Exile in every generation: On Jewish loneliness and longing

Judaism’s genius is its portability — but with it comes a painful, persistent sense of never fully arriving.

Out of all the scripture and poetry and midrash that fills Jewish history, all the mysticism and folktales, all the prophecy and piety, all the humor and skepticism, for me one of the most moving passages comes from Ephraim Lisitzky. A writer and teacher, he was 15 when he came to America with his father in 1900. He remembered his feeling of displacement this way:

“I had only one friend in my loneliness, one whom I met every day in the synagogue and to whom I poured out my heart — the Talmud. I was alone in the synagogue, sitting at the table and swaying over the open Talmud, chanting in the old country tone. Loud sounds burst in from the street — the sounds of the new life into which I had been cast…. The cries reproached me mockingly: what are you doing among us, you unworldly idler?”

I tried to read these few sentences at our family’s seder this year, but couldn’t do it without crying. I am attached to Lisitzky’s passion for scripture and study, but it isn’t only that. I often feel that I wasn’t born in the wrong place or the wrong decade but the wrong millennium entirely, and I hear echoes of this wherever I encounter stories of Jewish loneliness, and our search for belonging and rest.

It begins with Adam and Eve, of course, who are exiles from paradise, and it continues with Abraham, who is told to leave everything he knows and believes. And as the Torah narrates, it is the life of Abraham’s great-grandson in Egypt — only three generations later! — that leads to slavery and eventual freedom. But even then, the wilderness generation dies in the middle of nowhere, severed from the burden they’ve at least always known and without ever experiencing the Promised Land. Moses also never makes it there — so if our greatest prophet is left yearning and displaced, why should we assume our own lives will be any different?

After the destruction of the First Temple, the Jerusalem elites were taken off to Babylon, but so many more were left in the destroyed city, each cut off from the other. Centuries later, Jews reacted against both Greek and Roman influence and aggression, and after that and ever since we have negotiated our place in either a Christian, Muslim, or merely secular world. Many Jews in the last 2,000 years chose to convert, or to simply become irreligious, but we all know how the tradition, how the melodies and prayers and holidays, the food and the study, remain in our brains and our bones, and how our history remains like an itch, no matter how hard some of us might want to abandon it.

The Jewish experience in America has almost uniformly been a positive one, even if it is littered with the kinds of violence and prejudice and ignorance that still come as no surprise. There were the immigrant parents who didn’t want their sons playing baseball. There was the sudden reality that Jewish children in this new land might marry non-Jews. There was the displacement of Reform Judaism into the suburbs and of the Orthodox into their own enclaves. In a strange way, we are adherents of one of the most worldly of world religions — so much so that we are accused of running the world — and yet sometimes the best we can hope for, even in America, is simply to be left alone.

There is the burden of everything we believe and the amazing variety in how we express those beliefs, and there is the joy and meaning and richness of it all as well. But because the genius of Judaism was to make it portable, an experience of the divine that could be taken anywhere, there is also the sense that while we, as Jews, can go anywhere, we actually belong nowhere.

But like clockwork, there is the non-religious Jew who nevertheless feels a pull every year around Yom Kippur for reasons other than simple but powerful nostalgia. And there are the parents who haven’t stepped foot into a synagogue in decades who suddenly, despite themselves, want to make sure their children are raised Jewish.

It doesn’t end. There have been generations of boys who probably wished they could do anything but study Talmud, while until recently there were generations of women and girls who simply wanted the chance to study it; there has been Rashi and Rashi’s daughters, Benny Goodman and the Cohen Brothers; there has been Spinoza and Yip Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow”; and there has been the philosopher and poet Judah Halevi, who experienced all he could of 12-century Spain only to turn his back on it and die en route to Jerusalem.

Finally, there is our own fraught present moment, fraught and difficult and impossible to unknot for so many reasons. Only last weekend, when my daughter saw that her summer camp had a guardhouse and a security gate, she asked, “Does it have that because we’re Jewish?”

I return to Ephraim Lisitzky. Because while he left Belarus to end up so lonely in Boston, 80% of Belarusian Jews were killed in the Shoah. And so the point, perhaps, isn’t that he should have stayed home, but that eventually he would have felt out of place (or worse) anywhere.

Is this feeling of exile and rootlessness only a Jewish thing? Every day before going in to work, I sit in my car and read a page of Talmud. But do my coworkers, one of whom comes from Kazakhstan, have their own versions of this experience, where they ground themselves in something that 21st-century America cannot give them?

Perhaps. But the Jewish response to this unease feels unique. As Leon Wieseltier says in one of his books, “If you have made peace with the human world, you should be ashamed of yourself.” And as the late Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote, “Jewish thought pays little attention to inner tranquility and peace of mind.”

To which I say, Amen. PJC

Tim Miller is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.