In this week’s parashah, Nitzavim, we encounter two verses that many of us know well, as we recite them each Shabbat in the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel:
“Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers” (Deuteronomy 30:4–5).
The decision to include these verses in a prayer composed shortly after Israel’s founding was deeply symbolic. It acknowledged both the extraordinary return of so many Jews to their homeland with the rise of Zionism, and the hope for the eventual homecoming of millions more still dispersed across the globe.
And yet, there is a tension here. These verses—like many prophetic passages (see Isaiah 11:12; 43:5–6; Jeremiah 23:7–8; 32:37; Ezekiel 11:17; 36:24; 37:21–22, among others)—describe God as the one who gathers the exiles. But the very essence of the Zionist movement was the opposite: a bold rejection of passivity, a declaration that Jews must take their fate into their own hands rather than waiting for divine intervention. How then can the Prayer for the State of Israel invoke verses that seem to contradict the foundations upon which the State was built?
This same paradox arises when we look back at the return of the exiles during the Second Temple period. The prophets spoke of God’s hand in the return, yet the books of Ezra and Nehemiah repeatedly speak of those who “came up” from Babylonia (Ezra 2:1; 3:8; 7:6; 8:1; Nehemiah 7:6), which suggests that the people undertook the journey of their own volition. Furthermore, history records two distinct waves of aliyah: the first, after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538 BCE, led by Sheshbazzar, Zerubbabel, and Joshua the High Priest; and the second, nearly a century later, under Ezra the Scribe. If God Himself had orchestrated the return, why would it unfold in two waves, separated by generations?
Finally, the Rabbis in the Midrash sharpen this point in a striking comment on Song of Songs: “If she be a wall—we would build upon it a silver battlement; if she be a door—we would panel it in cedar” (8:9).They explain: “If Israel had ascended from Babylonia like a wall—that is, united and en masse—the Temple would never have been destroyed a second time” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 8:9). In other words, according to the Rabbis here, the Jewish majority who failed to return from Babylonia to the Land during the period of the Second Temple were responsible for the Temple’s eventual destruction. If the Ingathering of the Exiles was purely an act of God, how could those who remained behind be blamed?
I believe the answer lies in how we understand God’s role in redemption. Contrary to conventional belief, it does not appear that God’s intention was ever to bring us home on a “magic carpet” or by some other supernatural means. Rather, the Ingathering of the Exiles refers to God’s creating the conditions whereby the Jews could then return to the Land on their own.
Thus, the book of Ezra opens with the words: “The Lord roused the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia” (Ezra 1:1) and Cyrus proclaims: “The Lord God of Heaven… has charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2). God did not personally transport the exiles back to the Land; He empowered Cyrus to enable their return by inviting them to rebuild the Temple. The people themselves had to take up the challenge—and tragically, most did not. Hence, the rabbis could fault them for the Temple’s eventual destruction.
So too in our own day. Just as God worked through Cyrus then, He worked through the United Nations in 1947, opening the door for the Jewish people to reestablish sovereignty in their land. Once again, the divine role was to create the opportunity; the human role was—and remains—to seize it.
Today, nearly 7.5 million Jews live in Israel, yet more than half of our people continue to live elsewhere. While some have no intention of ever returning there are many who pray daily, and on Shabbat in the Prayer for the State of Israel, for the Ingathering of the Exiles.
And so I turn to them with one simple question: What are you waiting for?
Shabbat Shalom.
