Exile's Lament

Detachment is 'unnatural,' not primary, but the outcome of a liberation from the primary attachment, of an alienation, a break, a betrayal; the primary is fidelity, and the sympathy and love which go with fidelity.
- Leo Strauss, Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion

What is the liberation, alienation, break or betrayal that leads to exile? From a historical perspective, the primary attachment of our ancestors was to the ethnos. The Greek word means more than just ethnic group. Ethnos encompasses what moderns now categorize as religion, culture, bloodline, language and land. The challenge to the ethnos comes from universalism, whether propagated by Alexander the Great, St. Paul, Karl Marx or Uncle Sam. The Jewish people are a classic example of an ethnos, because they kept the traditional unity between nationality and religion intact. The Jewish people have historically resisted universalizing trends like Christianity and Hellenism, no matter if individual Jews embraced them with vigour. Even in exile from their physical homeland, for most of their history Jews were never in exile from the spiritual homeland they kept with them.

Yet that changed in modern times, beginning in the Jewish case with Spinoza. (Strauss calls modern Judaism "a synthesis between rabbinical Judaism and Spinoza.") We moderns have broken with our ethnos, just as ethnos itself has been broken into different categories. We may call ourselves culturally Serbian, racially African, religiously Jewish or territorially Canadian, but the original unity is gone. Even those who claim to maintain the unity of the ethnos have invariably broken with it in a million small ways. Religious fundamentalists, in their attempt to restore the original purity of their religion, invariably create a modern parody of it; and racists create a modern parody of paganism. We are all exiles now. Blame the Jews, the Americans or the Europeans if it makes you feel better, but there is no return to Eden. Whether you consider it liberation or a loss, we are outside the gates of tradition.

Leo Strauss observes that in our times "the sacred law, as it were the public temple, which was a reality thus becomes a potential, a quarry, or a storehouse out of which each individual takes the materials for building up his private shelter." I am seeking to build my own private shelter out of the storehouse of the past. I cannot return to the public temple because an eye in me has been opened that cannot be shut, an eye that sees the public temple as a private prison. Yet I still need to worship, I still need the sympathy, fidelity and love within its gates. If I abandon all vestiges of my ancestry I will be completely alone, completely in exile, with only technological narcotization as comfort for spiritual slavery. Exile without longing for return is death. But the longing for return is the closest to return we can come.