Yom HaAliyah: Going Up to the Land

The date: 10 Nisan and the crossing of the Jordan

The Book of Joshua dates the crossing exactly:

And the people came up out of Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and encamped in Gilgal, in the east border of Jericho.

The verb is alu (עלו), “they came up.” The first entry into the Land is described as an aliyah. The waters of the Jordan stood in a heap while the priests carrying the Ark stood in the riverbed. Yehoshua set up twelve stones from the river at Gilgal so that “when your children shall ask their fathers in time to come,” the answer would be told (Joshua 4:21–24).

The date has other associations. On 10 Nisan in Egypt every household took its Pesach lamb (Exodus 12:3), so the first step toward the Exodus and the first step into the Land fall on the same day. Tradition holds that the 10 Nisan before the Exodus fell on Shabbat, and so the Shabbat before Pesach is called Shabbat HaGadol.¹ Jewish tradition also records 10 Nisan as the day Miriam died, after which, according to the Sages, the well that had accompanied Israel in the wilderness disappeared. For this reason the date appears in the list of optional fast days.²

The law of 2016 and the autumn observance

Yom HaAliyah began as a grassroots initiative of young immigrants in Tel Aviv in 2009. On 21 June 2016 the Knesset passed the Aliyah Day Law, with sponsors from across the political spectrum. The law set 10 Nisan as an annual day to recognize the importance of aliyah to the Land of Israel as a foundation of the State’s existence and growth.³ The day is marked by government and Knesset events honoring immigrants.

Because 10 Nisan falls just before Pesach, when Israeli schools are on holiday, the school system marks the day on 7 Cheshvan. This usually falls close to the Shabbat when Parashat Lech Lecha is read, the portion in which Avraham is called to go to the Land. Seventh of Cheshvan was also the date in the Second Temple period when the last pilgrims returning from Sukkot reached the Euphrates and the prayer for rain began in the Land (Mishnah Ta’anit 1:3).⁴ It is a date tied to travelers on the road. See our calendar for both dates in a given year.

Aliyah in the Torah: “Get thee out”

The first aliyah was Avraham’s:

Now Hashem had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.

Lech lecha (לך לך) literally means “go for yourself” or “go to yourself.” Rashi reads it as “for your own benefit and your own good.”⁵ Avraham left Charan at seventy-five, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8), and the promise followed him: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). Every later aliyah repeats his journey.

The word aliyah itself grows out of the language of the Torah. Dying in Egypt, Yosef said:

God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Avraham, to Yitzchak, and to Yaakov … and ye shall carry up my bones from hence.

In Hebrew, “bring you out” (he’elah, literally “bring up”) and “carry up” (ha’alitem) come from the same root, and Moshe kept the promise by carrying Yosef’s bones out of Egypt (Exodus 13:19). Centuries later Koresh (Cyrus) of Persia issued his decree to the exiles in Babylon:

Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of Hashem God of Israel.

The Hebrew Bible, in the traditional Jewish order, ends with the same decree and the same word, veya’al, “and let him go up” (2 Chronicles 36:23). The last word of the Tanakh is a call to aliyah.

The waves of return

Jews never stopped living in the Land, and individuals and groups went up throughout the centuries. Examples include the disciples of the Vilna Gaon and of the Chasidic masters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modern historians number the organized waves that rebuilt the Jewish community, the Yishuv, as follows:⁶

• First Aliyah (1882–1903): about 35,000, mostly from the Russian Empire after the pogroms of 1881–82, along with a smaller group from Yemen. Members of Chibbat Zion and the Bilu movement founded farming villages such as Rishon LeZion, Zichron Yaakov and Rosh Pinah.
• Second Aliyah (1904–1914): about 35,000–40,000, largely young socialist pioneers who founded the first kibbutz (Degania, 1910) and Tel Aviv (1909), and revived Hebrew as a spoken language.
• Third Aliyah (1919–1923) and Fourth Aliyah (1924–1929): about 40,000 and 82,000 respectively, the latter including many middle-class families from Poland.
• Fifth Aliyah (1929–1939): about 250,000, many fleeing Nazi Germany and Central Europe, until the British White Paper of 1939 limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years.
• Aliyah Bet: the clandestine immigration of the 1930s and 1940s, when survivors of the Shoah tried to reach the Land on crowded ships, and the British turned many of them back or interned them in Cyprus.

After independence the gates opened. In the first years after 1948 some 687,000 immigrants arrived, more than doubling the Jewish population, many of them living at first in tent camps and ma’abarot (transit camps).⁷ Among the great rescues:

• Operation On Wings of Eagles, popularly known as Magic Carpet (June 1949–September 1950): about 49,000 Jews of Yemen were flown to Israel. Many had never seen an airplane, and they took it as the fulfillment of “I bare you on eagles’ wings” (Exodus 19:4).
• Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (1951–1952): about 120,000 Jews of Iraq, an ancient community dating back to the Babylonian exile.
• The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran and other lands followed over the next decades, as hundreds of thousands left or were forced out of Muslim countries.
• The Soviet aliyah: after years in which the “refuseniks” were denied exit and imprisoned, some 140,000 Soviet Jews reached Israel in the 1970s. After 1989, as the Soviet Union collapsed, roughly one million people came from the former Soviet Union. It was the largest single wave in Israel’s history.
• Ethiopian aliyah: in Operation Moses (late 1984 to early 1985), about 7,000–8,000 Beta Israel Jews were brought from refugee camps in Sudan, after thousands had died on the long walk there. In Operation Solomon, on 24–25 May 1991, more than 14,000 were airlifted from Addis Ababa in about a day and a half.

