Moving to the secular state of israel (SSOI) - Not Kedai for most people

  I just returned from a Yom HaZicharon presentation with my Ulpan class. It was my first and I went with an open mind as I hadn't had breakfast or lunch and lacked the strength to project my own perspective onto it unless really provoked. Warning, these are not the kind of reflections you may be expecting. A number of things struck me during the 45 minute ceremony which was held at a national religious school and conducted mostly by school boys. The first was how all the gestures seemed borrowed from somewhere else. The plethora of flags, the marching, the solder with the torch, the national anthem. It was all European/American military except for the national anthem not mentioning God. There was even an American military band marching song which very well could have been written by John Phillip Sousa. The second thing was how little of it was religious considering that the school was National Religious and this was an event to commemorate the dead. We Jews are specialists in...

Each person must decide for him or herself, but one should go with eyes open. There are aliyah salespeople who put out a lot of propaganda, making it seem that everyone should and must move to Israel, that it's some kind of Jewish paradise. To me, this is reprehensible. There are pluses and minuses to living here, like all places. Be informed. Some people prosper here, some get ruined. Some reasons not to move here:  1. The draft. I know that many Americans and British glamorize/idolize the Israel military, but the reality is that the 3 years of military servitude is a kind of hell for many people. I have spoken to numerous Israelis who have told me that they never recovered from the experience. Imagine an angry Israeli bus driver howling at you on a bus that you can't leave for 2 years and 7 months or whatever the ridiculously long military servitude is these days. They take young impressionable people and own them for that entire time. The indoctrination is intense when peopl...