Striving for a Healthy Jewish Spirituality: Qabala, Sexuality, and Geula
By Harav Micha Lindenberg
An excerpt;
It is important to remember that the situation of the Jewish people has been far from normative for not just fifteen hundred or two thousand years, but rather two thousand five hundred years or more. If we understand the normative vision of the Tora to be the Jewish nation dwelling in its Land, with a Temple, with a central judicial authority, with proper Tora-mandated government with the Davidic line at its helm, with sages and prophets in the Land, with all laws of the Tora active and functioning, we must admit that this has not been the reality since the times of the first Temple. During the entire second Temple period, a majority of the nation did not dwell in its Land. There were no longer any prophets walking the land. The Temple stood, but many expressions of the Divine presence were absent, as our Sages tell us. The Davidic line continued—in Babylon. In a sense, one can view the entire second Temple period as a precursor for the two thousand years of exile that followed, especially in that the developments of the Oral Tradition carried out by the Men of the Great Assembly and the generations which ensued provided the basic structures and institutions which laid the foundations for the Judaism of the exile.
When the revolts against Roman rule failed, the striving for national self-determination and expression progressively withdrew from the national consciousness into deep-freeze and dream-stuff. What had once been more a matter of propriety, a “temporary measure”, became more and more entrenched; an attitude of existential passivity and withdrawal from the world of realpolitik morphed from a short-term mechanism of survival into a central feature of the Jewish mainstream outlook and approach to national affairs. Withdrawal from the physical-material reality, inexorably leading to an inability to act within that reality to further the goals of the Jewish people, became more and more entrenched in the Jewish psyche so as to become the dominant approach.