It is Nisan 5769 (April 2009). All over the world, Jewish people are preparing to obey God and commemorate the Passover, our miraculous exodus from Egypt to Israel thousands of years ago. Seder meals will conclude with the declaration, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Yet how many Jews will heed that declaration? For just as God never intended then that we—His Jewish people—should remain in Egypt, so it is not His will today that we should stay in all the countries to which He sent us after the destruction of the Second Temple. A Jew outside of Israel is in exile, says the Lord GOD of Israel, and this is clearly stated in the Tanach. If you are a Jew, you have no other home, no other Land.

Sanctifying God's Name

We sanctify our God's name by returning to the Land that He has so graciously given back to us after nearly 2,000 years of wandering. So the Lord spoke through the Jewish prophet Ezekiel.

Our Welfare

Yet not only to sanctify His own name does God restore us to our Land, but also to promote our welfare. As He says in Ezekiel 39:25, “Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD: Now will I bring back the captivity of Jacob, and have compassion upon the whole house of Israel…” Note that the Lord speaks of all of us—the Diaspora is not a normal condition of Jewish life—and He says in verse 28, “I will leave none of them any more there [in the nations].”

In fact, we are now in the midst of this latter-day exodus. It began before and has continued since the rebirth of the modern State of Israel, as over 3 million Jews have come home from 1948. In comparison, the first exodus numbered “about six hundred thousand men on foot, beside children,” according to Exodus 12:37. Still we have yet to see the enormity of this final ingathering, because it will so greatly surpass the exodus from Egypt that we will have a new commemoration as a people, according to another Jewish prophet, Jeremiah.

It is written: “Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be said: ‘As the LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but: ‘As the LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the countries whither He had driven them’; and I will bring them back into their land that I gave unto their fathers” (Jeremiah 16:14, 15). The same statement is repeated in Jeremiah 23, verses 7 and 8, and we know that when our God repeats anything, it is very important and significant.

Interestingly, back in Jeremiah 16, verse 16, the Lord speaks of “fishermen” who will “fish” for us and then of “hunters” who will hunt for us. It seems apparent that we are still in the time when our God is “fishing” for us. But it also appears clear that we are transitioning to the era of the “hunters,” with the escalation of both worldwide anti-Semitism and economic, political, and social upheaval.

So it is obvious that we Jewish people need to decide now to leave “Egypt” and come home to Israel. There are many organizations, such as Ebenezer, that can help. Why not return soon before it will be increasingly difficult to do so? Our God is faithful—He will part your Red Sea and bring you into the Promised Land! May you obey His call to join us here as you remember the first exodus during this season. “Next year in Jerusalem!”