Why don’t we all just go?

Why don’t we all just go? Not a few hundred idealists or retirees, not the ones between jobs or on gap year visas, but all of us—American Jews, nearly half the world’s Jewish population. Pack up, say thank you to America for the chapter it gave us, and start anew on the shores of the Mediterranean. I can already hear the chorus of objections: the economy, the housing shortage, Israel needs the Diaspora, Israel doesn’t like non-Orthodox Jews. Maybe. But what if?

Maybe the economy can’t handle it. But what if we’re exactly what the economy needs? What if every doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, teacher, and craftsman who ever built something here decided to build there? What if Israel’s GDP became the collective Jewish project—an economy infused with purpose, not just profit? We’ve been exporting Jewish talent for centuries. What happens if, for once, we bring it home?

Maybe the housing market couldn’t absorb it. But what if we built? Jews have always built—synagogues, schools, settlements, cities. The early chalutzim drained swamps and raised towns from dust with less equipment than most of us have in our garages. We complain about real estate while living on the memory of people who literally invented it.

Maybe Israel needs the Diaspora. But what if that need is overstated—or outdated? Israel doesn’t need absentee advocates; it needs neighbors, colleagues, parents, and dreamers who show up. If the Diaspora’s job is to be Israel’s lobby, then let’s send the most passionate advocates to Washington and Brussels—and let the rest of us live where the Jewish story is actually being written.

Maybe Israel doesn’t like non-Orthodox Jews. But what if that’s only because not enough of them are there? Imagine a million Reform and Conservative Jews making aliyah over a decade—teachers, rabbis, artists, tech workers, lawyers—voting, serving, building. That’s not a complaint; that’s a constituency. Culture changes when people arrive with conviction. The Knesset would change. The schools would change. The tone of Jewish life itself would change.

Maybe it’s too complicated. But what if complication is the price of meaning? We’ve built lives in a country where Jewish safety and prosperity have been unmatched—but where Jewish purpose has quietly faded. America made us comfortable. Israel forces us to decide who we really are. Maybe that tension isn’t a burden; maybe it’s the spark that keeps a people alive.

Maybe the timing is bad. But what if it’s never been better? The world is tilting toward nationalism, heritage, and civilizational identity. Everyone else is rediscovering their roots—their languages, their songs, their land. Why are we the one people afraid to fully reclaim ours?

Maybe we don’t all belong there. But what if belonging isn’t something that happens to you—what if it’s something you build? What if our place in Israel’s story isn’t pre-written but waiting to be written? Every aliyah since Abraham’s first has been a risk, and every one has redrawn the map of Jewish destiny.

Maybe this is naïve. But what if it’s the most realistic dream we’ve got? We’re living through a century when Jewish safety, even in democracies, is again becoming conditional. The old strategies—lobbying, litigation, coalitions—may keep us tolerated, but not secure. At some point, even the most rational people must admit that history has been whispering the same advice for two thousand years: Go home.

Imagine what it would look like if we did. The American Jewish community wouldn’t disappear; it would transform. Those who stay would become ambassadors, advocates, lobbyists, and cultural diplomats—an organized Jewish conscience abroad. They’d finally have a mission worthy of their arguments: protecting the home they helped repopulate. And Israel? Overnight, it would become a global Jewish republic, a mosaic of Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Russian, American, and Mizrahi voices—religious and secular, left and right—arguing over the same destiny. The divide between “Israel” and “the Diaspora” would end not with speeches, but with suitcases.

And what then—what would America become without us? This isn’t a farewell, just a question worth asking. Strip the Jews from its cities, its universities, its industries, its public debates. Maybe America would adjust. Maybe it would even prosper. But what if it lost something it couldn’t quite name—the conscience that nags, the humor that softens, the restlessness that refuses to let comfort turn to decay?

Maybe the country would move on. But what if our absence revealed how much we held together—not by power or numbers, but by friction, by the way we questioned, challenged, and re-imagined? Maybe America would survive. But what if it would never quite feel the same—like music missing its dissonant note, like a mirror without its light?

Maybe this whole vision is impossible. But what if impossibility has always been our specialty? We say “Next year in Jerusalem” as though it were poetry, not prophecy. We imagine it as nostalgia—the wish of a people who know they never will. But what if it was meant as a dare?

Maybe the question isn’t logistical at all. Maybe it’s spiritual. Maybe it’s the one we’ve spent two thousand years avoiding.

Why don’t we all just go?