Human beings are creatures of interpretation. We experience the world through a search for meaningful context. We seek a single interpretive framework that ascribes its own coherence and internal logic to events and situations. We need an organizing anchor to guide us through the grand navigation of life – through the mysterious, the arbitrary, and the dangerous. We must have plot and continuity; we build the path as we walk it. At the same time that we experience reality, we construct its story for ourselves.
Humanity requires a unifying idea in order to cooperate, to advance, and to feel a sense of control. As we experience the world, we experience its explanation. We transform hills and valleys, paths and forests into a map. We live within reality, but we also create its representation, which instills reality with logic and coherence. And what makes a map a map is its drawing of boundaries – what is in and what is out, what is at the center and what is on the margins, what belongs and what does not. We may understand the drawing of maps as an evolutionary act directed at a group, and in particular, at the core of the group. For in nature, when you are not part of the group, you are vulnerable.
So we create a center and margins, an interior and an exterior; each designs itself in relation to the other. For there is no I without an Other, and there is no Other without an I. Every Beit Hillel needs a Beit Shammai, and every Beit Shammai needs a Beit Hillel; every messiah needs a false messiah; religiosity needs secularism, and secularism needs religion; every “modern” needs its “post-“; every conservatism needs progressivism, and every progressivism needs conservatism; every canon needs apocrypha, and the apocrypha need a canon; every house needs its outside; every theory needs a refutation, and every refutation needs a theory to refute; every culture needs an avant-garde, and every avant-garde needs a culture; every sage needs a prophet, and every prophet needs a sage; every Garden of Eden needs an expulsion, and every expulsion needs a Garden of Eden; every Land of Israel needs an Egypt, and every Egypt needs the Land of Israel; every redemption needs an exile, and every exile needs redemption.
Every place needs a fence, and every fence creates what is outside the fence. Each needs the other to mark its boundaries, reinforce its existence, find its place on the continuum. It is like a man in a dark room who feels for the walls in order to understand – This is the room. When we create maps, we define places that are dependent on what lies outside them. “Definitions” are “finite”; they establish what is within their finite boundaries and what is beyond them. The boundary between interior and exterior defines both, and thus a context is built; the whole world becomes a clear map on which there are continents and seas, borders and named countries.
Now that there is a map, we can start to wander. And there – outside the finite boundary but within the definition – may be found the nomad and the refugee, the asylum-seeker and the traitor, the homeless, the pilgrim, the invader, and the exile. The tent-dweller needs the nomad to make the walls of his tent seem more secure; every institution needs refugees from it in order to confirm its existence; every homeowner needs the homeless in order to understand the pleasure of having a home; the redeemed need the exile in order to savor their redemption.
Thus, the organizing principle lends us words to define everything in existence and its opposite. As long as words are defined – there are boundaries in the world. We have attained an imagined order for our world. It is ever clearer, it has meaning, and it can ostensibly even be predicted. And there is also a place in the world for those outside the border – every place has an outside and an anti-, and thus we eliminate true placenessness from the world. The nomad and the refugee, the asylum-seeker and the traitor, the homeless and the pilgrim, the invader, the exile and the political exile, are all outside, but their identity exists in relation to the place they stand beyond.
Exile, by its very nature, helps the real place to define itself. The fence between the real place and its outside creates a bond between the two. Each defines itself according to the other. The interior defines itself by means of the exterior, and vice versa. Thus, exile may be found outside, but it is an integral element of the inside; it is part of the idea, part of the power dynamic, part of the conversation. Sometimes, it is a ghost within existence – the ghost of what once was, resurfacing to remind us that it is still here and liable to return. It is a perennial warning that there is a bug in reality. Every house requires the destruction of the house, the past in which there was no house, the past in which the house was destroyed, and the possible apocalyptic future in which the house may be destroyed again – the owner of the house needs all these things to feel at home. He is like a man who looks at his shadow in order to understand his concrete existence.
The exile is not a nomad. The nomad’s place is on the road, in transition. The exile’s place, by contrast, is the place where he is not. The nomad is romantic, a kind of eternal traveler, with a backpack and a soundtrack of road songs in the background. The exile, by contrast, is a somber figure singing melodies of longing. He bears an identity on his back, like the Jews carrying the seven-branched menorah on the Arch of Titus. The exile is not an invader; he did not come from “there” by sea and mountain in order to conquer “here.” The exile is not a crusader. He does not go out on crusades.
But there is a kind of exile who might be called a pilgrim of exile. A pilgrim whose gospel is exile itself. He tells the house’s inhabitants that the house is stifling, stagnant, intransigent, that its fortifications do not protect them but rather imprison them. This is exile as a gospel of freedom and constant creativity – exile as metaphysics.
And then there is the political exile. He is found in an age where the ultimate organization is the state. The state creates its own overarching narratives as an organizing principle; it sets the boundaries of “here.” It generates identities and enforces them. Aristotle, who was among the first to examine the state, opined that a man without a state is like a man without a tribe, without a code of law, without a home.
A state is a mechanism based on a grand narrative. It is a mechanism created to serve a certain goal, an institution born of an organizing principle and a context of meaning. It is like a chair – beyond its mere existence and its parts, the chair is the product of a fundamental idea that, through a sense of internal logic, function, and meaning, puts each part in its proper place. The state tells its grand narrative – inter alia, through legal categories that give names to the people in its sphere of influence: citizen, resident, refugee, asylum-seeker, traitor. The state defines your identity, and thus gives you a place in the world, always in relation to the state. You have an ID card, a passport, a broader framework in which you are positioned with regard to the state. The political exile marks his identity in relation to the place from whence he was exiled. He is in a place outside a place, standing on the fence and saying: “Look, we have a problem.”
Exile is threatening. The ‘there’ converses with the ‘here,’ telling it: “There is a place other than this one.” Exile has an independent identity, the gospel of outsideness; it is a place outside of place, with a function, a reason, a story, a meaning. An exile of this kind, that chooses its own exile, poses a profound threat to the ‘here.’ This threat has been heard in the Zionist story ever since the early Zionists in the Land of Israel argued with American Jewry over the ideal future of the Jewish people; it has been heard since the debates over the universal message of Judaism as opposed to its particular, local message; since the aspiration to a world based on liberal, universal principles began to compete with concepts of sovereignty and territory. This threat has persisted even into the public conversation over the differences in the cost of living between Israel and Berlin. The question that is so threatening is this: Is life outside of the center a glitch in the system, something that must be fixed, a distortion of reality? Or maybe not – could this rather be a dual existence, where distinct centers maintain conversation with one another?
The very possibility of exile is threatening, because if you can be “there,” why “here”? What is the “there” and what is the “here”? Who decides what they are? Where is the core? Where is the center? And if there is a center “there,” too, then what about the center “here”?
