All Aliyah pushers are loathsome, but there are different levels. The least loathsome, but still wrong in what they are doing, are the Israelis who have never been to chutz. They meet chutznicks in Israel and lay on them some pompous words about how everyone must live in Israel. They are inarticulate. They grunt mostly. Since they don't know the difference between ssoi and chutz we give them a little bit of a pass. But you can't tell somebody to live where you have always lived, taking for granted that you speak the language, have family there, may have property, and are used to the culture.
Next up in loathsomeness are chutznicks who have never lived in ssoi who tell their neighbors to move there. It is not proper to tell people to move to a place that you have not experienced firsthand. Two months on a kibbutz doesn't count. A year in an Anglo yeshiva doesn't count.
Worse than them are rabbis who do this to their congregations, who abuse their authority. Rabbi Hershel Schachter encourages American rabbis to nudge their congregations. He also has never lived in Israel. He thinks he knows the place because he flies to ssoi several times a year, gets picked up at the airport, is fed the best meals that his hosts can offer, (he might even stay with family), gets driven around town, and makes speeches to anglos for a fee. That is not living in Israel. He knows little about the place. The community rabbis who nudge their congregations are wrong in doing so even if RHS instructs them to. The ones who pressure them or guilt them are just hypocrites.
Worse still are the people who have lived there. So what are they doing in America or England? But worse still, they know how vast the difference is between ssoi and chutz. They know about the lack of derech eretz in israel, the difficulty of earning a living, the hatred that chilonim have for religious people, the tension between even Dati Leumi and Charedim, the high prices of apartments, the low salaries. If they did servitude in the army, they know what that does to the psyche and maybe even the limbs as we learned this year.
Worse still are the Anglos who retired in israel. They sold their million dollar house after having full careers as rabbis or businessmen or doctors and they are so proud that they live in israel now, and they paint fantasies for chutzniks to move there. But they don't live in israel. They live in chutz bank accounts.
Worse still are the ones who pressure or guilt, and worse still are the ones who spin a tale that living in israel as an obligation. And the rabbis who do all this are even worse.
But the worst of all are those who retired in israel and pressure innocent baalei teshuvah to move there. There's a 'rabbi' who teaches at a yeshiva for BTs who does this. He was educated in America and had a full career there and moved to israel allegedly with more than a million dollars in his pocket. And he guilts baalei teshuvah to move there. This is the among the most loathsome of the aliyah pushing. He says you need a good excuse not to live there and Reb Moshe's pesak that living in Israel is only a kiyum mitzvah is schveir, meaning forced. That's some chutzpah. BTs can't parse through all that. They hear it as an obligation to move there.
Worse, he was raised Modern Orthodox and espouses a MO philosophy but dresses like Yeshiva man. It's outrageous.
All of these people must cease and desist. Giving bad advice is a lav in the Torah, and forcing bad advice on innocent people is like literarily putting a stumbling block before a blind man. Rabbi Soloveitchik says that exact act is not included in the listing of acts of lifnei ever because it's so grotesque that we assume a Jew wouldn't do something like that. It doesn't have to be said. But people who push aliyah on innocent people are pretty much literally putting a stumbling block before blind people. Actually it's worse because the person doesn't just fall down. His entire life is destroyed.
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