The choice we're not making
I’m not writing this to judge anyone. I’m writing this because it’s my truth, and because I think we need to have the uncomfortable conversation we’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’ll make you angry. Maybe it’ll make you defensive, and that’s ok. This isn’t about questioning your choices or your commitment to being Jewish. It’s about asking ourselves honestly: Where do we really belong? And what does it mean that we have the answer but we’re choosing to ignore it?
Picture a kid at a Shabbat table asking his father why they don’t live in Israel.
The father stumbles through an answer about careers, schools, family. The kid nods. The conversation ends. And 2,000 years of Jewish longing gets filed away as nostalgia from a different era.
But here’s the thing; our great grandparents didn’t get to choose. They cried and often died for the chance to live as Jews in their own land.
They faced east three times a day and prayed for what they knew they would probably never see. Most of them died in European cities and Polish shtetls, their greatest dream unfulfilled. The lucky ones made it out. The rest became ash.
And now we have what they died wanting. We have the thing that kept Jews alive through every exile, every pogrom, every expulsion. We have the one place on earth where a Jew doesn’t need permission to exist. And many of us treat it like a nice place to visit.
Living outside Israel when you could live inside it isn’t just a practical choice about weather and career opportunities. It’s choosing to be Jew-ish instead of Jewish. Because there’s only one place where a Jew can really breathe all the way in, and that’s in the land that God gave you.
Yes, you.
Not your ancestors.
You.
Today.
When Israel becomes only a vacation spot, a summer trip, a bar mitzvah tour, a birthright experience, you’re taking the place our ancestors prayed towards through pogroms and cattle cars and reducing it to “a nice place to visit."
You’re making peace with exile when exile is supposed to be unbearable.
Choosing comfort over covenant.
And here’s what makes this whole thing truly insane: our enemies believe in our land more than we do!
Think about that for a second. “Palestinians" who’ve never set foot in Haifa will blow themselves up for a “right of return" to a land their great grandparents left voluntarily in 1948.
They’ll strap bombs to their children. They’ll send teenagers into the streets with rocks and knives. They’ll reject state after state, peace deal after peace deal, because anything less than all of it is surrender.
They’ve built an entire identity around land they don’t have, creating a mythology of displacement that justifies endless war. And it works. They teach their kids that martyrdom is glory. That dying for “Palestine" is the highest calling. That no sacrifice is too great for the cause of return.
Meanwhile, Jews around the world whose deed to the land is written in every prayer book (and even the Quran), whose Temple stood on that ground, whose DNA literally traces back to those hills sit in houses in New York, Palm Beach and Scarsdale saying “nah, I’m good with my two-car garage. I’ll come visit though, it’s beautiful."
Our enemies are willing to die for a lie and we won’t even inconvenience ourselves for the truth.
Can’t you see how insane that is?!
You’ve got people in Gaza who’ve never seen the inside of a synagogue more committed to Jewish land than Jews with mezuzahs on their doors. Our enemies believe in our inheritance more than many of us do. They’re teaching their kids that dying for it is glory. We’re teaching ours that visiting once every few years is enough.
By living this way, we’re teaching the next generation something devastating: that what kept Jews alive for over 2,000 years was wrong. The refusal to accept that Galut is home - wrong. The insistence that exile is temporary - wrong. The certainty that one day we’d return - wrong. The prayer “Next year in Jerusalem" - just something we say but don’t mean. We’re teaching them that their great grandparents were wrong to long for it. That the covenant is negotiable. That settling is fine.
This isn’t about judging anyone’s personal choices or questioning anyone’s Jewish identity. Plenty of Jews have legitimate reasons for living in the diaspora, and Jewish life outside Israel has produced incredible things. But we need to be honest about what we’re choosing and what we’re giving up. When you make living outside Israel the permanent default rather than a temporary necessity, when you stop feeling the tension of galut, when Israel becomes just another country you like to visit, you’re not continuing the Jewish story. You’re quietly ending it.
The real tragedy isn’t what happens to us. It’s what happens to our children, and their children.
So how do we justify explaining to our children that the land their great grandparents prayed toward for 2,000 years is now just a vacation destination? How do we tell them that what our ancestors died wanting isn’t actually that important? How do we reconcile the fact that we have the choice they never had, and we’re choosing to pass? We can’t. Not really.
We can rationalize it with talk of careers and schools and family obligations. We can point to the Jewish institutions we’ve built in America, the communities we’ve created, the lives we’ve established. But at the end of the day, we’re choosing comfort over calling. We’re making peace with exile. We’re teaching our kids that 2,000 years of Jewish longing was just waiting for better brunch options in Brooklyn.
That’s not just settling. That’s losing while holding the trophy, forfeiting a 2,000 year long game in the fourth quarter when you’re up by twenty. And once you make peace with that, once you teach your kids that Galut is actually ok, it’s over. That thread doesn’t get picked back up. The chain breaks. The thing that kept Jews Jewish for two millennia, the absolute certainty that we belong somewhere else, disappears in a single generation.
Your great grandparents died dreaming of what you won’t even drive to the airport for. Think about that.
Next year in Jerusalem, maybe.