I’ve heard it all. Excuses, excuses, excuses. But in fact, it is your, “I’ll make aliyah only under MY conditions… not G-d’s.” THAT is what it comes down to. Every Jew without exception should be yearning to come home.

I often hear a lot of excuses from our brothers and sisters in the Western Exile how they don't want to come to Israel because of X, Y or Z.

Here are just a few of the examples I have been given by Jews who make excuses why they can’t or won’t make aliyah:

1. The government is not to their liking.
2. They won’t come until there is peace.
3. They don’t believe they are obligated to live here until the Moshiach comes.[1]
4. They won’t come unless they know they have a job in their field waiting for them.
5. Their kids are too old.
6. Their kids are too young.
7. They’re waiting until they retire.
8. They’re waiting until they are dead and need to be buried.
9. Their furniture won’t fit in these small apartments. Honest to goodness, this was an excuse. One American woman looked at my parent’s dining room when they were here touring Jerusalem on a pilot trip and the woman said, “I can’t make aliyah, I see that my dining room table would never fit into an Israeli apartment that I can afford”.
10. I have old sick parents or I am divorced and I can’t take my kids with me.

Of the above 10 reasons why most Jews don’t make aliyah today… only number ten has any merit at all. I personally sympathize with divorcees that want to be in their children's lives and cannot do so if they are forced to leave them in the Old Country. I also understand how someone who feels they cannot come because they are caring for their elderly parent who cannot be moved or travel such a long distance. However, even these two excuses can be argued.

The fact is, that most of our Jewish brothers and sisters who don’t want to make aliyah is because they are prisoners. They are prisoners of their fear and prisoners of the golden cages they have built for themselves. They are attached to their materialistic life styles and cannot escape. They THINK that they are free, but they are slaves. Slaves to the American dream, wealth, success, materialism, and their THINGS. Nice house, nice car(s) and nice shopping. They are living in affluence and they can’t extricate themselves.[2]

We KNOW this to be true. I will prove this to you right now.

• Anti-Semitism,
• Their host country’s economic situation is very bad and it is better in Israel.

When we look and see why we had aliyah from the Soviet Union back in the 1970’s, it was because they were living under an anti-Semitic and Communist regime. A Jew could not practice Judaism there under the anti-Semitic USSR, they couldn't get jobs they deserved because they were Jewish, and so they applied to emigrate and come to Israel (or the USA).

The largest Jewish population in the Exile is in the USA, but they don’t want to come for the ten reasons listed above. They are too comfortable. Most Jews in the USA are pretty much removed from Torah.[3] They are Jews who belong to a Conservative or Reform synagogue and do not know their own mother tongue - Hebrew. Most have never learned Torah and many want to shrug off the ‘burden’ of being a Jew. I want to address the religious Jews who should know better and should want better.

Jews are weighted down like a heavy bird in the golden cages of the Exile.[4]

We KNOW that G-d gave us this land as our homeland.[5]

We KNOW that the future of the Jewish People is going to be here, in Israel, and not in New York, Monsey, Los Angeles or London etc.

We KNOW that we cannot do all the mitzvos unless we are living in Israel.[6]

We KNOW that we were punished in the desert because of the spies who rejected the land of Israel.[7]

We KNOW that G-d wants us to live here and that even today, He is gathering us from the four corners of the earth in line with what our prophets predicted.[8]

We KNOW that if anti-Semitism rose to a level that was uncomfortable and too dangerous for Jews in the USA, they would leave America. And we KNOW that if the economy in America would crash, or that things would be very bad, that these same Jews who are crying out the above ‘ten excuses not to make aliyah’, would all be converging on the aliyah offices in America and trying to get here. If you are not yearning for Israel, there is something FUNDAMENTALLY wrong with your Judaism.