By Rabbi Josh Wander
There is a quiet but profound disconnect running through much of the Orthodox Jewish world. It is not primarily ideological, political, or even theological in the narrow sense. It is perceptual. A failure to recognize that the ground shifted beneath our feet nearly eighty years ago—and that the rules of Jewish existence changed with it.
Everything leads back to one moment: 1948.
With the creation of the modern State of Israel, Jewish reality was fundamentally transformed. Not incrementally. Not symbolically. Transformationally. A people without sovereignty regained sovereignty. A people scattered and hunted gained a home and an army. A theological abstraction—return—reentered history as a lived, physical option.
And then in 1967, that reality intensified. Jerusalem returned to Jewish hands. The map of Jewish possibility expanded. A critical stage of Geula was crossed.
Yet here we are, almost eighty years later, and roughly half of the Jewish people live as though none of this ever happened.
This is the crux of the issue.
This is not about political Zionism. It never really was. Zionism was a delivery system, not the payload. The real story is that Jewish history re-entered a redemptive trajectory. A paradigm shift occurred—a kind of historical big bang—that set in motion a chain of events hurling us forward toward Geula on one hand, while steadily collapsing the plausibility of exile on the other.
If you fail to recognize that 1948 changed the rules, then nothing that follows makes sense. You misread the signs. You misjudge the risks. You mistake delay for stability.
And that is precisely where many Jews get lost.
In times of crisis, human beings often respond with disbelief. Psychologists call it normalcy bias: the instinct to assume that tomorrow will look like yesterday, even as the building burns. People don’t evacuate because evacuation would require admitting that everything they assumed was safe…isn’t.
How many people stayed inside the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they assumed it would be fine?
Galut works the same way—only slower, quieter, and more seductive. It doesn’t announce its expiration date. It stretches on just long enough to make denial feel reasonable. Institutions stabilize. Communities thrive. Synagogues expand. Schools flourish. And all of that becomes the evidence used to argue that nothing fundamental has changed.
But the evidence is lying.
The Jewish exile is not static. It is imploding in slow motion. Socially. Politically. Spiritually. Physically. The pressure builds unevenly, so denial is easy—until suddenly it isn’t. At some point, the choice becomes stark: acknowledge reality and move, or stay put and be trapped.
This is not rhetorical. It is existential.
More than half of the Jewish people have already come home. History has tipped. The center of gravity has shifted. And those who remain in exile are no longer merely “waiting”—they are choosing, actively or passively, to treat an emergency exit as optional.
Eighty years is a long time. An extraordinarily patient stretch of history. Hashem has made this return easier than any generation could have imagined. Flights that take hours instead of weeks. Safe travel instead of perilous voyages. Homes instead of tents. Supermarkets overflowing with abundance instead of suitcases stuffed with peanut butter and toilet paper.
Israel today is not a refuge of last resort. It is a functioning, thriving society. Housing. Cars. Jobs. Torah. Technology. Security challenges, yes—but Jewish history has never offered a risk-free chapter. What it has never offered before is this level of access, comfort, and national rebirth all at once.
To ignore this is not humility. It is not caution. It is not faithfulness to tradition.
It is a refusal to update one’s mental model of reality.
And that refusal carries consequences—physical and spiritual. History does not pause indefinitely for those who hesitate. At some point, people are remembered not for what they feared, but for what they failed to see.
This is not about running away from danger. It is about running toward destiny. Toward the place where Jewish history is being written in real time. Toward the responsibility of participating rather than spectating.
The exile is closing. Quietly for now. Patiently. But decisively.
The only remaining question is whether we are willing to recognize what already happened—and act accordingly.
