"They aren’t all 'going off' the derech. Some of them were never on it to begin with"
Last week, a reader asked why the yeshivish community in America doesn’t prioritize aliyah on a large-scale, community level. There are really two components to this question: the hashkafic/ halachic component and the practical one.
On the hashkafic/halachic level, we know that one is obligated to anticipate the Geulah. This refers to the final Geulah. I’m not sure that one is obligated to desire to live in “Israel” as is currently constituted. As Reb Moshe Feinstein paskened in Igros Moshe: Do you fulfill a mitzvah by living in Eretz Yisrael? Yes. Are you obligated to live there? No.
However, there is a flip side: We should not become too comfortable living in galus lest we come to say, as the Meshech Chochma stated: “Berlin [Lakewood] is Yerushalayim.” So there is a dialectic here that needs to be understood.
But I believe that the main reason why the American yeshivish community is hesitant to make aliyah en masse is due to practical concerns.
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