From Hadesh Vol. I, Issue No. 2
By: Jacob Levin
It is no secret that the way we think is affected by what we see. It is what makes advertising so effective. Social media has caused mass echo chambers, polarization, and radicalization due to this fact. Social media companies design an algorithm that will show its users engaging content; political content is more engaging by nature since it can generate negative comments (which the algorithm only recognizes as engagement); the more sensational the content, the more engaging it is; the more a user engages, the more the algorithm will push similar content. And as more and more of our news and education is designed to be entertaining, the more its informative quality will suffer. “The narrative” becomes top priority– what our users want to hear is more important than what actually happened. The worst part is that there will be more than one narrative. However they can get more user engagement– however they can keep users on their site, viewing ads.
Israel is victim to this process firsthand. While it is true that the modern state of Israel is gravely affected by this, I am referring to the people, the tradition, and the civilization known as Israel.
Judaism is the result of millennia of exile, during which we were influenced by what we saw. One can dig through Judaism and see the strata of accrued exilic sediment. Schlissel challah (or key challah), as it is most commonly practiced today, was adopted while in 19th century Poland.1 Wearing a red string around the hand is likely a combination of reinterpreting a local enactment in 15th century Portugal2 and an adoption of a widespread pagan mystical practice.3 Tashlich is from 14th century Germany.4 Even the names of our months are Babylonian!
But Judaism was not only influenced in its practices, customs, and behaviors, but even in its philosophy and thought. The Ramchal’s rigorous, almost mathematical philosophy is reminiscent of Enlightenment thought, evoking memories of Linnaeus’ rigid classifications. Rambam’s desire to reconcile the Torah’s commandments with Aristotle echoes the sentiments of scholasticism in Catholic Europe, as well as of Muslim scholars like al-Kindi and al-Farabi. Rav Saadia Gaon is well-known as a proponent of Kalam, an Islamic philosophy and style of argument.5 Philo’s writings, influential to the earliest Jewish scholars, are themselves quite influenced by contemporary Greek philosophies.
None of these influences, both in practice and thought, are inherently negative, so long as the intentions are pure and free of idolatry. Yet it can make one wonder: “What does genuine, native Israelite practice look like? What does genuine, native Israelite thought sound like?”
Unfortunately, the last time Israel was not in exile was before the destruction of the First Temple, in the 6th century BCE, about 2500 years ago. While today’s Judaism is absolutely, without a doubt the most authentic, contemporary version of Israelite civilization, and no attempt should be made to abandon it, it is exceedingly difficult to find textual sources that have been untouched by exile. Strictly speaking, only the Torah, some books of Nevi’im, and some books of Ketuvim are pre-exilic, yet no commentary nor midrash survives from pre-Exile– everything we know is tainted.
But there is hope.
By analyzing the foreign civilizations that characterize our exiles, it might be possible to do as Rabbi Meir did: save the fruit and remove the peel. To answer the question of what Israelite civilization is like, we must first answer the question: what are other civilizations like? Once we have that answer, we can subtract the layers of exilic influences from our sources and possibly discover true Israelite civilization.
So what are the major civilizations that have dominated our exile? We list them regularly: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. We have existed in other lands, and partaken of other cultures, but these four are The Four Exiles. Why these four?
Maybe it is because they destroyed our Temples. But we rebuilt our Temple under Persia, who never destroyed it. Maybe it is because they dispersed us. Yet Persia actually returned us to our land, so that cannot be the reason. Maybe it is because our land was inside their borders. This is not so, as Greece itself controlled our land for no more than a decade of the 300-year-long Greek exile, before the Ptolemies and the Seleucids took control of the region. We even had independence for over a century before Roman legions entered Jerusalem! Not only that, but there were many other powers who controlled our land since Rome: the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, and now, again, we are independent. Yet no one today claims we are not still in exile. So what makes these civilizations the Four Exiles?
It is because we are not only influenced by what we see. We are influenced spiritually by the dominant civilizations. These four civilizations’ ideas suffused the entire world. Even without algorithms, without advertising, without radio, without books, even without contact at all, the major ideas of these civilizations reached the ends of the earth. In the following month’s issue, I will expand on this idea, providing more detail for each of these civilizations, historical data and context, and my hypotheses for some of the major ideas of each of these civilizations.
Zvi Ron, The Origin and Development of Schlissel Ḥallah (Hakirah, 2024), 8, 12.
Zechariah Holzer, The Earliest Origins of Wearing a Red String as a Spiritual Charm (Kovetz Etz Chaim, 2015), 12-13.
For further information on this, search “kautuka”, and compare to Tosefta Shabbat 7:1
Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 165.
Sarah Stroumsa, Saadya and Jewish Kalam: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 71-90.