Some thoughts on exile

Jacob and his growing family did not return to their God-given homeland once the famine that drove them out had ended. Facing both a prophecy that their sojourn in Egypt would be long and arduous and a marked reluctance on the part of their Egyptian hosts to let them leave, they had to accept their lot and await the miraculous events that led to their return more than two centuries later.

Pirkei Avot does not ignore the phenomenon of exile. Rabbi Nehorai (Avot 4:18) urges us to be exiled to a place of Torah. Our sages may debate what this means (for example, do we actually have to exile ourselves in order to go to a place of Torah, or finding a place of Torah only the right way to proceed in the unfortunate event that we are exiled?) There is no doubt however that we should not let ourselves be in a place where there is no Torah. The Egyptian exile took place before the Torah was given, but midrash teaches how Jacob sent his son Yehudah ahead of him (Genesis 46:28) in order to establish a place of Torah learning (Bereshit Rabbah 95:3).

Exile is also listed as one of the seven punishments of the Jewish people that are attributable to a specific cause: at Avot 5:11 it results from the three cardinal sins (idolatry, sexual immorality and bloodshed) and also from working the land of Israel during the sabbatical Shemittah year.

Today I came across another slant on exile, one that had not occurred to me before. I quote Rabbi Pinchas Winston, in an article called “Inner Redemption”, posted yesterday on Torah.org. It reads, in relevant part:

When it comes to personal fulfillment and inner happiness, the basic rule of thumb is that the more inner happiness a person has—personal redemption—the less outer happiness a person “needs.” As the Mishnah teaches, “Who is a happy person? One who is satisfied with their portion” (Pirkei Avos 4:1). Large or small, because for an innerly happy person a large portion could just as well be a small one, and a small one is a large one as far as they are concerned. As Ya’akov told Eisav, “I always have what I need.”

 

After thousands of years, mankind as a whole has come to realize that money does not buy happiness. It can “buy” pleasures and a whole lot of fun, but it cannot buy happiness. It can “buy” people and countless distractions, but it cannot buy happiness. Rich or poor, the only way to “buy” happiness is to do the work and stick with the program of personal development, of being a Tzelem Elokim. The world is so gashmi—materialistic—because so few people truly know what inner happiness really entails.

That is the real exile.

 

There is no greater exile than not being yourself. It may sound trivial because, how can you be anyone but who you are? But the very fact that psychological depression is a national disease and anti-depressants are such a lucrative prescription drug today answers that question head-on. It is exhausting to watch how hard people have to work just to maintain an image they want to project, but which has little to do with who they really are.

 

We can call that “Exile of the Personality,” and after many years of living like that it can become too hard to be redeemed from it. Just like the Jewish people in Egypt, a kind of “slave” mentality settles in over time, until the person sees their mistaken persona as the real one. When enough people act like this then it eventually takes an actual physical exile to bring people back to themselves. God didn’t make the world, especially one as elaborate as ours, for a bunch of phonies. Pun intended.

I like this idea very much, but I’m not sure it works. Is a person ever really exiled from his or her real self? It can be argued that, where a person is wedded to undesirable or damaging values—or even to good values that are harmful when taken to extremes, a person is only exiled from an ideal self that may never have existed and which that person may be unwilling to find. We probably all know people who are ambitious, competitive, confrontational, driven by the mere existence of a challenge rather than by the need to avoid it. I can say for certain that I should not wish to live such a life and that I would find it infinitely less congenial than an existence in which I am truly content with my lot, whatever it may be. But I cannot say that the same applies for other people and I would hesitate to say that, because I have found my place, I would judge them to be exiled from theirs.

As newborn infants our real self is driven by hunger, anger, fear, greed, impatience and other factors which, as we grow up, we learn to suppress or disguise. By ceasing to be slaves to our base mentality, maybe we are not ending the exile of our personality but seeking to create a new personality entirely—a task that is far more onerous if far more rewarding.

Thoughts, anyone?

Your wife might follow you -- but the Torah won't!

At Avot 4:18 Rabbi Nehorai teaches that a person should be exiled to a place of Torah and not say that, wherever he goes, the Torah will follow him. This is because learning Torah is a shared activity and it is only when one learns Torah together with others that it will "stick". Many explanations have been given over the ages as to what this means. Here is a somewhat unusual one that does not normally see the light of day, possibly on account of the current demands of political correctness. It is however interesting in its own right. It goes like this.

The last chapter of the Book of Proverbs contains one it its best-known passages: a set of verses which commence with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet in turn, from aleph to tav. These verses, often referred to as Eshet Chayil (“A Woman of Worth”), praise an ideal wife and mother in terms that are taken by some to be literal, but by others as an allegory in which its author, King Solomon, praises his mother, the Sabbath or the Torah.

Taking this proverbial “woman of worth” to be one’s wife, Rabbi Eliezer Papo (the "Pele Yo’etz") has an ingenious and quite dramatic explanation of how the Torah differs from the Eshet Chayil. In the first place, he says, when a husband storms off in anger against his wife, she will go after him in order to appease him; the Torah, however says “If you leave me for one day, I’ll leave you for two” (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 9:5). Secondly, a wife has only one husband at a time and may have no-one to whom to turn if her husband leaves her, while the Torah is always followed by a multitude of admirers and enthusiastic suitors. Thirdly, it is the husband whose role is to support his wife and provide for her needs while, in contrast, it is the Torah that provides for those who are wedded to it. Finally, the wife is presumed to be less knowledgeable and less intelligent than her husband, while it is the Torah that imparts her knowledge and wisdom to those who pursue her.

This comparison reflects the social and economic reality of the Ottoman-ruled Balkans in the early 19th century but may appear inappropriate, if not offensive, to those who read it two centuries later. However, the punchline is as powerful now as it was then: don’t treat the Torah as though it was dependent on you, for the truth is quite the reverse. The Torah owes you nothing and has no need for you at all. If you do not continue to study its content and fail to practice its principles, you can hardly expect it to cling faithfully to you—particularly if you run off in pursuit of other activities and pleasures in places where the light of Torah is rarely, if ever, seen.

There is a touch of irony in the Pele Yo’etz’s explanation here since this Mishnah reflects an element of role reversal: it was actually Rabbi Nehorai’s wife who decided to live in the leisure resort of Diomsit -- and it was he who followed after her.

Source note: R' Eliezer Papo did not include this explanation in his Pele Yo'etz. It can be found in a partial commentary on Avot that is interspersed within the second volume of his Torah Commentary Elef HaMagen.