Tora of Israel, Tora of Exile

By Yoav Sorek

Judaism seems to have become irrelevant to reality. The first step to bringing it back.

The retooling of Jewish norms for exile thus culminated in a legal framework severed from the laws’ original content. Since the goal was preservation, the framework soon overpowered the content—even when the intent was to preserve the content as well as the forms. But even if the commandments were understood to be mere tools and not the main substance of life, there remained a need for some force that could mold Jewish spiritual and ethical life in the absence of a full national ethos. This void was filled by the rabbinic law, with its focus on the responsibilities of the individual Jew.

This, then, is the second basic element of the exilic Tora: Its shaping force is not the original commandments themselves but the halacha—the tradition, primarily of rabbinic origin, which interpreted the commandments with a new focus on the individual and on the narrowed Jewish community. The particulars of this system have various sources, including scholarly commentaries on the commandments, the pietistic practices of sages and the time-honored customs of the diverse Jewish communities. As a whole, this system of law contrasts sharply with the original commandments. For, while the latter sought to act directly on life—to elicit all the constructive forces of the nation and the individual, all their potential for success and their love of life—the Tora of Exile is geared toward constructing a replacement for life.

In order to appreciate this move, one must understand that in exile, the Jewish people lived their lives in one place while dreaming of another, better one. In their minds, the Jewish people could do nothing but suffer until the Creator saw fit to renew the covenant and establish the promised society in the promised land. Therefore, the reasoning went, we should allow only our bodies to be present in this world; the soul must be left to purer, better, more optimistic spheres. Accordingly, study and prayer emerged as the two central pillars of the Tora of Exile—activities which vie for the time, resources and attention of the faithful Jew, and which built a comprehensive system for engaging in the biblical commandments, one which ultimately constitutes a replacement for the full national life in which such commandments were meant to exist.

The halacha also constitutes a replacement for real life in another sense, the third element of the exilic Tora: Those life forces which lost their meaning in the physical world live on in the observance of Jewish ritual, preserved as if in a nature reserve. As the rabbis taught: “Since the day the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One has nothing in his world except the four cubits of halacha.”¹³ These four cubits now encompass all that used to exist in the wider world: The light of the divine and the significance and worth of the world. The festival of Sukot serves as a fascinating example: This holiday of the harvest, once the foremost expression of the Jewish celebration of life in the physical world, underwent a substantial “spiritualization” in exile, where it became the holiday of physical transience (booths) and spiritual redemption. Nonetheless, even in its present form, Sukot requires the observance of many laws which open the door to a diversity of experiences normally belonging to the mundane world. Thus the same Jew who during the rest of the year regards building as dirty work to be contracted out suddenly becomes an amateur builder, erecting a temporary home for himself and his family for the upcoming festival week, investing much effort in the project and talking expertly with his neighbors about the construction experience. The same Jew who regards nature as the silent witness to life lived according to the commandments, goes about selecting a citron—one of four species he is required to gather as part of the festival ritual—transformed into a botanist and esthete, his trained eye capable of passing judgment on its every yellowish-green bump.

These elements of the exilic Tora—a life devoted to an utterly distant purpose, the primacy of submission to a framework and the transformation of Jewish law into a substitute for “real life”—follow from the fundamental experience of exile: The inability of the Jewish people to actualize their covenant with their Creator, which was predicated on their existence as a nation in their own land.

One might say that all these characteristics of the exilic Tora could have been derived from the rabbinic parable of the king who sent away his wife. However, the exilic conception of the commandments is very rarely explicated in traditional literature. Although no one challenges such rabbinic statements nor their authority, it has clearly been preferable to downplay the true status of the commandments in exile, for fear of encouraging disrespect for the law.

The secret of the Tora of Exile’s power lies in the ignorance of its nature. Most Jews, like their opponents, are certain that by observing the halacha they are truly “observing the commandments.” Clinging to their legal framework enabled the Jewish people to maintain their existence, reinforcing Jewish identity in exile while preserving the Tora of the Land in suspended animation for better times to come. This is identical to the parable of the woman alienated from her husband: By wearing her jewelry in her father’s house, she strengthens her connection to her husband—and keeps the jewelry ready for the day of their reunification.¹⁴

VII

The Tora of Exile developed gradually over centuries, undergoing three main stages: The period of the Sages, that of the Rishonim (medieval scholars) and that of the Aharonim (later scholars).

The Period of the Sages. This era began early in the Second Temple period (fifth century b.c.e.) with the initial development of the Oral Law by the Men of the Great Assembly, and ended with the final editing of the Talmud and the decline of the intellectual center in Babylonia (ninth century c.e.).

The destruction of the First Temple in 587 b.c.e. at the hands of the Babylonians shattered the form of Jewish existence and the Israelite consciousness of the biblical period. This was, in fact, the turning point out of which the exilic Tora was born. The return to Zion and the establishment of the Second Temple never fully restored the previous circumstances, due to its limited nature: A sizable portion of the Jewish people did not return to the land of Israel, and, more significantly, the clear unity between life and faith which existed in the time of the First Temple was not restored.

The period of the Sages witnessed the early formation of the Tora of Exile; however, it was still relatively close to the Tora of the Land, as opposed to the fully exilic Tora of the periods that followed. During the first five hundred years of this period there was a functioning Jewish commonwealth, which necessitated a Tora that could govern the day-to-day life of a nation. Many of the rabbis who defined the character of this period’s literature cherished memories of this Second Commonwealth, or took part in the efforts to restore it in what became known as the Bar Kochva rebellion in the second century c.e. As a result, the early teachings reflect a tension between the exilic and landed perspectives, between those who sensed the magnitude of the new era that had arrived, and those who saw the destruction as only a temporary setback in the national life. This was a transition period between the Tora of the Land and the Tora of Exile, characterized not by a clear distinction between the two, but by a blurring of the lines.

Where in the teachings of the rabbis do we see the creation of the exilic Tora? First, in the new concern with the “world to come.” While the Bible rarely refers to anything beyond the life of the individual or the nation in this world, the rabbis devoted much attention to man’s fate after death and to the compensation he receives in the next world. Especially well known is the dictum of R. Ya’akov: “This world is like a vestibule before the world to come; prepare yourself in the vestibule, that you may enter the banquet hall.”¹⁵ The primary motivation for performing deeds is not the repair of this world and the establishment of a fitting abode for the Divine Presence in it, but preparation for the afterlife. One may argue that R. Ya’akov intended the “world to come” to refer to a future situation within the course of history. But regardless of the intent, he was clearly diverging from the worldview of biblical times, in which the goal and the means to achieving it were present within the same existential context.

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