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“Diaspora” is a relatively new English word and has no traditional Hebrew equiva-lent. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term fi rst appears in English usage in 1876, and in 1881 it is used by Wellhausen, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, in connection with Jewish dispersion. But the term seems closely related to the more traditional galut (exile). Nevertheless, refl ection reveals crucial diff erences.

Diaspora is a political notion; it suggests geopolitical dispersion, perhaps non-voluntary. However, with changed circumstances, a population may come to see virtue in diasporic life. Diaspora—as opposed to galut—may thus acquire a positive charge. Galut rings of teleology, not politics. It suggests dislocation, a sense of being uprooted, in the wrong place. Perhaps the community has been punished; perhaps awful things happen in our world.

Galut is a pervasive theme—perhaps even the dominant motif—in Jewish tory. From the perspective of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish religious tradition, his-tory is virtually a study in exile. Th e original exile is the expulsion from the Garden (Eisen 1986). Before the expulsion, Adam and Eve were in harmony with their world.

Afterward, they experience life as we know it, an uncanny constellation of richness, even exquisite beauty, along with all manner of awfulness.

Th e story suggests that the human plight, the human condition, is a conse-quence of bad choices. Its more subtle suggestion is that such choices are them-selves paradigmatically human. Our plight, our condition of galut, is a consequence of being human in the world in which we live, no formula for bliss. It is only in the Edenic mythological past and the messianic mythological future that human exis-tence is not radically troubled and confused. To apply the notion of exile to the human condition is thus to allude to the Eden story, but more importantly, it is to call attention to such “normal dislocation.”

A central facet of the religious impulse is the drive to fi nd meaning in such ex-ilic existence. Even without the well-known horrors of Jewish history, the religious impulse would have an abundance of raw materials. Skipping ahead to what is, until the 20th century, the catastrophe of catastrophes: the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the subsequent defeat of Bar Kochba in 135 CE, and the dispersion of Israel. Th e destruction of the First Temple—in 587 BCE—and the sub-sequent Babylonian Exile was calamitous. But that exile lasted only half a century;

exile could still seem an exception. Exile becomes the rule after Bar Kochba and the second expulsion from Jerusalem, this time with no foreseeable return.

To the exiles, the prospect of living without the foci of national and religious life must have seemed a violation of the cosmic partnership between God and Is-rael. Temple times—the sacrifi cial worship practices in place, in the context of something approaching the dignity of sovereignty—were, in retrospect, Eden. Th e churban (destruction), by contrast with “normal dislocation,” was a cosmic jolt.

Rabbinic Judaism is in part a response, a reconstruction of national and religious life. Continuities between pre- and postdestruction Judaism granted, and taking a

bit of dramatic license, one might say that result was nothing less than a religion of galut. And since the attempt to reconstruct was made in keen awareness of the human condition, it is a religion of galut, both normal and catastrophic. Dramatic license aside, there are of course many foci of the Jewish religious outlook, and cer-tainly no adequate single formula, galut included.

Th e best-known ways in which the rabbis came to terms with galut are devel-opments in practice, for example, increased emphasis on prayer and the study of the Torah as among the highest forms of religious practice, and a shift in the locus of ritual holiness from the sacrifi cial altar to the family table. Th e focus here is on theological developments.

Ways of thinking about divinity are dynamic. Subject a community to great trial or triumph and its way of thinking about God may well alter or enlarge. Th e Hebrew Bible is characterized by anthropomorphic depiction of God. But post-churban rabbinic literature—specifi cally, Midrash Rabbah on Lamentations—r eveals a new level of divine aff ective engagement and self-awareness. God has become almost one of us in aff ect. He suff ers, weeps, and even mourns. “Woe is Me!” he cries in Proem 24, “What have I done?” Sometimes the Midrash sees God in maternal terms:

Proem 22 compares God to a mother sparrow whose nest has been destroyed.

Proem 24 sees God in a paternal role, speaking of himself as a king who drove away his sons, who were in any case badly raised.

Strikingly, such radical imagery is developing simultaneously with the Chris-tian emphasis on (and very diff erent interpretation of) divine vulnerability. Th ese

Students holding the biblically prescribed lulav palm branch during prayers over the festival of Sukkoth at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. (Recon-structionist Rabbinical College)

developments are heightened when the Talmud speaks of God himself, after the churban, as living in exile. Th is is no doubt in part a matter of empathy that He is with us, He feels for us. But it is equally an expression of divine dislocation. Here we approach discontinuity with what we know of God from the Bible, an anthropo-morphic quantum leap.

Such superanthropomorphism yields new possibilities of relationship. With the more remote Divine Presence of Genesis, for example, relationships are quite limited—for the people, if not for the privileged few. Quite another matter is a God who is vulnerable in the ways explored, whose range of aff ective response is not un-like our own, whose self-perception is of one whose fate is tied up with that of the community. Such a God can function as life partner, as it were, of the community and, derivatively, of the individual.

Selected Bibliography

Eisen, Arnold. 1986. Galut: Modern Jewish Refl ection on Homelessness and Homecoming. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.