Returning

We’re now in the month of Elul, when Jews begin the teshuvah process. Teshuvah means “return” to God: repentance. We spend Elul in moral contemplation as we prepare for the Yamim Nora’im / Days of Awe beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur. (Our penitential season continues through Sukkot.)

There’s also physical return. Martha and I have just returned from a nearly month-long stay in America, where she finished her aliyah process and then took an El Al flight back to Israel and became an Israeli citizen.

I went through the same process four-and-a-half years ago. At that time, in the airport here another traveler smiled at me and said, “Welcome home.” Even Jews who have never stepped foot in Israel before but follow through on aliyah are returning home.

One of my reasons for making aliyah was my certainty, as I stated in my blogpost “Freedom” (April 29, 2025), that, “[t]o live my Jewish democratic values, I could no longer just sit on the sidelines and complain about Israel’s nosedive into authoritarianism but had to give myself a voice in the country’s representative decision-making process.”

I have no respect for the legion of well-paid liberal Jewish pundits who badmouth Israel while professing concern for it. Let them make aliyah so that they can vote and participate in the political debate here; otherwise, they should hold their tongues.

Judaism’s message about teshuvah (in the moral sense) involves insistence on the need to gauge, monitor and demonstrate one’s own sincerity as a function of active commitment to right a wrong. Our Rabbis teach that teshuvah involves two steps, whose moral dimension depends on its physical dimension: Being good requires doing good.

The first step is to confess your offense to the person you’ve wronged. The second step is to act on your acknowledgment of wrongdoing by repairing the harm you’ve done. This principle has a corresponding application relevant to anybody judging another’s conduct.

Not only must a guilty party follow admission of guilt with deeds of atonement; an accuser should follow condemnation with an outline of practical, concrete steps the offender has to take to make amends. The methodology applies to tochechah/criticism of Israel.

Does Israel have an obligation to own up to its shortcomings and remedy their ill effects? Undoubtedly.

It’s one thing, though, to admit your own mistakes but quite another to be subjected to someone else’s rebuke for wrongdoing that person claims you’re to blame for. Inability or refusal to offer a concrete proposal for repair, or future prevention, of that injury places the veracity of the allegation itself in doubt.

For example, those who accuse Israel, in its Gaza war, of deliberately killing innocent people - i.e., murdering them - never offered Israel an alternative, less violent mode of self-defense against a genocidal enemy that uses innocent people as human shields.

Instead, the chorus of armchair critics are content to castigate and lecture; those self-appointed moral authorities remain confident in the supreme virtue of their position but - sitting on the sidelines at a safe distance from the zone of conflict - without lifting a finger to help and at no risk to themselves personally. Without skin in the game, they are a sanctimonious fraud.

Teshuvah in the moral sense is meaningless unless effected through teshuvah in the physical sense.

Jews who want to help right the wrongs that afflict Israel - you can do something to make a difference: You can make aliyah.

By making aliyah, you become part of the Jewish body politic and help shape its teshuvah.

Let me know if you want to discuss the practical implications of how to go about doing it.

I urge you to think seriously about this!