By Rabbi Josh Wander
There’s a strange psychological pattern that shows up again and again in Jewish exile history. Pressure increases, hostility rises, warning lights start flashing red… and instead of packing bags, people print banners.
After the Tree of Life massacre and the wave of antisemitic attacks that followed, segments of Pittsburgh’s rabbinic leadership launched a public campaign declaring: “We are here to stay.”
Think about the theology of that sentence for ten uncomfortable seconds.
Not “We’re coming home.”
Not “It’s time to strengthen Aliyah.”
Not even “We’ll survive.”
But: We are staying.
It sounds brave. It sounds defiant. It photographs well on lawn signs.
It is also, from a Torah perspective, completely upside-down.
The entire arc of Jewish history runs in the opposite direction.
Avraham is told Lech Lecha — leave.
Yaakov’s children go down to Egypt — temporarily — and are commanded to return.
The Torah repeats the promise of the Land dozens of times like a drumbeat.
Chazal say dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the mitzvot.
Our daily prayers end with ותחזינה עינינו בשובך לציון.
Three times a day we beg to come back.
And yet modern diaspora leadership responds to danger by saying: Plant deeper roots here.
It’s almost tragicomic. Like standing in a burning building and announcing, “We’re renovating.”
There’s something psychologically understandable about it. Humans crave stability. Rabbis don’t want to uproot communities they’ve built for decades. Institutions have mortgages, schools, donors, egos, nostalgia. Exile becomes familiar. Familiar becomes sacred. Sacred becomes untouchable.
But Torah doesn’t treat exile as sacred.
Galus is not a lifestyle choice.
It’s not a brand identity.
It’s not a place to dig in and declare permanence.
It’s a מצב בדיעבד — a temporary, sub-optimal state, at best a hospital waiting room until we go home.
So when rabbis say “We are here to stay,” they may mean emotional resilience, but what they’re actually broadcasting — theologically — is surrender. They’re declaring permanence in a place the Torah itself describes as inherently temporary.
The Tulsa campaign and the Pittsburgh slogan are really two expressions of the same confusion.
Tulsa says: Come build Jewish life here.
Pittsburgh says: We’re not leaving here.
Different tones. Same premise.
Both assume that the long-term solution to antisemitism is simply finding a nicer corner of exile.
History keeps laughing at that theory.
Spain was safe — until it wasn’t.
Germany was cultured — until it wasn’t.
America feels stable — until it won’t be.
Exile is rented space. Never owned property.
The only place the Jewish people were promised permanence — legally, covenantally, metaphysically — is one thin strip of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean.
Everything else is a layover.
So when sacred language like Lech Lecha gets repurposed for Oklahoma, or when rabbinic leaders double down with “We are here to stay,” it’s not just bad messaging. It reveals something deeper and sadder: a generation that has gotten so comfortable in galus that it mistakes the waiting room for home.
And Jewish history has a ruthless way of correcting that mistake, whether we learn gently or the hard way.