The author lived in Highland Park prior to making aliyah, and wrote this on September 5, 2023.
I can’t say it was the MTA-Makor Chaim Exchange Program that ignited my desire to make aliyah. But it certainly helped.
Whether it was my time in yeshiva during my gap year, my time at Camp Moshava, or the endless Israel programming at Rutgers Hillel, I truly felt that each step and new stage of my life in America always came with another reminder about the importance of the Land. Everywhere I turned I had incredible people to speak with to delve into my passion for my homeland and what options I have to one day end up there.
No matter how comfortable I got in Highland Park, New Brunswick or the Upper West Side, something consistently felt lacking in my residence and permanence. I felt like I was still just living temporarily, no matter how much of an imprint I tried to make in my community. I couldn’t stop bringing it up in every conversation; I couldn’t stop asking people their thoughts on aliyah. Something kept drawing me back to my love for Israel, and it finally hit me last year that I had a Band-Aid sitting on my healed wound, a longing to return Home, and the time had come for it to be ripped off.
I remember sitting at the Seder table last year—Passover 2022—and getting to the end of the late night, beginning to sing לשנה הבאה, and intensely feeling my visceral desire to make the move and fulfill the longing expressed in that song. The next day, I turned to my parents at the lunch table and asked if they were ready to discuss my unexplainably imminent need to make aliyah. We sat there and raised all the issues that needed to be raised, and they honestly shared that as much as they were unhappy that I had this need to make a move that would result in my being thousands of miles away, they were going to do their best to work with me to make this complicated situation happen. That next week, I opened my account with Nefesh B’Nefesh.
The tentative idea was for me to move the following January (2023), and so I began the process—documenting, fingerprinting, apartment searching, job scrounging, and more. It became my second job. Aliyah is not easy. However, I made progress and I was getting closer and closer to achieving my goal.
It got far more complicated, however, when my grandmother got sick and we realized that what we had thought were years or at least months left, was looking more like weeks or even days. I don’t know whether I was doing nothing more than reading into signs that weren’t there, but I knew that God was telling me that the right thing for me to do at the time was to put my aliyah on indefinite pause and be there to help care for my sick grandmother and pain-stricken family. My advisers at NBN were incredibly understanding and worked with me to put everything on pause until further notice. A victim of non-alcoholic liver disease, my grandmother Eva Zimmermann BD”E, an absolutely incredible, beautiful, youthful woman, passed away on February 17, 2023.
Once the shiva ended, I was stuck. It felt incredibly strange to me to try and resume life after such an immense loss. I was lost. My timeline had been halted, my plans were destroyed, and I had lost someone I immensely loved. I felt confused, a deep sense of loss and despair. Yet I also felt a sense of longing to go. Those were the hardest few months of my life.
Late this past spring, I had some important and eye-opening conversations with people I respect and trust, from friends to rebbeim, and found a way to process and proceed. I decided it was time to begin rethinking, reframing and returning to the fulfillment of my journey. The un-pausing and timeline recreating took some time, and it wasn’t until this past summer that I was able to find a way to begin my ישוב הארץ this upcoming fall. I applied and secured a spot at the graduate school I had always hoped to attend for this upcoming fall, and with immense ברכה things began to fall in line allowing me to make aliyah in just one week from now.
I hope I’m not coming off as dramatic or zealous, but something truly feels different inside me now… and I’m not even there yet. I feel like the Band-Aid is no longer hiding the wound that has already healed. I feel like I have finally hit “resume” on a journey that someone sent me on thousands of years ago. I have still yet to step foot in the Land, but I already feel like, in some sense, there is a wholeness to my current life that I was missing before.
עם ירצה ה׳ I am going to be making aliyah in just one week. I hope to provide another update once I’m there, but at least for now I wanted to take this opportunity to share that the journey has been far from easy, but if you can fulfill the journey our forefathers began, try. Even before my first Shabbat being able to watch the sun set over the Land I’ve been promised to call Home, I can say how grateful I am that I pushed through and am beginning this new journey.
I know not everyone is as ecstatic about this move as I am, most importantly the friends and family who will remain here. I understand that this is not a move for everyone. Aliyah is hard, but if you are reading this as someone out there who feels the way I do, has felt the need to return Home as I have described above, please know that we will all be waiting for you to join us back Home one day, God willing very very soon.
Jason Blatt, a Rutgers University graduate and former RU-Hillel president, made aliyah shortly before Rosh Hashanah this year. He is now enrolled as a master’s student in the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. He hopes to share new chapters of his aliyah journey with the readers of The Jewish Link in the months to come.
