 Hello friends, subscribers. Welcome back to my YouTube channel or the podcast, the Daniel Rosel podcast, if that's where you're picking up this episode. My name is Daniel Rosel and this is going to be an audio version of an essay, which I wrote over the past week or so. When I get right to it, I might make this into an actual video with, you know, actual like video elements, but for now, it's just taking on this format. I mentioned in a few videos how I wound up here in Israel, although that probably wasn't the best choice of words because there was nothing even slightly accidental about the process, but I haven't talked much about whether I've ever thought about leaving. And the short answer is that I have, actually an awful lot. So in this video, I wanted to share a little bit about how that process has been for me. In this video slash podcast, I'm going to try to cover quite a bit of ground, including why Jews move to Israel, why they sometimes end up leaving after moving here, and how I feel about both of those actions. There are going to be a few different sections to this video slash podcast, so I'll make sure to leave timestamps. So please feel free to jump around to the part that interests you. In 2015, coming on a decade ago, I decided to move my life from Cork in Ireland to Jerusalem and Israel. I was eligible to make that move because of something called the law of return. Israel was established as the Jewish homeland and Jews from all over the world can and do choose to move their lives to Israel. My mother was Jewish, Judaism is a matrilineal religion, and I was also raised Jewish, so I didn't face any obstacles in qualifying. But that's the bureaucratic reason and not the emotional one. I moved to Israel because I felt, and I still fervently do, that Israel is where Jewish people should live. This idea is my version of Zionism, which is the idea that Zion, which is in turn a metaphor for Jerusalem, Mount Zion is in Jerusalem, and that in turn is a metaphor for the whole land of Israel is where Jews should make their lives. Needless to say, not all Jews choose to make their lives in Israel, and not all Jews identify as Zionists. In fact, an awful lot of Jews would strenuously disagree with the worldview I articulated above. As I've shown in a previous video, the majority of the world's Jewish population, although it's not a huge majority, continue to live in the Jewish diaspora. So yes, there are fundamental differences of opinion within the Jewish world about such a basic issue, how to relate to the modern state of Israel. Another difference of opinion within the Jewish world centers on how we perceive the state of Israel as having legitimacy, what we think its purpose in the world should be. Some Jews subscribe to the viewpoint that Israel exists because of the Holocaust, that that atrocity proved that Jews need their own state. Others, including me, take a longer view of Jewish history. Israel is where the Jewish people emerged as a distinct collective, so we think that this is a place where Judaism should be practiced and where Jews should live. This is where we have a future. So although ideological convictions drive many Jews like me to move to Israel, it isn't always necessarily enough to actually, you know, sustain a life here. Which is to say that even if you are full of conviction that Israel is the right place to make a life, as I was and now, you still have to pragmatically figure out how to make your life work here, to do your tax return, to get a job, and all the other stuff involved in living. That part isn't always easy. An old saying in Judaism affirms that one stake in the land of Israel is only acquired through suffering, and sometimes that aphorism seems just a little bit too true. There are a lot of challenges to making a life in Israel. Firstly, the immigrant experience is just a difficult one in general. I think that there are some difficulties of Israel that are kind of very specific, like, you know, the constant threat of warfare, and there are others that I think we can just attribute to, yeah, immigrant life being hard. I think that when it comes to Israel, we Jews kind of think that, well, this isn't like classic immigration, it's, you know, we're Jews and we're moving to Israel, but I think that's a huge mistake. An unpalatable truce is that in Israel, as elsewhere, immigrants can unfortunately get taken advantage of. Companies can conveniently forget to contribute to pension funds, knowing that immigrants may not be familiar with their legal rights. This happened to me in my first job here. Landlords can also take advantage of immigrants because they know that they might not have the linguistic skills to take them to court. I've shown the video a few times on this channel of how a former landlord once actually literally ripped out my toilet while I was living in the apartment and paying rent to try to fix a leak. Of course, the landlord expected me to continue paying rent for the shoebox apartment that now lacked any form of sanitation. I left by the way. Although Israel has been engineered to support Jewish immigration, moving here brings with it many challenges that for some are just insuperable. For one, Jewish immigrants to Israel commonly lack family connections that can preclude them from integrating into society as quickly as they might like and advancing in careers as fast as their native Israeli peers. The job market in Israel is very much about who you know rather than what you know. Lifelong personal connections and networks are often forged during mandatory army service and those who didn't serve in the army can