It’s in our collective DNA - and for some of us more recent, and perhaps alive as others in the world right now are feeling this cruel fate directly.
I invite you to explore this question with me this coming Sunday, right in the middle of the Nine Days on the Jewish Calendar that commemorate some of the darkest days of destruction and exile in our national history, so many generations ago.
We will explore the three major traumas that our people went through as both the kingdoms of Judah and Israel ceased to exist - over the course of a few hundred years.
What’s left? How did our ancestors survive exile and reinvent identity? How did these exiles impact the evolution of Jewish culture? Can we not only reflect on how we suffered - but about our historical role in creating conflicts within us that made it easier to dismantle our national realities? What can we learn from these histories to be better and do wiser, kinder, safer - now?
There are critical theological and political lessons to be learned here - not just tears for traumas past.
Dr. Christine Hayes, in her “Introduction to the Old Testament” suggests that the exiles gave us a global language of belonging and a religious vocabulary of purpose:
“The exiles of 722 BCE and 586 BCE forced a philosophical revolution. Before the destructions, if your nation was conquered, it meant your god was weaker than the enemy’s god. The prophets of Israel and Judah inverted this completely: they argued that Babylon and Assyria were merely clubs in Yahweh’s hand. In doing so, they decoupled God from geography, paving the way for a monotheism that could be worshiped anywhere on earth.”
This coming Sunday we’ll delve deeper into this topic, just in time for the Ninth of Av.
🚩 Our Next LIVE LEARNING Session:
A Tale of Two Exiles - Mourning Both Jerusalem and Samaria
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