Hebrew word translating as exile. Refers specifically to our exile from the land of Israel since the Roman army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

Lit., exile. Since the destruction of the Temple, Jews have been in a state of galut, exiled from their land. This has been understood as a spiritual as well as physical state. Traditionally, Jews have longed for the coming of the messiah to end the long exile. Others feel that it has ended with the advent of the State of Israel, while still others see the State of Israel as a step on the way to redemption. In modern times, some Jews have viewed the creativity of the galut as a positive force and have argued for the creative tension of Israel and the galut.

Hebrew - "exile" or "captivity". The Jews living outside of Israel.

Exile Galut has come to mean the abnormal life of the Jewish minority in the lands of dispersion. In the words of Chayyim Greenberg: "Wherever Jews live as a minority...is Galut." Moses Ibn Ezra, one of the leading Hebrew poets of the Spanish period (1060 - 1138), describes galut as "a form of imprisonment...the refugees are like plants without soil or water." In 1906, Solomon Schechter wrote: "The term Galut expresses the despair and helplessness felt in the presence of a great tragedy... It is a tragedy to see a great ancient people, distinguished for its loyalty to its religion...losing thousands every day by mere process of attrition... It is a tragedy to see a language held sacred by all the world...doomed to oblivion and forced out gradually from the Synagogue... This may not be the Galut of the Jews, but it is the Galut of Judaism..."

(Hebrew for "exile") The term refers to the various expulsions of Jews from the ancestral homeland; over time, it came to express the broader notion of Jewish homelessness and state of being aliens; thus, colloquially, "to be in galut" means to live in the diaspora and also to be in a state of physical and even spiritual alienation.