10 weeks to aliyah – “This day will fade away, the sun will set and be gone – let us come to Your gates.” (Yom Kippur Ne’ila service, cf: Psalms 100:4)

There are so many things in our lives that have “soft” deadlines. That is, we know that we want to take care of it “someday”. Sometimes we get around to it and sometimes we don’t.

In the last few weeks and months there have been a lot of deadlines for us to deal with. Some are deadlines that we set for ourselves, for instance getting our visas, organizing the lift, putting our finances in order, etc. and some are deadlines that are being thrust upon those around us. For example, we have lots of friends and relative who have wanted to get together with us over the years or wanted us to look at or address something for them, but nothing has ever pushed us in the past to set the dates. Well, now we have a hard deadline to work with.

Even aliyah in general works this way. Pearl and I have talked for decades about making aliyah, but it was so easy for us to say that we would like to do it “someday”. It only actually happens when you set a real date to that “someday”.

Aliya is something that takes a lot of planning and organization. There are a 1000 decisions that need to be made and lots of research to do. You find yourself working on 100 projects at once, many of which cannot be completed until a later date, but you have to keep on top of every one of them, following through with people who do not return phone calls or emails as responsibly as you would like. (By the way, employers, these are skills that are very applicable to the job that I am trying to get – hint, hint…). And you have to do it all in the right time-frame or it just doesn't get done.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a complaint. Aliyah could be a real simple and easy thing for some people. But we happened to have made our lives rather complex at this stage of the game, so there are just a lot of factors that we have to address. I wish that people could look at our experience and say “look how easy it was for the Friedmans to make aliyah”. Although it is not always easy, aliyah is very doable if you make it your priority.