What Our Encounter with Marc Ellis Taught Us About Practicing Exile

We spoke with Marc in late January 2024, a few weeks after October 7th and only five months before his passing

Note: In honor of one year of Lost Prophets, this is the first in an occasional series of reflections on past episodes.

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The above is a short video clip from our interview with the late Marc H. Ellis. A transcript is at the bottom of this post.

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The prophets — as my co-host Pete Davis and I learned from the subject of our very first episode, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — are enemies of indifference and callousness. They are highly sensitive to suffering. More than that, they can be disturbing, sometimes very annoying, people.

But we were simply podcast hosts: we did not imagine this little project somehow implicated us in anything truly prophetic. That is, until we met Jewish theologian and scholar of prophecy Marc H. Ellis, a friend of Bishop Desmond Tutu, Cornel West, Dorothy Day, Fr. Daniel Berrigan and many more such “light bearers”, as Marc referred to them. (Listen to Marc’s interview — Lost Prophets #7. Marc Ellis on the Prophetic Diaspora — here.)

About halfway through our conversation with Marc, I sensed a kind of horrified realization coming over us both. In these conversations about practitioners of radical justice, we were not merely outsiders looking in. Especially in this conversation about the crisis in Marc’s own tradition, we felt ourselves being drawn into an invisible community we could scarcely imagine.

We’re speaking of the community of people who side with the prophets, those who express outrage and lament about events such as the genocidal destruction of Gaza. As Marc calmly asserted, indeed speaking from his own personal experience of rejection, the lovers of righteousness will find themselves rewarded with the condition of self-exile from their own traditions and communities.

Marc spoke of ‘Constantinianism’ — religious traditions becoming too compromised with modernity and state power. There is even, Marc explained, an ecumunical Constantinianism: a mutual power agenda across traditions which works to stifle critics of empire.

The necessary response? To Marc, we need more people to embrace and embody the “indigenous Jewish prophetic.” Those who have done so have had a profound effect on what he called the global prophetic—a hidden circle of which Buber and others have spoken. Prophets in this time, Marc told us, are part of a New Diaspora in which we are all “practicing exile” together—not solely as part of some inter-faith solidarity but in order to gather the fragments of our traditions that have been abused and squandered.

What does it mean, we wondered, to practice exile? Marc’s definition: It’s a condition of all who seek authentic covenantal existence in a justice-loving community which is in resistance. Each of our faith communities—my Christianity included—have reached some kind of end point, he argued. Our sharing of exile is defined mostly by “sharing what is left.” And there must be a recognition on the part of exiles that “there is no return, only a journey forward with others who share a common fate—which creates a New Diaspora.”

As we spoke with Marc about prophetic figures like Buber, Heschel, Gandhi, King, Simone Weil, Peter Maurin—even Bob Dylan—he was unsparing in his candor. To be a prophet is to take on a perilous vocation—and your community probably can’t protect you. There’s no reward, not even from God. There’s only a solitude and yes, a solidarity.

Near the end, Marc mentioned his Parkinson’s diagnosis almost casually, just in passing. He had been told he might have ten more years—in fact, he had only two.

In this conversation that shook us both, Marc not only reminded us of what time it is on the clock of the world, in Grace Lee Boggs’ phrase.

Unexpectedly and movingly, he revealed to us something about what we are to do and who else will be with us.

May his memory be a blessing.

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Transcript of clip above

Elias: I'm just thinking, Marc—we're taping this conversation, as I know we're all very aware, at a very dramatic moment [in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel].

In reading your work, I discovered what the phrase “After Auschwitz” refers to, and the theology and reflection on that. And then you introduced a second term, which I'd never heard of: “After Israel”. I just wondered if you could say a little bit about this moment and what your thoughts are around what an expression like “After Israel” might mean?

Marc: Right, I'm writing on that now. It's After October 7th too — [and] the Gaza assault. After Israel — and what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people.

We go from empowerment—which we needed—to abusing that power and displacing another people. So we had the formative event of Holocaust, the formative event of Israel — suffering and empowerment, and the abuse of that empowerment, which has now reached new levels.

So we can't do theology or religiosity or ritual by just saying: We suffered—or we enjoy the promise of Israel. We have to deal with the cost of our empowerment. This is central to a Jewish theology of liberation.

And where that leads us: Has our empowerment liberated us or enslaved us to our empowerment?

So a Jewish theology of liberation is not about God being among the poor, because the question for us was: Was God in the Holocaust? And, you know, no theologian would say that. But God isn't in our power either, and in our abuse of power.

What are we doing? For God's sakes, we're squandering our entire tradition.