States of Exile

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 emb...

Et in Arcadia ego is a Latin phrase meaning "Even in Arcadia I exist," with the "I" in question being death personified. Arcadia was an ancient Greek idyll, a pagan Eden home to nymphs and swains. The message of the phrase is that death lurks in paradise too. "Sadness in Palestine?!" is what Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max Brod about early Zionist Yosef Haim Brenner's novel Breakdown and Bereavement . Palestine was an ancient Hebrew idyll, a Biblical Arcadia home to farmers and warriors. The message of the phrase is that sadness lurks in paradise too. There is sadness and death in any earthly Zion precisely because it is earthly. Some orthodox Jews believe that with the coming of the Messiah, all Jewish corpses outside of Israel will burrow through the earth and be resurrected in the Holy Land. I'll make my aliyah then.