From Judah Became God's Holy One to Unclean Shouted in the Streets

There is a line in the Hallel that Jews have been singing at Passover tables for more than two thousand years. When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of a strange tongue, Judah became His holy one, Israel His dominion (Psalms 114:1 and 114:2). The line is a boast in the mouth of a former slave. A people who had just been chattel in a foreign empire was now, the psalm says, the personal holding of God. Judah, the lead tribe, had become nothing less than the sanctuary. The word in the Hebrew is kodesh. Holy one. Set apart. The word that only a few things in the Torah are allowed to wear. The incense. The priests. The space inside the veil.

The rabbis who built the Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval compilation of rabbinic material assembled by Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan in thirteenth-century Germany from earlier Talmudic and midrashic sources, loved that line. And then, on the same page of Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 1026, they put another line next to it, and you can almost feel the ink on the page cooling.

The second line is from Lamentations. It is spoken in the voice of a Judean priest walking out of the ruined city into exile, and it is not about holiness. It is about a shout. They cried to them, Depart, unclean, depart, depart, do not touch (Lamentations 4:15). The word this time is tamei. Unclean. Impure. Defiled. The exact opposite of kodesh.

The rabbis of the Yalkut are not interested in explaining the juxtaposition. They just stack the two verses on top of each other and step back. When Israel went out of Egypt, Moses said, Judah became His holy one. When Israel went out of Jerusalem, Jeremiah said, Depart, unclean.

The reader is supposed to gasp, and then to think.

Think about who is shouting. In the Lamentations verse, the priests and the Levites of Judah are walking out of the burning city into captivity. They are still, technically, the holy servants of the Temple they have just watched collapse. They are still wearing the residue of a sanctity they have carried for centuries. And the people who are shouting Unclean at them are not Babylonians. The rabbis who read this verse carefully noticed that the shout is in Hebrew, not in the language of the conquerors. The shout is coming from the other exiles, from the common people of Judah, from neighbors and strangers in the caravan who want the defiled priests to keep their distance.

In other words, it is Israel shouting Unclean at Israel. Judah, the tribe that in the exodus psalm had become God's holy one, is now the tribe calling itself defiled. The priests whose blessing had once filled the courtyards of the Temple with kodesh are now being told to walk on the far side of the road because the rubble of the sanctuary is still on their sandals.

This is the specific grief the Yalkut is pointing at. Exile does not just take the land away. It takes the grammar. The vocabulary of holiness, carefully cultivated across fifteen hundred years from Abraham to the Babylonian conquest, gets inverted in a single afternoon. What was kodesh becomes tamei. The word that used to mean set apart for God now means set apart from God. The same verb. The same distance. The opposite direction.

Lamentations Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on the book of Lamentations probably compiled in the fifth century, picks up the same detail and pushes it harder. The midrash imagines the scene on the road from Jerusalem to Babylon in specific, cinematic terms. The captives are tied together by the neck. The chains clink. The dust kicks up under a long file of bare feet. And as the priestly families shuffle past, with the bloodstains of the Temple altar still on their hems, a voice from somewhere in the line shouts, in mother-tongue Hebrew, Tamei! Sur! Al tigau! Unclean, turn aside, do not touch. The words are taken directly from Leviticus 13:45, where the Torah prescribes that anyone stricken with the skin affliction called tzaraat must cry out exactly those words so that passersby can avoid him. The priests who had once been trained to diagnose tzaraat in others are now being tagged with it themselves by their own people on the road to Babylon.

This is the theological vertigo of the moment. The Torah's own vocabulary of exclusion has been turned on the men the Torah had once set apart. They know the formula because they have pronounced it themselves a thousand times over lepers in the courtyard of the Tabernacle. Now the formula is coming at them. They hear their own legal Hebrew used against them by mouths that had once whispered blessings at their feet. It is the most disorienting sentence a priest could possibly hear, because he understands exactly what it means and exactly who has the right to say it, and he cannot defend himself without walking backward into the ashes he just walked out of.

The Yalkut sets Moses's line next to Jeremiah's line so that the reader will feel that specific inversion as a lived theological event. Judah was holy. Now Judah is unclean. The exodus was a coronation. The exile is an excommunication. God, in the same breath of Hebrew, has moved His people from one category to its opposite, and the rabbis are saying without saying it that the God of both verses is the same God.

Louis Ginzberg, in his seven-volume synthesis Legends of the Jews compiled between 1909 and 1938, preserves a tradition in which the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, walks out of the Temple chamber by chamber on the night before the fire. First she leaves the Holy of Holies. Then she leaves the threshold. Then the courtyard. Then the gate of the city. At each stop, the rabbis have her weep. When she reaches the gate, the tradition says, she turns and waits for the exiles to catch up, because she is going with them into Babylon. She is also unclean now. She is also being shouted at. She is walking out with the priests and the Levites, stripped of the word kodesh, taking her chances on the long road east.

The Yalkut does not spell any of this out. It just leaves the two verses on the page next to each other. Moses, in Hebrew: Judah became His holy one. Jeremiah, in the same Hebrew, a few centuries later: Depart, unclean, depart, do not touch. Two words. One people. One God. One spine-chilling mirror.