notaplaceofhonour
“Jews shouldn’t live in Israel because Jews were meant to be wanderers”
You can’t seriously be suggesting Yishuv Eretz Yisrael (a blessing/commandment in the Torah) goes against Judaism and that Judaism instead requires Jews to be The Wandering Jew (a Christian antisemitic trope)…
“Living in exile is a Jewish Value™️ because it allows us to empathize with other dispossessed and oppressed people”
As does being homeless or being raped or having your family members killed or any number of traumas. Doesn’t mean you should refuse to live in a house or that you should actively seek out situations that give you and your family more traumatic, disempowered experiences.
If you want to believe exile was G-d’s plan and we were meant to experience it to better identify with other people, okay I guess. But we have that experience now. We’re good. We can go home now.
Jews lived in exile in Egypt for 200 years.
In Assyria for another 200 (counting Babylon conquering Assyria and the Edict of Cyrus as a return).
In Babylon for 70.
Even if you’re going to believe the expulsions under the Romans were divine punishment of some kind, and not simply a senseless act of hatred and oppression by our oppressors, there’s no way whatever sentence that was hasn’t been served.
It’s been nearly two thousand years. No other previous exile lasted nearly that long.
If G-d wanted to prevent the return of millions of Jews to the Land of Israel they would have already. Instead, nearly half of our people has already returned.
The exile is over. You’re allowed to return.
indecisiveavocado
I saw a really interesting argument somewhere, in reply to the “G-d created the Shoah to punish Jews for Zionism!” argument. And to be clear, I don’t think it makes to say G-d created the Shoah for anything. That exonerates the Nazis. The Shoah happened because people wanted to kill Jews. People wanted to kill Jews because of two millennia of antisemitism. The only thing that changed with the Shoah is that they got more efficient at it, more modern (i am still not over the fact auschwitz had a parking lot.)
And the argument was that it was the opposite. That if the Shoah was meant to teach us anything (again: I don’t think it was, but this was in response to a claim that presupposes that the Shoah was done by G-d for a purpose), it was to teach us to be more Zionist and less meek. Those traditionalist Jews who refused to go with the kibbutzniks to Eretz Yisrael? by and large, they were the ones who were killed. those hyper-modern Jews who rejected all semblance of Judaism? by and large, also killed. those Jews who made aliyah? by and large, they survived.
Our G-d is, by and large, fairly rational. The things that are supposed to be precepts of faith are laid out in the Torah. Everything else can be reasoned from, learned from. The rational conclusion from the Shoah is not to stay in Europe. If G-d wished for us to stay in Europe, G-d should either not have given us the intellect to draw such conclusions, or, possibly, made it a mitzvah to live beside the murderers and turn the other cheek even as they kill you. But G-d didn’t do that. We have the Torah; it’s up to us to interpret it, using logic and reason, and logic and reason, to me and many other Jews, suggests that the rational response to two millennia of antisemitism is, in fact, a Jewish state.
I don’t remember who made it or where, but I just find that an interesting thought.
