Jewish history is basically the story of tribes, exile, and the repeated discovery that somewhere else might be slightly less hostile.

Which is why it felt oddly appropriate that I lost my job the week of Pesach.

I lost my job this week.

Not dramatically. No shouting, no slammed doors, no security guard escorting me out while my colleagues pretended to check their email.

Just a polite email informing me that I was being “let go.”

Corporate English is a fascinating dialect. It can describe expulsion in a tone normally reserved for releasing a dove at a peace conference.

“You are being let go.”

Thank you. That’s very thoughtful of you.

The strange thing about losing a job is that it doesn’t feel like losing employment.

It feels like losing a tribe.

For months, you belong somewhere. You have meetings, shared complaints, an office coffee machine that produces something technically related to coffee, and a Slack channel nobody understands. Still, everyone treats it with the seriousness it deserves.

Eventually, you start saying we.

We handled that client well.We’re drowning this week.We should probably fix that system.

It’s a small word — we — but it carries remarkable emotional weight.

Then one morning, you receive a carefully worded email and discover something clarifying.

You weren’t part of a tribe.

You were part of a payroll.

Corporate culture loves the word team.

Sometimes it becomes more ambitious and upgrades itself to a family.

Families, after all, are the people who show up when you are sick, broke, ridiculous, unbearable, or unemployed.

(Except, of course, for the brother who has chosen to sit this particular family out.)

Real families don’t revoke your login credentials.

Within hours, my meetings had migrated to other people’s calendars. My email signature — once proudly attached to a title — became a historical artifact.

Somewhere in the office, my chair was probably already preparing itself emotionally for the next occupant.

Organizations do not mourn employees.

They reassign logins.

And suddenly you are outside the tribe.

Which, if you think about it, is the most Jewish emotional state imaginable.

Jewish history is essentially a long series of communities discovering that the phrase “you belong here” sometimes has an expiration date.

Apparently, Jews travel well.

And every year on Pesach, we gather around a table and retell the story of the original exile — slavery in Egypt — followed by the original escape.

The Exodus is an extraordinary national origin story.

A group of slaves leaves Egypt and somehow becomes a people.

Most modern office teams cannot successfully organize a lunch order.

But here’s the interesting part.

The Jewish story doesn’t end with liberation.

It continues with wandering.

Then losing everything again.

Then rebuilding again.

Which means Jewish history teaches one surprisingly practical lesson:

Exile is rarely the end of the story.

It’s usually just an administrative inconvenience before the next version of the tribe appears.

For a few days after losing a job, there is a predictable emotional pattern.

Part the very practical question of how one intends to pay rent.

But also something else.

And blank spaces are dangerous because they force the question most adults carefully avoid:

What do I actually want to do with my mind?

For a while, my identity was tied to a title, a desk, and a polite email signature beneath every message.

Remove that, and something unsettling happens.

You are temporarily outside the tribe.

Jewish history suggests this is survivable.

After all, the entire point of Pesach is that exile is not the final chapter.

Sometimes it is simply the moment when the tribe reorganizes itself somewhere else.

Which brings me to the mildly ironic part of this whole episode.

I am writing these reflections in Israel.

The country that was supposed to end Jewish exile.

Freshly exiled from a tribe again.

Jewish history suggests the solution is obvious.

Preferably somewhere with decent coffee.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)