When, Not If

Some questions are honest delays. Others are disguises for a decision already made in the negative. Aliyah has been trapped in the second category for too many capable families. The move is treated as a thought experiment that never has to report a result.

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg drew a clean line: “There are legitimate reasons not to make aliyah at the moment. But there are no legitimate reasons to not be struggling and wrestling with when, not if, to move oneself and one’s family to Israel permanently.” The first sentence protects the real obstacles – a parent who cannot be left, an illness, a child who needs a particular school, work that cannot yet travel. The second sentence refuses the pose of indifference. Wrestling is a Jewish form of respect. If the Land is what we say it is, it deserves a fight on the calendar, not a shrug.

The Torah’s first journey begins with a command that does not flatter comfort. “Hashem said to Avram, ‘Go forth from your land, and from your family, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you.’” Go forth is not a tourist itinerary. It names the cost in the same breath as the destination: land, birthplace, father’s house. The showing comes after the going. That order still offends people who want a complete prospectus before a first step. Avram was not given a brochure. He was given a direction.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, after the political right to the Land had been recognized, defined the harder labor: “Zionists are now left with their second major task – more important, serious and difficult than the first – to place the realization of Zionism on every single Jew – to link the revival of the homeland with the personal fate of the wide masses of Jewry.” States can be declared. Lives have to be linked. The revival remains abstract until a household’s fate, rent, friends, burial plots, the language of the dinner table, is tied to the homeland’s revival. That is not propaganda. It is how a mass of people becomes a nation again.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said to new olim, and through them to Jews everywhere: “I wish to say to you and to Jews all over the world: We always needed you but we need you now more than ever. Come to Israel. We need you here.” Need, in that mouth, was not panic. It was the builder’s inventory. A country is made of nurses, engineers, teachers, soldiers, and neighbors. The sentence is an invitation with weight. Come. We need you here.

Wrestling with when means putting dates on paper. It means visiting with a notebook rather than only with a camera. It means asking an employer a question that might change a career. It means telling children the truth: this is not a vacation we are discussing. Families who do that work sometimes conclude that this year is not the year. That conclusion, reached after struggle, is honorable. What hollows a life is the unfought if.

Avram’s going does not require every reader to leave next month. It requires an end to pretending that the father’s house is the final horizon. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s second task does not conscript. It asks whether Zionism is a donation or a biography. Prime Minister Sharon’s need does not deny the legitimacy Rabbi Goldberg reserved for delay. It simply refuses to let delay become identity.

A column cannot schedule a shipping container. It can keep the verbs honest. Struggle. Wrestle. Go forth. Link. Come. Those verbs are positive. They assume a future in which a Jewish household’s ordinary fate and Israel’s revival are allowed to meet.

If the reasons not to go this year are real, name them without shame. Then keep the other question on the table where the mail sits. When. The land that was shown to Avram is no longer hidden. The remaining hiddenness is personal: whether a given family will treat aliyah as a rumor about other people or as a date that has not yet been circled.