One of the wonderful benefits that comes along with making aliyah and moving to Israel is free ulpan, where we learn to speak Hebrew with other new immigrants. Last Chanukah we had a party for the entire school with a few hundred students.
The organizers asked one person from each country to say where they had immigrated from as they lit a flame. There must have been 40 people from different countries up in front of the room on that day. There were olim (the word used for those who made aliyah and moved to Israel) from everywhere from Argentina to Australia, from Belarus to Belgium, from Canada to Columbia, from Ethiopia to Estonia, from Georgia to Germany, from Italy to Ireland, from Hungary to Honduras and from Ukraine (a lot from Ukraine) to Uruguay.
Each one stood up, announcing where they arrived from, and kindled a candle of hope, a flame of the future. Nobody could hold back the tears as the significance wasn’t lost on any of us. We all knew that we weren’t just witnessing but rather that we were participating in the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy of the return of the Jewish people to the land of our patriarchs and matriarchs.
“Then, the Lord, your God, will bring back your exiles, and He will have mercy upon you. He will once again gather you from all the nations, where the Lord, your God, had dispersed you. Even if your exiles are at the end of the heavens, the Lord, your God, will gather you from there, and He will take you from there. And the Lord, your God, will bring you to the land which your forefathers possessed, and you will take possession of it, and He will do good to you, and He will make you more numerous than your forefathers.” (Deuteronomy 30:3)
From the time that the Romans sacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile until the late 19th century, the Jewish population in Israel hovered around6,000 individuals. The remainder of world Jewry found themselves in the lands of the Diaspora.
The first wave of Aliyah began in 1881 and by 1917, with the pronouncement of the historic Balfour Declaration, where Great Britain declared the right of the Jewish people to rebuild in their historic homeland, there were a mere 60,000 Jews dwelling here.
In 1947, just before Israel declared its independence, creating a sovereign Jewish state for the first time in 1900 years, there were 600,000 Jews who called Israel home.
In the first two years of her existence, the State of Israel absorbed another 600,000 Jews, doubling its population in two years. (To put this in perspective, this would be like the United States absorbing 330 million new citizens in two years, the same number of its current population).
By her 62nd birthday in 2010, the Jewish population in Israel reached 6,000,000 and today it stands at 7,145,000. Researchers estimate that by 2050 more than half the world’s Jewish population will reside in Israel and that number will continue to increase.
If this isn’t the Biblical prophecy of the Ingathering of the Exiles, I don’t know what else to call it.
But to me, equally amazing as the return of the “children to their mother” is the fact that for all those 1900 years in exile, the Jewish people never gave up their identity as being Jews in exile awaiting their return to the home.
Let me try to explain this with an analogy.
Imagine we gathered the entire population of Switzerland onto passenger planes and scattered them all across the globe. A million were dropped in Russia and another million throughout Europe. A few hundred thousand were released in South America and half a million throughout Asia. This continued until the entire Swiss population was spread across the “four corners of the earth.”
Then a research crew was dispatched to go and interview these exiles and to ask them the simple question: “Who are you? What is your national identity?”
It is reasonable to belief that most of these deportees would respond that they are Swiss citizens, currently in exile and eagerly awaiting their return to their homeland.
Skip ahead a generation and interview their children who have now settled in their new countries, learned the language and integrated into the culture. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that a significant portion of them may answer that they citizens of their new countries as their identity has begun to shift?
Now let’s jump ahead ten or even twenty generations. How many of the descendants of these Swiss exiles would we expect to self-identify as Swiss citizens in exile? And what about 1900 years later? The answer to that is clear – ZERO.
However, if you were to approach a Jew at just about any time in history and in any location throughout the Diaspora and ask them the question, “Who are you? What is your national identity?” The answer would have been a resounding, “I am a member of the Jewish nation, currently in exile and eagerly awaiting our return to our homeland.”
This defies all comprehension. How can we possibly understand how this could be? How did the Jewish people never lose their national identity as almost two millennia transpired? And then how did it happen that after that amount of time, the unimageable actually occurred and the Jewish people returned home?
To me the answer became crystal clear as I sat in that Chanukah celebration in our ulpan. The Jewish people were promised in the Torah that although we would expelled from our land and that we would have to experience the horrors of almost 2000 years in exile, God would never forsake us in the lands of our dispersion. And we would never forgo our yearning and aspiration of our inevitable eventual return.
And as I sat there watching these olim from across the globe igniting their light here in Jerusalem, I wept because I knew that by the grace of God we have been able to be part of the fulfillment of this 3300 year-old prophecy.
