I immediately understood, without any doubt, that chutz l’Aretz is not a healthy place for a Jew. A day after the wedding anniversary, I returned to Jerusalem, and thank G-d, the bleeding stopped. Years later, I told the story to Rabbi Leon Levi, and asked him why the bleeding had suddenly returned when I went back to America. He explained that when I had become a baal tshuva, I had formed a connection with the sefirah of Malchut, which designates the Shechinah. Since the Land of Israel embodies the sefirah of Malchut, in its geographic manifestation on earth, when I left Eretz Yisrael I was, in a sense, turning my back on the Shechinah. For detaching oneself from the Shechinah, you have to pay a price. Even though I left the Land to perform a mitzvah, I still was given a warning. It may be, as Rabbi Kook writes in “Orot” (Eretz Yisrael, 6), that there are tzaddikim, so deeply connected to the Land, who can temporarily leave the Land of Israel, in order to do a mitzvah, and return unscathed, but for the average, and the above average amongst us, Rabbi Leon said that the attribute of Malchut – the Shechinah – exacts a price: one person will have the anguish of missing a connecting flight; another will have a suitcase lost; another will have a fight with a parent during his or her trip; another will get sick; another will find some trouble waiting for him when he returns to Israel. To give just one example, Rabbi Dov Begun, Rosh Yeshiva of Machon Meir, is beyond all question a Tzaddik and great lover of Eretz Yisrael. Years ago, when he decided to travel to America (his first and only trip to chutz l’Aretz) to raise money for the yeshiva, I helped him prepare a brochure. When he arrived at the airport in New York, the person who was supposed to greet him wasn’t at the terminal. So, Rabbi Begun found a pay phone and made a phone call to discover what happened to his driver. While he was speaking, one of his suitcases, filled with the brochures, which he had set on the floor by his feet, was stolen. Welcome to New York! The next day, he was walking along Fifth Avenue by the Empire State Building when a strong wind ripped apart the shopping bag he was carrying filled with the brochures which he still had with him. The brochures scattered all over the avenue, and no one bothered to help him retrieve them. In addition to this anguish, it took him literally several months upon his return to Israel to get over the pain and shock of having witnessed firsthand the devastating assimilation of American Jewry. In other words, it is no simple matter to leave the Land of Israel, and this esoteric observation can also help us understand why it is halachically forbidden to leave the Land, except for a few specifically permitted reasons clearly set forth by our Sages.
So, I’ll be staying in Eretz Yisrael for Rosh HaShanah. I’m quite sure that if Rebbe Nachman were alive today, he’d be here too.