One of the cornerstones of Jewish mysticism, which is also found in many other forms of mysticism, is that creation in general and the presence, or descent, of the soul into the body in particular, all form a long process of exile.
Thus, the exile of the Jewish people is more than a special case or even a symbol.
In exile the Jewish people act as human seeds, which come from the body and which carry the highly concentrated message of the body as a whole.
Each chromosome is a perfect replica of the whole organism.
The true function of the Jewish people is to encode and constitute the genetic system of the world.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From The Seven Lights, p. 114, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz