We can all see that things are not working well for the Jewish Nation on many fronts. Most people agree that new conceptions are needed. But the conceptions suggested are band aid conceptions – a little more of this; a little less of that. In other words – business as usual. No real change. No sweeping upheaval. No going anywhere. Just a lot of frantic activity and confusion, like a person peddling madly on an exercise bicycle. His peddling doesn’t get him anywhere. He remains where he was at the beginning.
Real change is needed. But change is hard. Humans tend to be sedimentary creatures. We have a resistance to change. Most often we are content where we are. Take the example of the Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. Grave warnings came from several directions but most Jews clung to the delusion that they were safe were they were. The same thing is occurring today. Even though there are grave warnings throughout the Diaspora, the Jews of the West are far, far away from the understanding that the solution to the swelling anti-Semitism is not the battle against anti-Semitism but rather mass Aliyah.
Presently, the conception regarding anti-Semitism is to fight against it with anti-propaganda such as mass advertising campaigns on American television, posters at bus stops, giant billboards in Times Square and the like. This, of course, is like throwing money down the drain. Advertisements won’t change the 2000 year hatred of the Christians against the Jews for having supposedly killed their savior. It won’t change Islam’s 1000 year hatred against the Jews for refusing to adopt their religion. The hatred is something that is imbedding in genes of the descendants of Esav and Yishmael from the beginnings of time. All of the advertisements and dialogue in the world cannot uproot it. The only solution is mass Aliyah. The simple truth is that the Jewish People don’t belong in strange lands. We belong in our own Jewish Homeland – in Israel. This eternal truth was established thousands of years by the Creator of the Universe in His command to our forefather Avraham – “Get thee forth to the Land.” It was reiterated in G-d’s promise to our holy forefathers that He, as Ruler of the World, would bestow the Land of Israel to the Jewish People for all eternity. Hashem is not a liar. Hashem will bring this to pass. Today, anti-Semitism is the stick he is using to bring us all home. It isn’t the first time in our history. Unfortunately we are indeed a stubborn people. Without getting repeatedly hit on the head we don’t internalize the message. And if we don’t wake up to Hashem’s calling, He will continue to hit us again and again.
One of the conceptions demanding revision today is the vitalness of Aliyah to the survival of the nation. Firstly, because living is Israel is Hashem’s will for His children, in order to erase the profaning of His Name which comes about through our living contentedly amongst the gentile nations of the world. The Prophet Ezekiel, whose reprimand we recently reread during Pesach, taught us this long ago. Rashi has emphasized this in several places. Our Sages have reminded us of this eternal promise and connection to our Holy Land again and again in their sacred writings. History itself has taught us this fact. Hashem Himself has decreed this truth time and again in the Torah in His somber decrees of exile when we don’t follow His Plan for Creation.
Secondly, the reason we need to be in Israel is because it is our Home. It is where we belong. As Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook often repeated, Eretz Yisrael is our natural environment. The Land is ours, the air is ours, the fruit is indigenous to our special holiness, we can only have our own sovereign Jewish State here in this portion of the globe with our own army and Hebrew language, the learning of Torah is vastly elevated here, our unique gift of prophecy is dependent on our being in the Land, the Temple can only be built here, and the word of the Lord goes forth to the world from Jerusalem and not from Brooklyn or Boca Raton.
The truth is that young Jewish students don’t belong at Harvard. They don’t belong at Columbia University in New York. They belong here in the Jewish Homeland. The Israel haters and Jew haters in America and around the world are simply Hashem’s current stick to lead us all home. Demanding our right to learn wherever we like in foreign countries is a futile strategy. There is no future for Jewish life in an exile which was never meant to last forever. On October 7th, the genie of Jew hatred escaped from the bottle. Just as a new Pharaoh rose up who didn’t know the Jews, a generation of Gentiles has been born that doesn’t know what the Holocaust was. They don’t learn about it like we do. It is not an obsession for them. The old eternal Jew hatred is back in full force and it will only get worse so long as Israel must defend its God-given Land against enemies who yearn to take it away in defiance of Hashem’s having chosen us and not them.
The concept that it is perfectly OK to remain in the exile must be erased from our Jewish consciousness. The exile is a curse and punishment. Hashem does not want us there. Isn’t the ever-skyrocketing rate of assimilation enough to make us realize this truth? Must we suffer the blows of the stick until blood flows on college campuses in America and on the streets of Lakewood and Monsey, New York?
More programs of Aliyah offered by the Government of Israel and its Aliyah branches will only bring a trickle more of Jews. The entire conception must be changed. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky prophesized: the Jews must liquidate the exile before the exile liquidates the Jews.
