Belonging After Exile

Finding life after labels — from the gallery to Parliament and back to faith.

The Torah portion this week, Chayei Sarah — The Life of Sarah — opens with Sarah’s death. A strange title, perhaps an honest one. We are all too quick to name people by their endings, not their living. It’s how we talk about others who have fallen, failed, or returned — as if their life stopped the moment their story became uncomfortable.

For years, I’ve lived with that paradox: how to speak of life after a label, after exile of any kind. I’ve worn more than one label — formerly incarcerated person, DES daughter, advocate — but none of them capture the restless pulse underneath. Titles flatten what was once complex and human. They tidy away the noise, the hope, the small and defiant signs of life.

In criminology, Labelling Theory suggests that once society defines a person by their worst act, the label can become a second sentence — an identity that follows long after the punishment ends. Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, and later Erving Goffman all explored how deviance is not simply behaviour but a social reaction; how stigma attaches and reshapes a life. Once named, you are treated as though that name contains your entire story. But labels rarely tell the truth; they tell the fear people feel toward complexity.

Judaism offers a counterpoint. Where criminology studies the damage of labels, faith creates rituals for returning beyond them. Teshuvah — repentance — is the theological opposite of labelling. It insists that identity is not fixed by failure. You are not the act; you are the capacity for renewal.

This week, I walked through the Koestler exhibition at the Southbank Centre — Night Owls and Abstractions. For anyone unfamiliar, the Koestler Awards showcase art created by people in custody or under supervision, offering a glimpse into private futures that don’t fit official paperwork. This year’s show was curated not by an artist but by a poet, which made sense: it was more about seeing than showing. It asked visitors to look with tenderness.

The exhibition’s central motif — the owl — was everywhere: carved, painted, sketched, stitched. Watchful, nocturnal, quietly wise. Each owl seemed to say, I’ve seen darkness, but I still look out. There was no institutional polish, no probation reports, no imposed narratives. Just creation. And in that freedom, I recognised the same fragile power as Chayei Sarah — life refusing to be defined by what came before.

A few days later, I found myself standing in Parliament, surrounded by women campaigning for better understanding of a medical condition I’ve lived with too. The building is both vast and intimate — corridors filled with footsteps and history. We walked past the hall where the late Queen lay in state, and another where the suffragettes had chained themselves to statues. Their ghosts were everywhere, whispering that belonging isn’t given; it’s fought for.

It was an exhausting day — fluorescent light, thick air, so many conversations — yet strangely comforting. There is something redemptive about standing in the same space from which you were once symbolically excluded. It isn’t triumph. It’s a quieter thing — a kind of peace that still carries its own hesitation.

Because belonging, after exile, never feels secure. You keep waiting for someone to tell you there’s been a mistake. Gratitude and caution coexist; even joy comes with a shadow. I feel that often, even in community — and yet my home synagogue has taught me that welcome can be both unconditional and real. That trust, like faith, has to be practised.

When people first come home from prison, they don’t necessarily have language for that kind of faith. But over time, they can begin to see that desistance — the slow, personal work of moving beyond crime — depends on belief just as much as rehabilitation does.

In my research I call them the three dimensions of belief: belief in self, belief in others, and belief in something greater. Each one is fragile on its own, but together they create the moral architecture that lets people rebuild their lives.

For me, returning to community meant learning to believe in all three again — to trust myself with freedom, to believe that others could see more than my past, and to hold on to the idea that something greater could make meaning out of it.

In Israel, one of the most striking examples of belonging after exile came from the Kibbutz Resocialization Program, studied by Michael Fischer in the 1980s and beyond. Young men leaving prison were invited to live and work within kibbutzim, not as inmates but as participants in communal life. Over time, many found employment, enlisted in the army, built families, and — by Fischer’s measure — rebuilt trust. It wasn’t simple or sentimental; the scheme had strict limits and careful selection. But it offered something radical: a community that chose to see possibility rather than pathology. It showed that belonging is not a reward for goodness but a condition for growth — the very thing that makes goodness possible.

That’s what makes belonging after exile so complex. It isn’t just about being accepted back; it’s about rediscovering the capacity to believe that you still deserve to belong.

In Judaism, teshuvah — repentance, or return — isn’t just moral repair; it’s a geography of the soul. It’s about walking back into the world you thought you’d lost, even when it still looks at you differently. It’s about turning again toward life.

Standing in Parliament, looking up at those high Gothic arches, I thought of the art I’d seen days earlier — the owls, the night, the persistence of light. Between them lay the whole story of exile and return: the art of surviving, and the courage to be seen again.

Belonging, I realised, isn’t a destination; it’s a daily act of faith. It’s what you do each time you enter a room, each time you create, each time you trust the world with your presence.

Midrash Tanchuma (Chayei Sarah 4) says: “As long as Sarah was alive, there was blessing in her dough, a cloud over her tent, and a lamp that burned from one Shabbat to the next. When she died, these ceased — and when Rebekah came, they returned.”

It’s a perfect image of continuity and renewal after absence. The Midrash teaches that when Sarah died, the light of her tent went out — yet when Rebekah entered it, the light returned. (Tanchuma Chayei Sarah 4.) Belonging, it seems, was never meant to be static; it’s the courage to keep relighting the lamp. Each generation, each person who returns, becomes another spark of that same life.

And maybe that’s what Chayei Sarah was always about — not the record of a death, but the proof of a life still being lived through others.