulah.htm – the connection between exile and redemption

In Judaism, time has a clear trajectory and goal that was defined from its very inception. According to Jewish thought, the desired destination of all time and history is a perfected world of peace and prosperity, distinguished by a pervading awareness of G‑d’s presence.

Before creation reaches its crescendo, however, humanity in general, and the Jewish people in particular, are in a state of exile. Whether as a result of our collective eviction from the Garden of Eden, the loss of our ancient homeland and sovereignty, or an acute sense of existential alienation, it often feels like the human race is adrift through the choppy seas of history.

And what is the shore that we are all aiming to reach? Redemption, return, reconnection, renewal.

This dynamic dialectic of exile and redemption runs throughout human history, but it will one day resolve in an era of ultimate redemption, described by the Sages as yom shekulo Shabbat, a [never-ending] day of Shabbat.

In Hebrew, the difference between the words exile, golah, and redemption, geulah, is but a single letter, alef, a silent letter, numerically equals one, representing the underlying presence and unity of G‑d that pervades all of existence.