This is a beautiful post from Shimshonit about making aliyah:
My
husband and I met at a one-year program in Israel in our late 20s. He
had come to continue his Jewish studies and involvement that had begun
in graduate school a few years before. I had come, after a lifetime in
a mixed-married household with little or no Judaism, to begin mine. It
was my first visit to the country and his second. While neither of us
had grown up in Zionist homes, we were both deeply affected by the
country, and our time here solidified our Jewish identities and
observance.
But
it was not yet time to think about aliyah. We were not ready to put
that much physical distance between ourselves and our families, nor to
contend with the realities of the language, culture shock, the
rabbinate (both for my necessary halachic conversion and for our
marriage), and finding a community into which to integrate. We were
still new to Orthodox Judaism and chose to marry and settle in the U.S.
for the foreseeable future.
And
yet throughout our marriage, we found ourselves having The Conversation
every six months to a year. What about Israel? Is it time yet? Should
we think about it? In the first year of our marriage, we took a trip to
Israel to visit friends and the country again. The night we were due to
leave, we were both in tears—I while packing and he while prowling the
aisles of the grocery store buying nosh for the plane trip. This visit,
while a great delight to us, drove home the reality that once we began
a family and were paying for day school and college tuition, it was
likely that we would not be able to visit Israel again until the
children were out of the house and financially independent.
Finally,
after the birth of our third child, we heard a Bat Kol (voice from
heaven). It wasn't the supernatural kind one imagines from the Torah;
it was actually embedded in a d'var Torah given by a friend at Kol
Nidrei. In his discussion of the expression timhon levav (confusion of
the heart) our friend interpreted the phrase to mean "refraining from
doing that which you know is right, because it's easier to stick with
the status quo." On our walk home that night, we had The Conversation
again, and this time decided that it was time to do a little research.
(To our relief, Nefesh B'Nefesh had been invented, and this made the whole process much easier for us.)
Within a year, we were on a plane to Israel (plus three kids, three car seats, three carry-ons, and ten boxes of our stuff).
We've
been here over two years now (two years in Beit Shemesh, four months in
Efrat). Life is not significantly different in the day-to-day sense: my
husband still works, I still run the household, the kids go to school
and gan and their afternoon activities. We still have Shabbat, hosting
or guesting in other people's homes. But here are some crucial
differences we have noted in our lives here:
1) The sun shines nearly every day. (Couldn't say that of New England, much as we loved it.)
2)
We spend more time together as a family. (Like many people in our
neighborhood, my husband works from home and has flexible hours.)
3) The kids know more about Hebrew and Judaism by age 5 than either of us did at 25.
4) We're never hard-up for a kosher place to eat out.
5) We never have to wonder when our next trip to Israel will be.
In
America, we sometimes feared we'd seem rather boring if we went on too
long in conversation about Israel. Here it's on everyone's mind and
lips. We can influence Israel's policies directly by being able to vote
here. And we feel as though living here, we are helping to make history
(rather than watching it be made). We still have good days, bad days,
and days in between, but at the end of each one, none of us would
rather be anywhere else.