Aliyah has continued from France, Ukraine, the Americas and elsewhere. In all, more than three million people have made aliyah since 1948.

The Law of Return

On 5 July 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return, whose first article states: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.”⁸ The date was 20 Tammuz, the anniversary of the death of Theodor Herzl. A 1970 amendment extended the right to the children and grandchildren of Jews and to their spouses. Who counts as a Jew under the law has been debated in Israel’s courts and Knesset for decades, especially regarding converts and Messianic Jews. The law expresses in modern legal terms what the prophets said: the Land is the home of every Jew, wherever he or she was born.

The Messianic witness

Yeshua’s own aliyah

Even the infant Yeshua “went up.” After the flight to Egypt, the angel told Yosef, “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:20). Matthew links this return with Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” In Matthew’s reading Messiah follows the path of his people, from exile back to the Land. Yeshua went up to Jerusalem for the feasts (Luke 2:41–42; John 7:10), and the Gospels describe his last journey as a deliberate going up: “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem” (Luke 18:31).

“Out of every nation under heaven”

At Shavuot after the resurrection, Jerusalem was full of returned Jews:

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

Luke lists them: “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia … Cretes and Arabians” (Acts 2:9–11). Some were pilgrims, but the word “dwelling” (katoikountes) suggests that many had settled in the city. The first community of Yeshua’s disciples in Jerusalem was a community of olim and pilgrims who spoke many languages. It included “Grecians,” Greek-speaking Jews (Acts 6:1); Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus (Acts 4:36); and Paul of Tarsus, “brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3). Shavuot was a small picture, in a single city, of the gathering the prophets foretold.

“From the four winds”

Yeshua described his return with the language of the ingathering:

And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

He was echoing Isaiah 27:13, “the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship Hashem in the holy mount at Jerusalem.” This gathering is not a rescue away from the earth. It is a gathering to Zion. The great shofar is still awaited. The aliyah of our own era is not that final gathering, but it is a foretaste of it. In the daily Amidah Jews pray, “Sound the great shofar for our freedom … and gather us together from the four corners of the earth.”

The prophets of ingathering

The prophets return to this theme again and again. A few passages:

Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together: a great company shall return thither … He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.

Jeremiah includes the blind, the lame and pregnant women. This return is not for the strong alone. The airlifts of the sick and the elderly from Yemen and Ethiopia are a living picture of that verse.

Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.

“I will say to the north, Give up” has moved many who remember the Soviet gates finally opening. That is an application of the verse, not its stated meaning, but the words fit the event closely.

Isaiah also foresaw the nations helping: “they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders” (Isaiah 49:22). Isaiah 60 sees Israel’s children coming “from far” (60:4) and asks, “Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” (60:8), with “the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far” (60:9). Isaiah 11:11–12 speaks of Hashem setting His hand “the second time” to recover the remnant of His people “from the four corners of the earth.” Ezekiel promises, “I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land” (Ezekiel 36:24). In Ezekiel the cleansing and the new heart follow the return (36:25–27). Amos closes with the planting that will never again be uprooted (Amos 9:14–15).

These promises are Hashem’s faithfulness. They do not give a timetable, and the regathering of our time is not the end of the story. Many Jews still live outside the Land, and the full return that the prophets describe is a return of the heart to Hashem as well as of the body to the Land (Deuteronomy 30:1–6). Mashiach ben David will complete the ingathering, and the Sages counted kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, among his works.⁹ We give thanks for what Hashem has done in our days without claiming to know when He will finish it.

Keeping Yom HaAliyah

The day has no halachic obligations. Some ways to mark it:

• Read the crossing: Joshua 3–4, and tell children the story of the twelve stones. Ask, as the Torah intends, “What mean these stones?”
• Read Lech Lecha: Genesis 12:1–9, and Ezra 1, the decree that ends the Tanakh.
• Honor an oleh: welcome a recent immigrant you know, or learn the aliyah story of one family in your community.
• Learn a wave: read about the Yemenite, Iraqi, Soviet or Ethiopian aliyah, and the hardships of the transit camps.
• Pray the Amidah’s blessing for the ingathering with special attention, and pray for those who are still waiting to go up.
• Support the work of aliyah and absorption, as Isaiah 49:22 pictures the nations helping to carry Israel’s sons and daughters home.
• For Gentile friends of Israel: remember Ruth, who said “thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16), and Isaiah 56:6–7, which welcomes those who join themselves to Hashem.

“He that scattered Israel will gather him.” The day honors those who went up and gives thanks to the One who brings them.