Exile and redemption גלות וגאולה
The pair of ideas running through Jewish history: displacement from one's place and the promise of return.
The first exile in the Torah is not of a nation but of a person: Adam leaves Eden, and the whole dynamic begins there. Then it repeats: Avraham leaves Ur, the family goes down to Egypt, the ten tribes are taken by Assyria in 3205, Yehuda to Babylon in 3338. After the Second Temple exile becomes a condition lasting nineteen centuries.
Tradition describes galut not only as geography but as damage within the world itself: the Shechina goes into exile with the people. Redemption therefore means repairing something in the structure of being, not only bringing people home.
Geula is the promise repeated by every prophet — and once already fulfilled, with Cyrus's decree in 3390 after exactly seventy years. The whole liturgy is built on the pair. The twentieth century brought both the extremity of exile and a return in 5708.