People always ask that as if it’s so simple to pack up a family and cross the earth when you have sold your home and moved all your belongings to a country in Asia. We are from America, not the UK. It’s much further away and presents obstacles, if only psychological. It’s not as easy for one of us to zip over there and set something up and then fly back again. That would be much easier from the UK. We had nobody to help us set up again, nowhere to stay if we landed. And you need all adults to agree. Sometimes, it takes longer for one of them to come around.
What happens is that you keep trying to make it work until it's too late to leave. You hope that maybe by next year you'll be competent in Hebrew. But it doesn't happen. You hope that next year everybody will make friends. That you'll find the right school. That you'll get a good job. That you'll start to enjoy the Israeli style. That it will start to feel like home. But it doesn't happen. All the attempts to make it work only tied you up. The people who gave up more quickly and left fared better in the long run. You stayed and tried and tried again, and now you fear the effects of uprooting your children again even though they aren't prospering here and may even be struggling.
All of this is worsened significantly when you are surrounded by people who say that you can never leave. They tell you that it’s osur to criticize Israeli society, so you walk around in a daze not facing the truth. The problem is your attitude, they’ll say, never the place. How can Eretz Yisroel ever be the wrong place for a Jew they'll say as if it were the right place when the Canaanim were here or when the Northern Kingdom was worshipping idols. And a baal teshuvah has so much self-doubt, has been told not to trust himself a thousand times, and has already accustomed himself to living with cognitive dissonance and with a life that's been turned upside down.
They assure you that the first year is difficult, the second year is difficult. You must stay. It will become wonderful. Don’t even consider leaving. I learned later that nearly all of those people had family here, much more money than we have, and oftentimes knew Hebrew from a parent or day school. Also, their main avenue of religious consciousness is living in Israel. I’m not like that. I came because I was led to believe Israel has a better future for children.
One rabbi told me, “Only losers leave.” Others said, “America is collapsing. You are walking into a death trap.” They make you feel guilty. "You only miss your luxuries," they will say as if I ever lived in luxury. Aliyah propaganda is as relentless as Zionist propaganda.
Generally people who move here are obsessed with aliyah. That’s why they moved here. And they are dishonest about the topic like any fanatics. They presented the main challenge as children learning Hebrew, not the 100 other things that are a bigger problem when children get older. The school bullying isn’t in gan. Tyrannical teachers aren’t in gan. Yeshivas that force all the boys to study Gemara from 8 AM until 10 PM aren't in gan. All that happened as they got older.
I see aliyah pushing as a reprehensible act. People want to satisfy their own ideological urges at the expense of others. There’s a reason that the halacha doesn’t require living in Israel. When Rav Moshe Feinstein tells you that you are not obligated to live in Israel, nobody should tell you that you must. It's such a chutzpah. The same people who say to trust rabbanim question the posek hador.
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