Aliyah — Choosing to Go
A life decision • Going up • What it costs and what it gives
Ask them to list everything they would have to leave behind to move to another country tomorrow. Let the list get long and specific — friends, a bedroom, a language they can joke in.
Children wonder and discover; you facilitate more than you lecture.
- What would you have to leave behind?
- Why is the word for moving there “going up”?
- Who gets to decide where home is?
This year is the shape of a Jewish life, and aliyah belongs in it beside conversion and marriage: a decision that reorganises everything after it. The Hebrew is the lesson — aliyah means going UP, the same word used for being called up to the Torah. Going is described as ascent. Be careful with that: it is the tradition's own language and it is also a value judgement about everybody who stays, which is most of the Jews in the world, including everybody in this room.
- Aliyah — going up; moving to Israel
- Oleh / olah — one who goes up
- Yordim — those who go down, the word for Israelis who leave
- “Is it better to live there?”
- Half the Jews in the world live in Israel and half do not, and both are complete Jewish lives. The Hebrew calls going there “going up,” and Israelis have a word for leaving that means “going down” — worth noticing that a language can carry an opinion.
- Students can explain aliyah as a life decision alongside the year's other passages.
- Students can name real reasons people go and real reasons people stay.
- Students can hold that both choices are whole Jewish lives.
Some students have family who made aliyah and some have family who left Israel. Neither is a better Jew and the vocabulary in this lesson quietly suggests otherwise, so say so out loud.
Folktale. Operation Solomon (1991) — fourteen thousand Ethiopian Jews flown to Israel in thirty-six hours.
Changemaker. Yityish Titi Aynaw — walked out of Ethiopia as a small child, arrived speaking no Hebrew, and years later became the first Ethiopian-Israeli crowned Miss Israel — then used it to argue publicly about racism in the country that had taken her in.
I wonder whether a word can carry an opinion without anybody noticing?
“We talked about aliyah as a life decision. Try at home: does anyone in our family's story have a moving-country decision in it?”