Kabbalah

Exile and Redemption as Cosmic, Not Only National

Luria took the historical story of Jewish dispersion and return and rebuilt it as one local instance of a much larger metaphysical condition affecting the divine light itself.

In the plain biblical and rabbinic sense, galut means the political exile of the Jewish people — first to Babylon, later under Rome — and geulah means their eventual return. Isaac Luria did not discard this reading; he nested it inside a bigger one. In his system, exile is first and foremost a condition of the light itself: sparks scattered by the shattering of the vessels, divine unity fragmented since the very beginning of the created order. National exile becomes, on this account, the visible historical symptom of an invisible cosmic rupture, and Jewish practice in exile becomes a mechanism for repairing that rupture rather than merely enduring it. Redemption, correspondingly, cannot be reduced to a political return to a land; it means completed tikkun, the reassembly of scattered light, of which the political ingathering is only one expression among others.