I became religious as a young teenager. I grew up in a warm and loving home, but somewhere in my preteen years, I started looking for something more in my own religious expression. A local rabbi and his family opened their home and their Shabbat table to me, and I was drawn in by their love of Torah, their joy, and their sense of purpose. Slowly, I started keeping Shabbat. I started keeping the kosher dietary laws, I began to only wear skirts and dresses – aligning my inward expression of religiousity with my outward appearance. I prayed every day. And I did all of this while attending public middle school in America. Which meant I was, in the most practical sense of the word, a Jew in exile. I brought a placemat to school during Passover so my matzah would not touch the crumbs of leavened bread on the cafeteria table. I was a musician, part of the school orchestra, and I missed the Friday night concert because playing an instrument on Shabbat is forbidden. My teacher penalized me for it. Students threw rocks at me in the courtyard. I was called skirt girl. And somehow, none of it weakened my commitment. If anything, it did the opposite. Every moment of being visibly, unmistakably different clarified for me, that this is who I am. This is not negotiable.
I did not know it then, but I was living the Book of Daniel.
Today’s Bible Month conversation on the Book of Daniel is one of the most intellectually rich in the entire series. And the thread that runs through all of it is this: Daniel is the ultimate exile figure. He is taken from Jerusalem as a young man and deposited into the most powerful pagan empire of his day. He rises to the highest levels of Babylonian society. He is given a Babylonian name, Belshazzar, to replace his Hebrew one. He is surrounded on all sides by a culture designed to absorb him, to reshape him, to make him forget where he came from. And he never does. He refuses the king’s food. He prays facing Jerusalem. He refuses to bow to idols even when it means being thrown into the lion’s den.
Daniel is not just a hero. He is a manual. A walking, breathing instruction guide for how to be a Jew in exile without losing yourself in the process.
And he is not the first one. The Bible draws a direct and deliberate parallel between Daniel and Joseph, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The linguistic echoes between the two stories are striking. In the original Hebrew, there are ten places where the language used to describe Daniel mirrors almost exactly the language used to describe Joseph centuries earlier. Both are introduced as young men of exceptional appearance and intelligence. Both are given new names by foreign rulers. Both are recognized by God as uniquely gifted. Both rise to the highest positions in the most powerful empires of their time. Both interpret dreams that no one else can interpret, and both refuse to take personal credit for it, pointing instead to God as the source of their wisdom.
When Daniel tells the Babylonian king “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries,” he is saying exactly what Joseph said to Pharaoh. This is not my gift. This is God’s gift, flowing through me.
Of course, no parallel in the Bible is by accident. It is teaching something essential: there is a model for what it means to be a Jew in exile, and that model has a name. Actually, it has two names. Joseph and Daniel. Jews who rose to the absolute pinnacle of power in foreign empires, who brought their gifts fully and freely to the cultures around them, and who never for a single moment forgot that their real home was somewhere else. Joseph’s dying wish was to be carried out of Egypt and buried in the land of Israel. Daniel prayed toward Jerusalem three times a day, every day, from the heart of Babylon. Their bodies were in exile. Their souls never were.
This is the lesson that every Jew who has ever lived in the diaspora has inherited, whether they knew it or not. You can thrive here. You can contribute here. You can rise here. But know who you are. Know where you come from. Know where home is.
Do not let the culture reshape you so completely that you forget the thing that makes you worth listening to in the first place.
I think about the 13-year-old version of myself with the matzah placemat sometimes. About what it cost her to be that visible, that committed, that stubborn about her identity in a place that did not always welcome it. And I think that is Daniel. That is Joseph. That is a line that runs straight from the court of Pharaoh to the court of Nebuchadnezzar to a public school cafeteria in America, and it has not broken yet.
This Bible Month, Israel365 is going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, one book a day, every day in June. Every conversation is also available on Bible Plus, Israel365’s in-depth Hebrew Bible learning platform, hundreds of hours of teaching from Israel-based rabbis and scholars going deep into every book, every story, every hidden thread. This June, annual access is just $49.99, the lowest price all year.
If Daniel’s story is your story too, this is where you go to understand it better.
