No giant leaps. Just one step. You’re not quitting your job, selling your house, or signing on any dotted lines. In fact – and I know this will be perceived as mere rhetoric but it really isn’t – whether or not you choose to pursue aliyah any further is essentially beside the point. This is about an exercise in mindfulness, about searching yourself to identify what you value, how much you value it, and what you’ll do about it.
In one of the Torah’s most famous scenes, God appears to Avraham and instructs him with the words “lech lecha” – leave everything you know and begin your journey to the Land of Israel. God instructs him to “look at the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them; and He said to him, your children will be like this.”
Rav Meir Shapira, founder of the Daf Yomi movement, explains that Avraham actually began to count the stars, one by one. When God says your children will be like “this,” says Rav Shapira, He refers to this act of Avraham, of making an ostensibly farfetched attempt to count all the stars in the sky. Anyone else might balk at the futility of such a task, but Avraham took it seriously.
This is Avraham, our forefather, and his actions reverberate across the millennia to the Jewish people of today. The prospect of “lecha lecha” can seem to us as daunting and as distant as it was to Avraham. But following his example, we do not cower and we do not despair. We simply take one small step.