find themselves boxed out of that group. Then of course, there's the language. Although lots of Israeli speak English and many services are available in English, the lingua franca of life in Israel is very much Hebrew. Hebrew like Arabic is a Semitic language and it's not quite as easy to pick up as some other languages. People would disagree with me, but I personally think that Hebrew is actually quite a tricky language to really really get provisioned in. Given that many immigrants move to Israel at relatively advanced ages, their lack of Hebrew can often prove a really difficult obstacle. Many try to work around this fact by moving to communities with large numbers of English speakers. These are sometimes referred to derogatively as Anglo ghettos. Anglo is a word used in English to mean an English speaker. It's short for Anglophone. Many have discovered that it's actually pretty possible to get by living in Israel with very limited Hebrew or none at all. This is true of course in many countries with large expat populations. Some have even written books advocating this as a viable option, as in you don't need English to live in Israel. Personally, I think that this is a disastrous idea to subscribe to. In fact, one of my only regrets about my experience in Israel to date is not investing more time and effort in learning Hebrew sooner. Not being comfortable enough in Hebrew is really socially limiting, but a much bigger disadvantage is that not knowing Hebrew or not knowing Hebrew as well as you could or should is a major disadvantage when it comes to life in the workplace. Dealing with government authorities is naturally also a lot harder. People forget this, but English is not an official language in Israel. That means that the state of Israel isn't legally obliged to translate materials into English or operate English-speaking call centres. So if you can't find an English-speaking government department, consider yourself lucky. They don't have to do that. Another common tripping point that prevents immigrants from succeeding in Israel is navigating the job market here. This can prove challenging in a number of respects. We've talked about the difficulties inherent in finding a job. There's also the difficulties in telling your resume or CV to the Israeli job market. Then there's navigating the different professional culture in Israel where everything is often upper casual. And of course, there's the question of professional opportunity. Although Israel has a relatively healthy startup ecosystem, it has less multinationals than many countries. Israel is not home to a major world financial or media centre in the same way that London or New York is. And while Israel also has professional opportunities, especially in the realm of technology, there are also professional disadvantages to living here. I think that that's often underappreciated. Immigrants often need to get very creative in how they repackage their skill sets. Finally, we have the cost of living. Israel has one of the highest cost of living in the entire world. And the average salaries, at least outside of the high-tech bubble, simply do not keep up. The cost of real estate here is also one of the highest in the world per square metre. Buying property in Israel often requires having to commit more to a down payment than you would spend buying literally an entire property on cash in many European cities. For many immigrants, the idea of an indefinite financial struggle or of never being able to own the roof over your head is simply more than they're willing to sacrifice. Of course, some also simply dislike Israeli society, hate the sunshine, dislike falafel, or there's some other reason why they just don't like it here. There are lots more immigrants why Jewish immigrants may not end up living in Israel over the long term. All this has pushed me and many to consider, at some point or another, leaving Israel. And of course, many don't just think about it, they actually go ahead and, you know, actually leave the place. It's worth pointing out that the whole subject of leaving Israel is rather fraught with controversy here. In fact, many people would even criticize me for simply pointing out the challenges in living in Israel. There's a common feeling in the Jewish world that so many people are just insanely critical of Israel for political reasons, so adding to that chorus of often unjustified hatred is something approaching treason. Some people come at this from religious grounds, arguing that it's actually a religious sin in Judaism to speak evil in any way whatsoever of the land of Israel. And that that religious sin encompasses pointing out potential challenges, even if those are factual, or that a lot of people think that those are difficulties. Finally, we have the fact that the whole subject of emigration from Israel is a controversial subject in Israel itself. