>>I would also like to encourage people to try out temporary residence before committing to aliyah. There are many positives to do so. Don’t do aliyah because you need the money from Misrad HaKlitah to live. Experience living for one, two or maximum three years under temporary residence, and if things don’t work out, you always can come back another time.<<

Recently I was speaking with someone in her first year of aliyah who is having a hard time adjusting to all the differences here.  I mentioned that I thought it was beneficial to give yourself enough time to live here to be successful, not to rush to make a geographic change when things are uncomfortable in the beginning.  I also said that I thought it was helpful to mentally commit yourself to living here when making aliyah, but a couple of other women disagreed with me, saying that knowing they could go back to the US if things didn’t work out here was very important for them.  We agreed that this might be a personality issue, but I wanted to flesh out my thoughts on this here.

Before we moved, upon hearing our plans to make aliyah with nine children ranging in age from 2 – 18, many people told us that we could always come back if it didn’t work out.  I told them that we planned to make Israel our long term home, and this was the attitude that we consistently conveyed to our children (and ourselves!).  Not because we closed all the doors behind us when we moved from the US – we didn’t – but I felt it would make it harder for all of us to fully transition if we were holding on to the idea that at the end of a year we would move back to the US  if everything wasn’t comfortable by everyone by then.

Of course if you’ve made your best effort in something and it’s really not working after an extended period of time, you need to reassess.  There’s no benefit to feeling trapped and desperate with a life you don’t want if you have a way to change that.

However, being mentally prepared is very important when making aliyah.  Aliyah is difficult. Really difficult.  It’s particularly difficult if you don’t really want to make the move to start but come because a spouse or parent pulls you along with the power of their desire, but it’s hard enough even if you have the best of thoughts and intentions.  One has to find a balance between finding a perspective that allows you to mentally put your best effort forth on a continual basis without feeling trapped and how to do this is very individual.  While I knew we could move back to the US if we wanted to, this wasn’t what I focused on.  I think our clarity in this area helped out kids because if we had been ambivalent about the tough times and wondered if we had made a mistake, they would have immediately picked up on it.

I think this was a really good idea because it pushed everyone to look forward into building a new life rather than looking back constantly to long for what we left behind.  We left a very nice life behind, with wonderful friends and a wonderful community.  We came to something totally different, we felt isolated and out of place in many ways and everything was a struggle.  If I had given us a year to adjust, we wouldn’t still be here.  At this point, at twenty-one months, the kids and I all agree that it feels like life is getting easier in every area.  After about nine or ten months here, I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel – though before our one year anniversary things happened that obscured that light for a number of months to come.

Earlier this year we seriously considered moving to a different community; when we decided to stay in Karmiel, we emailed the family who was going to host us for Shabbos to let them know of our change in plans.  They told us they were sorry we wouldn’t get to meet – we were members of the same synagogue in the US and have mutual friends but they moved to Israel before we joined the shul – but said they were happy we had found a way to make it work where we were.  They explained that they had seen many families who moved to their city because they were unhappy with the city they had initially moved to, and too many of these families were just as unhappy in the new place.  Sometimes moving to a new place makes all the difference, but since you take yourself with you wherever you go, often the problems that you hope to escape are recreated in a new setting.

Something I’ve said for years is, ‘Expect the best and be prepared for the worst’.  This sums up how I look at a lot of things.  Think positively and trust that things will be good, but at the same time, be ready to deal with life’s vagaries.  It’s predictable that aliyah will have many challenges.  It’s predictable that at times you may question what in the world made you think this would be a good idea!  Difficulties don’t last forever and aliyah related challenges fade with time.  Give yourself that time by trusting that you can handle the frustrations, look for the good, and believe that you will be successful in making the adjustment. Trust that if you keep your mindset positive and look for the good in everything around you, if  you keep putting one foot in front of the other and doing the next right thing, that you will be successful in making aliyah.

Avivah