A great miracle has taken place in America! Finally the Jews of America can say “A great miracle happened here.” You didn’t hear about it? What is it? An Orthodox Rabbi in America told his congregation” “The clock is ticking. The time has come to leave America and to return home to Israel!” Amazing! Miracle of miracles! The establishment of the State of Israel wasn’t enough to cause to Jews of America to hop on an airplane. The miraculous rebuilding of the Jewish nation in the Holy Land wasn’t enough for the Jews of America to wake up. The weekly Shabbat Torah readings and call of the Prophets weren’t enough to cause the Jews of America to listen. Just as HaRav Kook warned 90 years ago during his famous Rosh HaShanah sermon in the Churva Synagogue, it has taken the impure shofar of anti-Semitism to force the Jews of America to realize that they don’t belong in a gentile land. Well, not all the Jews of America. One Orthodox Rabbi. Maybe two. In all of the United States, only one or two brave Rabbis have raised their voices to call the Jews of America to make Aliyah. The Jews themselves and the rest of the American Jewish leadership are still clinging to the fantasy that the golden exile will last forever.
When Hashem first appeared to Moshe at the burning bush, he ordered Moshe to set out on the mission to bring the enslaved Jews out of Egypt and lead them to the Promised Land. Faithfully, Moshe confronted Pharaoh and conveyed Hashem’s command to “Let My People go!” This cry of freedom became the cry of Theodor Herzl and then decades later during the struggle for Soviet Jewry – “Let My People go!” Today the cry of the Jewish leadership throughout the Diaspora has been twisted into the very opposite: “Let my people stay!” Instead of longing for freedom in the Jewish Homeland, the Jews who remain in gentile lands cry out “Let us stay here amongst the gentiles in a foreign land, in a land not our own!” They demand their democratic right as citizens of America and France and England and Belgium to remain faithful citizens of these gentile countries, free to live there in liberty and equality like everyone else. But Diaspora Jews are not citizens like everyone else – they are Jews, and Jews will always be strangers in strange lands. And now today, with the explosion of anti-Semitism throughout the world, Diaspora Jews tragically cry out: “Let my people stay!”
In America, the Jewish Federation cries out “Let my people stay!” The American Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations cries out “Let my people stay!” The American Jewish Congress cries out “Let my people stay!” The American Reform and Conservative Movements cry out “Let my people stay!” The Rabbinical Council of America cries out “Let my people stay!” Modern Orthodox communities throughout America cry out “Let my people stay!” The Lubavitch Organization cries out “Let my people stay!” The Anti-Defamation League cries out “Let my people stay!” The Hillel organization and pro-Israel advocacy groups on college campuses cry out “Let my people stay!” American Jewish Newspapers cry out “Let my people stay!” The great benefactors of American Jewry cry out “Let my people stay!”
Even though the pavement is burning under their feet, the Jews of America cry out “Let my people stay!” “Let us remain loyal Americans,” they plead. “Don’t force us to move to Israel. Don’t force us to make Aliyah. Don’t make out children fight in your war. We are no longer the Children of Israel! We are the Children of America. We have American passports to prove it. We are content to remain here as a minority in a gentile land. The temporary hatred will pass.”
Across the spectrum of Jewish organizations throughout the Diaspora, Aliyah is not on anyone’s agenda. Here and there a courageous Rabbi may venture to speak about the great mitzvah of living in Israel, but no Aliyah Movement exists. In North America the Jersalem-based Nefesh B’Nefesh works hard to rescue whatever brave souls that it can but the same 2000-3000 pioneer olim arrive each year, whether in good times or bad, a sad trickle of American Jewry, a mere .06 percent of the total. This month, we will read in the media about the “record number” of new olim arriving on flight-after-flight from America, but the grouping of flights during the summer is just a public-relations stunt organized by the heads of the various Aliyah agencies to give them an opportunity to make grandiose speeches. While we are happy upon the arrival of every single Jew to the Land of Israel, the yearly total of olim will be the same as last year, and the year before that, and even lower than the number of Jews who arrived in the wake of the Coronavirus scare. Approximately 3000 out of the 5 million Jews in America.
Many Diaspora Jews support Israel from afar, donating large sums of money for a plethora of causes in Israel, and they deserve heavenly reward and a sincere yasher koach for that. Others support Israel on a political level, attempting to influence foreign policy on Israel’s behalf. But their conception of Israel as the Jewish Homeland is more like nostalgia than a genuine yearning to live here. Tragically, Diaspora Jews have forgotten where they truly belong. But Hashem has not forgotten. He is sending the animosity of today’s anti-Semites to remind us who we are. To remind us that we don’t belong in foreign lands, just as He reminded us time and again in our wanderings across the globe whenever we believed that we had finally found refuge in a friendly gentile land.
It is almost too late to avoid the inevitable. Already, assimilation has ravaged 70 percent of Diaspora Jewry. With the rise in anti-Semitism which will surely increase as Israel is forced to defend itself against enemies who rise up on all sides, Jews in the Diaspora will find their futures less and less certain. Yet there is still a chance. For starters, Rabbis in Israel have to call out to Diaspora Jews in a much louder voice. The Government of Israel needs to lessen the bureaucratic obstacles confronting olim, build attractive new centers of klita, create job opportunities in a more aggressive fashion, and accept all college students openly, readily accepting the credits which students have already compiled overseas – unlike the inflexible system in place today which turns away many young potential olim.
Since the establishment of the State, the Government of Israel and its Aliyah agencies have failed to attract olim from the West. For the past forty years, ever since I worked in the Israel Aliyah Center of the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, I have been pained by the paucity of olim from Europe and North America. Today, over half of the new immigrants to Israel are non-Jews. I believe that a national public commission must be established immediately to analyze the workings of the official Aliyah agencies, to see how their enormous budgets are being used, and to promote the necessary changes to bring home the threatened Jews of the West. Perhaps, it is not too late to change the cry of “Let my people stay!” back to the original cry of “Let My People go!” As the Prophet proclaims, “For from Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
