Israel’s Changing Relationship with Those Who Leave It

Mosaic reader Dov Cymbalista writes about my last column:

Thank you for your interesting observations about contemporary use of the Hebrew word aliyah. I believe you’ve overlooked something, though. An additional factor in Haaretz and its left-wing readers using the word hagirah rather than aliyah to describe a Jew’s moving to Israel lies in their similar unwillingness to use the word y’ridah in reference to a Jew’s leaving Israel. You might have included this in your column.

Mr. Cymbalista is right. Just as aliyah literally (and when used in most contexts) means “ascent,” so y’ridah means “descent,” and just as the former denotes travel or immigration to the Land of Israel, so the latter refers to travel or emigration from it. Its verbal equivalent of la-redet, “to descend” occurs in this sense in many places in the Bible—the first of which is in the book of Genesis, where we read that Abraham “went down” [va-yered] to Egypt to live there because famine was harsh in the land.”