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Quotes About Aliyah |
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| "I choose to be a Jew, that is to participate in the collective experience of my ancestors and fellow Jews down the ages. Albeit a selective participation: I do not approve of everything they approved of, nor am I prepared to continue obediently living the kind of life that they lived. As a Jew, I do not want to live among strangers who see in me some kind of symbol or stereotype, but in a State of Jews."
Deborah Dayan
(halutz-pioneer) 1914 |
"Zionism is nothing more - but also nothing less - than the Jewish people's sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name. It is also the instrument whereby the Jewish nation seeks an authentic fulfillment of itself."
Abba Eban
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"All I can really say is: what there is for you in Israel is the experience of being here, of being part of a Jewish people living in its own land, building its own society, determining its own fate-and desperately needing you, because that fate will be determined among other things, by whether you are here or not. Is that too little for you? It seems to me a lot."
Hillel Halkin, "Letters to an American Friend," 1977 |
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"So..I ask the person who looks at someone like me with a raised eyebrow, who thinks that life is so hard and horrible and 'not for them' over here, If life is so hard and horrible, then why do I feel as though I'm sitting on top of the world?"
Rashi Rosenzweig, Ra'anana
new immigrant |
"The road to national rebirth is a hard one, but there is no other.
"That cosmic element [in nationality] ...is the mainspring of a people's vitality and creativity, of its spiritual and cultural values."
A. D. (Aaron David) Gordon, 1920 |
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Eretz Israel is not something apart from the soul of the Jewish people, it is no mere national possession, serving as a means of unifying our people and buttressing its material or even spiritual survival. Eretz Israel is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being."
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook 1920 |
"We are a privileged generation, witness to a moment which will not soon come again, and called to work which we alone can perform. The very least we can do is honestly face the question which the facts so urgently pose for us."
Professor Arnold Eisen (from 'To Keep the Blessing'), recent immigrant and Stanford University Professor of Religious Studies |
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"...I regard the State of Israel as a great and terrible blessing. What does one do, as a Jew, in the face of such a blessing? At the very least, if Jewishness is at the center of one's life, one takes it with ultimate personal seriousness. One asks - more than once, at more than one stage of life - whether one should not be living there. Not out of guilt (though this guilt would not be unhealthy), nor out of obligation (though I feel a certain obligation), nor because aliyah is necessary to become a better Jew (it is not). One goes, if one so decides, because one cannot physically sit by and let other people blow it."
Professor Arnold Eisen from "Keep the Blessing" |
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