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once derided those who emigrated from Israel as a band of weaklings. In Hebrew, emigrating from Israel is called Yerida, and this term is kind of almost pejorative in its own right because it's the antithesis of ascent or aliyah, which is the idea that Jews moving to Israel are going through a spiritual ascent rather than a physical one. As another general observation, there is vastly more information available about moving to Israel than there is about reversing that decision and choosing to leave here. I think that to a large extent, that's attributable to the fact that more people are interested in the former topic, but I also believe that it's the byproduct to some extent of stigma and silencing. The same people who are often the most fervent supporters of aliyah will simply refuse to discuss the possibility of leaving Israel, whether for ideological or religious reasons. Whereas the state of Israel maintains meticulous statistics about how many Jews move to Israel, it seems to invest almost zero effort in collecting reliable data about how many Jews leave and what their reasons were for doing so. And here's another observation. In general, Jewish organizations are great at pre-aliyah, the idea of getting people excited about moving to Israel and actually getting them on the plane. But when it comes to olim retention, keeping olim in Israel and post-aliyah, these same organizations often kind of fall down a bit. As a fervent believer in aliyah, I think that we need to do a lot more to make sure that those people who've chosen to move their lives to Israel are properly resourced to have every possible chance at succeeding here. So you could say that there's something of a stark asymmetry about the information presented around Jewish immigration to Israel. Immigration is often viewed as a success story and celebrated and publicized, whereas immigration is often decried as evidence of failure and kept on the DL. Whereas Jews moving to Israel on nephish-benefish flights are often welcomed by photo-ops attended by politicians and sent to the newspapers, those who choose to move their lives in the opposite direction often do so in almost total silence with an almost sense of shame with none of the accompanying fanfare. Personally, the first years in Israel were by far the hardest. I got screwed over by dodgy landlords, found myself doing work that I was way overqualified for, and generally had a pretty trying time. At times I began actually planning the logistics of leaving, but each time things got really bad they then seemed to miraculously get better. I've considered both temporary relocations for professional reasons and actually leaving for good, but ultimately I've done neither. So what's kept me here? I think a few different factors. For one, my life here has gradually improved over the course of a decade or so, although it's been a long and very faltering uptrend rather than anything like a story of overnight success. As my Hebrew has slowly gotten slightly better, I found it slightly easier to deal with bureaucracy and generally managing my life here, and this has had a big positive impact. The current war that Israel is fighting in the Gaza Strip has also oddly had a really bolstering effect on my motivation to stay put here indefinitely. In the wake of it, and the global rise of anti-Semitism, I've actually found myself more committed than ever to spending the rest of my life here in Israel. Perhaps oddly, I don't feel quite the same level of commitment, actually anything near the same level of commitment to the city I live in, Jerusalem. While my decision to move to Israel was very intentional, Jerusalem was kind of an accident. I came about mostly because I didn't realize that I could have gotten my Aliyah benefits in Tel Aviv, so I just did what the Jewish Agency told me to do, and I moved to Jerusalem. I see Jerusalem as offering far less in the way of economic opportunity compared to Tel Aviv, and I think more concerningly, I don't really see that situation improving year by year. I think my wife and I might bite the bullet and move closer to the coast to Tel Aviv one day, but I'm also pretty happy here, so either or. For now, we're focused on other things including running our businesses and seeing how things go year by year. My wife works as an architect, I work in the field of impact investing, and we both spend a couple of days per week in Tel Aviv for work reasons. Personally, I kind of see this as a future. More and more people living in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv are going to take advantage of quick connectivity between the two cities, and maybe their professional lives in one city and their live life is in another, or vice versa. I think it's all kind of part of the modern way of work. Although I fervently believe that Jews belong in Israel, I would personally never tell any individual to move here. Mostly because I don't want to find myself having to take responsibility if somebody ends up totally hating it and regretting the move, and then it's shouting down the phone at me. More importantly, I think because I think that to stay committed to living here in Israel over the long run despite the challenges, well, it takes enormous personal conviction and mental strength, and that needs to come from actually wanting to make a life here. Equally, I don't think it makes any sense for people who truly hate living here to continue suffering needlessly. So much as I wouldn't advise a family member to come and make Aliyah to Israel, I wouldn't tell a friend, hey, you know what, I think you should just actually live elsewhere. Again, my reasoning isn't rooted in religious belief or ideology. It's just because I think that Aliyah or the opposite process of leaving is an enormously personal decision. I hope this short podcast essay or whatever you might call this has been at least somewhat interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if you'd like to continue receiving more videos from me, then do please consider subscribing here on YouTube or to get these videos in audio format, look up and subscribe to the Daniel Rossell podcast. It's available on Google podcasts, Spotify, Apple podcasts, and other places. Thanks for watching or listening. Shabbat Shalom for those keeping it. And until the next episode.