Reflections from Rabbi Ellis

I met yesterday with a couple who first showed up in Poland in March 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are refugees from the war, each with their own unique story and Jewish history. They have been active in the Ukraine refugee community and the Jewish community in Warsaw, playing an active role in connecting and activating the two of them. We spoke mostly about their future, and where they should seek it. 

The woman, I will call her Sarah, said that her whole childhood everyone around her spoke only about Europe. Everyone she knew, everyone, was doing all they could to secure themselves a ticket out of Ukraine, she was the only person amongst her friends who had found a program of study outside or Ukraine before the war. Now that she had the chance to truly experience Europe she wasn’t rushing back to Ukraine, but she certainly didn’t find here what she had been promised.

Her boyfriend, I will call him Avraham, is a Zionist, he has tried to live in Israel before and part of him wants to try again. He was part of the initial effort to help absorb the tens of thousands of new immigrants in Israel as a result of the war in Ukraine. At one meeting the representative from the Ministry of Labor told him that Israel was not interested in the highly skilled worker from Ukraine but rather people to serve as waiters, lifeguards and gardeners. “I lost almost all of my Zionism when I heard that.” 

I started thinking about the Parsha, what I am supposed to learn from it to tell them now and what I can learn about it from them. Avraham wants to go to Israel but at the same time feels that all doors there are closed to him, Sarah spent her whole life pursuing a promised land that was not in the end what it was promised to be. We spoke about many options and they asked me about moving to Israel, does it have to be a priority for them? Yes of course Israel has to be the priority of every Jew. It is our home, it is the greatest physical gift that G!d ever gave and he gave it to us. We can never lose sight of that and never undermine its value.

My discussion with Avraham and Sarah encapsulated the two greatest challenges that the spies and everyone in our generation faces regarding Israel. It won’t be as perfect as we dreamed and there I will just be a nobody. These are two truths that remain and that every person who makes Aliyah has to contend with. The answer that G!d gives in our Parsha though is the ultimate source of comfort for all of us who long for Israel. Even if you aren’t able to make it, your children will. The spies were not wrong when they feared going into land Israel, but their fear came from the wrong place. The ultimate question we need to ask ourselves is not whether or not Israel will be the place that I always thought it should be, rather whether or not we have the resolve to make it the place that it needs to be for all of the Children of Israel.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis