https://www.jewishhistory.org/a-mystical-view-of-exile/  (from jewishhistory.org)

Notice these extracts from the above article:

“What sin of the Jewish people was so great that it required such a long, bloody and painful exile – with seemingly no end? The Jews may have sinned, but if we compare the Jews’ behavior to many other nations and religious groups in history, it is difficult to place them at the bottom of the ladder. We are not found to be that wanting morally or spiritually. The punishment seems disproportionate to the sin.”

“What purpose does this exile accomplish?”

“The exile was transformed from being viewed as a punishment for the sins of the Jewish people into a vehicle for redemption”

In this last sentence and what follows, we see the problem of the exile being collapsed into an aspect of a common Jewish answer to the so called, “problem of evil”:

“only through darkness could light shine.”

This softens the blow of the traditional view of exile as punishment for sin. It doesn’t deny sin, but it makes sin, and evil in general, to be the means by which the nobility of innate human goodness can be extracted towards some eschatological ’re-assembling’ of human goodness, ultimately purged and freed of the excretion of evil through good deeds.

How much more optimistic of a properly “educated” human nature could any world and life view be than this?!

Kabalistic Judaism is an enormous leap of faith in man as the ultimate cooperator to ‘help God’ get us back to the Garden, as a joint endeavor to be achieved at the end, but what end and when? What will make the end so different than the history of the seemingly unending cycle?

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