“Next Year in Jerusalem”, but this year we prefer returning to Egypt.

By Rabbi Josh Wander

This year, because of the war, a strange phrase has begun circulating among Jewish students and tourists. Many say they are “stuck” in Israel and cannot get “home” for Pesach because the airports are closed.

War disrupts normal life. Flights are cancelled. Borders tighten. Travel plans collapse. That part is understandable. No one enjoys uncertainty, and many students simply want to spend the holiday with their families.

But the language being used reveals something far deeper than a logistical inconvenience.

Jews are in Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people, and yet they describe themselves as being “stuck.” They speak anxiously about needing to get back to exile in time to celebrate the holiday that commemorates leaving exile.

If one steps back and looks at the situation honestly, the irony is staggering.

Pesach is the national memory of the Jewish people’s liberation from Egypt — not merely from slavery, but from displacement. It marks the birth of a nation whose destiny is tied to a specific land. The Exodus was not a random escape into the wilderness. It was a journey toward Eretz Yisrael.

Yet thousands of years later, Jews physically standing in that very land are anxiously trying to leave it so they can celebrate the festival of redemption somewhere else.

The Torah’s vision of Pesach included something that today has largely disappeared from Jewish consciousness: Aliyah la’regel, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Three times a year every Jew was commanded to ascend to the Beis HaMikdash — on Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Entire families would travel across the land and converge on Jerusalem in a massive national gathering centered on the Temple.

The Torah describes this movement with the word oleh — to ascend. Jews would go up to Jerusalem. The entire nation would flow toward the spiritual and geographic center of Jewish life. Not away from it.

Yet this year the conversation revolves around Jews who feel “trapped” in their own homeland.

Two thousand years of exile have done something subtle but powerful to the Jewish psyche. Entire civilizations of Jewish life developed in Babylon, Spain, Poland, Morocco, and eventually America. Communities flourished, Torah scholarship thrived, and Jewish culture developed in remarkable ways.

But exile carries a psychological cost. Over time people begin to confuse the temporary shelter with the permanent home. What began as a forced displacement gradually becomes normalized.

Eventually the map flips.

Israel becomes the place one visits. The diaspora becomes the place one belongs.

So when war interrupts travel and flights stop, the instinctive reaction is panic: “We’re stuck here. We need to get home.”

Something in that sentence reveals just how inverted the Jewish compass has become.

The prophets warned about this mentality long ago. In the Haftorah read just this past Shabbat, Yechezkel speaks with striking bluntness about Jews remaining scattered among the nations. Again and again he explains that when the Jewish people live in exile among the nations, it creates a chilul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, because the world concludes that the people of Israel have no real land and no real future.

Exile becomes normalized. The temporary becomes permanent. And the homeland becomes optional.

So when religiously educated Jews say they are “stuck” in Israel and need to return to exile in order to celebrate Pesach properly, the problem is not transportation.

It is orientation. The compass is broken.

And this year the situation becomes even more surreal. In order to escape Israel during wartime, some Jews have chosen to leave not through the Mediterranean, not through Europe — but through the border with Egypt.

Think about that for a moment. Jews leaving the Land of Israel through Egypt in order to celebrate the holiday of leaving Egypt.

The historical symbolism almost feels like satire. The Torah repeatedly warns the Jewish people about returning to Egypt. Yet today some actually believe that escaping from Israel to Egypt is what Hashem wants them to do. You could hardly design a more backwards picture.

None of this is meant to mock people facing real stress or uncertainty. War is frightening. Families want stability. Students want to be with their parents for the holidays. Those emotions are real and understandable.

But the language and assumptions behind them reveal something deeper: a massive educational gap.

Thousands of Jewish students spend a year studying Torah in yeshivot and seminaries in Israel. They learn Gemara, halacha, Jewish philosophy, and ethics. They walk the streets of Jerusalem and study the very texts that describe the centrality of the land. Yet somehow many still leave believing their real home lies thousands of miles away. That suggests something fundamental is missing from the curriculum.

Perhaps what is needed is not another lecture in Talmud, but a crash course in Jewish history, Jewish geography, and Jewish destiny.

For the first time in two thousand years, Jews can live freely in the land promised to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. They can walk the streets of Jerusalem, pray near the Temple Mount, and build Jewish life in the place every generation before them only dreamed about. Yet many still feel they are merely visiting.

Maybe what we are witnessing this year — students unable to board planes, forced by circumstance to remain in Israel for Pesach — is not a crisis at all. Perhaps it is a moment of clarity.

Which brings us to the people who must address this issue most directly: the rabbis and educators leading our yeshivas and seminaries.

These students did not invent this worldview on their own. If a young man can spend a year immersed in Torah learning in Eretz Yisrael and still believe that he is “stuck” in the Jewish homeland and must urgently escape back to exile for Pesach, something fundamental in the message he received is missing.

The same applies to the thousands of young women studying in seminaries across the country. If their year in Israel concludes with the assumption that their real life will begin again when they return to New York, Los Angeles, or London, then the most basic lesson of Jewish history has not been taught clearly enough.

This moment therefore demands leadership! The rabbis and educators guiding these institutions should speak openly to their students right now. Not about airline logistics or travel arrangements, but about the deeper question: What does it mean to be a Jew living at this moment in history?

For two thousand years Jews prayed to return to this land. Generation after generation ended their Pesach Seder with the same words: L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim — next year in Jerusalem.

Today we are living in the generation that can actually stand in Jerusalem and say those words. That reality should not be treated as a side experience during a “gap year.” It is the central drama of Jewish history unfolding in real time.

Rabbis and educators have a responsibility to frame this moment properly for their students. They should challenge them to think deeply about what it means to call Israel “home.” They should ask them to confront the uncomfortable irony of celebrating the Exodus while trying to flee the very land toward which the Exodus was directed.

And they should remind them that the story of the Jewish people did not end in Brooklyn. It ends in Zion.

If thousands of Jewish students currently studying Torah in Eretz Yisrael can leave this experience with a clearer understanding of that truth, then perhaps this unusual moment — closed airports, disrupted travel plans, and unexpected Pesach sedarim in the Land of Israel — will become something more than an inconvenience. It may become a turning point.

Because sometimes the most powerful lessons in Jewish history are not learned in the classroom.

They are learned when history itself interrupts our plans and forces us to reconsider where we truly belong.