“You’re a Jewish youngster. There’s the Jewish State. Goodbye!”

These are the words that sent Avraham to Israel, where he made aliyah as a teenager.

And why? Because Avraham believes that Israel is the place where Jews are writing the next chapters of the story of the Jewish People.

And there are other reasons too, including the fact that the Jewish People’s rain, which Jews pray for from their homes all over the world, only falls in Israel!

Praying for rain

 

Making Aliyah

 

The “Birkat”

 

No more Jewish refugees

All of the Land of Israel is the warehouse of Jewish memory .That is why I am so mishuggene about Jews visiting here. Because you can’t be a Jew today without a tie to the Land of Israel. This is where the memory of our people resides. There are many reasons why the State of Israel is important. One is this: only sixty years ago, the noun that most frequently went with the adjective Jewish, was ‘refugee.’ Jewish refugee. The greatness of the State of Israel, irrespective of the mess we are in, is that it has removed the phrase Jewish refugee from the language of the world. This is important to every Jew. You don’t come to Israel just to take a tour of another country. You come to Eretz Yisrael to tour your soul, and you come here to meet the place that turned your family from being a family of refugees into a family that will never again have a refugee. You cannot remain a people today, without a state in which your people are sovereign.

Questions to think about

What are the implications of sovereignty over the Jewish people and individual Jews – both on those who live in Israel and those who do not?
What is your responsibility for Israel-Diaspora relations? To humanity? To the Jewish people in particular, to other nations and countries in general? To humanity?

 

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