Counting the Exiles

A Spiritual Mnemonic

The four exiles alluded to in the book of Daniel and elaborated upon by commentaries through the ages are no mere historical regimes but a series of still-extant veils over the perception of G-d, the blinding condition of all we now know, the way the whole world relates to G-d. The Maharal of Prague writes that the number of an exile is significant. Each exile’s number is the divine truth it opposes. This is also an easy way to remember them.

Babylon is the old idolatry, the proliferation of powers and potentates on earth, unencumbered by unifying accounts or the arguments of Abraham. It is deeply spiritual, too spiritual, with experience itself pulling the Babylonians to worship finite realities, to label the diversity of experience ultimate. As such it is the first exile, and oneness it opposes.

Media/Persia opposes the opposite. It is perhaps a dialectical response to Babylon: it has a problem with otherness or the world as an extension of the divine. It is fine with there being one king but he must be locked behind a bureaucracy of intermediaries. This is not a wild idolatry of many powers but systemization as G-d itself. In the book of Esther, the King is an absolute potentate but even he cannot rescind his own decree. The Purim story shows that the Jewish G-d does not work this way, that systems and rules and bureaucrats are no less G-dly than than oneness. It is no coincidence that the Jew who is G-d-in-otherness, G-dliness within the creation, faces his first genocidal threat in Persia, where they refuse to submit Duality to G-d, and call it ultimate.

Greece is the third exile and of a totally different tenor once more. The many gods and one king are here reconciled by rationality. The problem is not that the Jews exist as the presence of God in otherness. The problem is that their revealed mechanism of integration, the Torah, hides the reconciliation from the reach of reason; unaided intellect can’t reach it. The Torah calls itself third—“Blessed is the all-Merciful One, Who gave the threefold Torah to the three-fold nation by means of a third-born on the third day in the third month.” Chanukah is a victory of the Torah over Greek rationalism and its attempt to claim the third reconciling thing for itself.

Edom, Rome, is four and four in Torah is the receiver—the last letter of the tetragrammaton, the four foremothers, the poor receiving alms. Rome is not opposed to the One G-d, the extension of G-d into otherness that is the Jew, or the third thing that reconciles them that is the Torah It just doesn’t want them in its world on a pragmatic level. The Jew is excluded on a technicality rather than on principle. Principle is not Roman; practicality is. The Jewish mission may take place anywhere that the Jew owns, anywhere that is not a physical place at a physical time, anywhere outside of the empire. It is the actualization of God’s kingship in fact and in history that it cannot abide. It claims exteriority, receiving, the pragmatic realm, as ultimate and not belonging to the Jewish G-d.

The order of history was providential and particular, and there are precisely four exiles, in order.