When I was a kid, one of my favorite songs to sing in school was “Eretz Yisrael Sheli,” my beautiful land of Israel. You can listen to it below!
It is a simple children’s song, the kind where each verse adds a new line you have to remember, with hand motions to match. Who built? Who planted? All of us together. A house here, a tree there, a road, a bridge. Almost thirty years later, my own kids sing that same song. Except now they are singing it in Israel. Today we are studying the book of Jeremiah for Bible Month. Rabbi Pesach Wolicki’s conversation on Jeremiah is one I would urge you to watch in full. He talks about Jeremiah as the loneliest figure in the Bible, a prophet who did not just deliver a message and move on but lived inside the tragedy he foresaw for forty years. It is a moving, personal conversation, and I am only going to touch on one piece of it here. Go watch the rest.
The piece I want to focus on is chapter 29. Jeremiah is writing to the Jewish exiles who have just been dragged off to Babylon. Their home is destroyed. Their identity, their entire sense of nationhood, was tied to the land of Israel, and now they are sitting in a foreign empire, grieving everything they lost. And what does Jeremiah tell them to do? He tells them to build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit, take wives and have sons and daughters, and seek the welfare of the place where they have been sent.
This is, as Rabbi Pesach points out, one of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice in history. Jeremiah was not telling them their loss did not matter. He had spent his whole life mourning it. But he was telling them that grief cannot be the whole of your life. Build. Plant. Marry. Have children. Live with dignity, because the exile will end, but only if you are still here, still rooted, still capable of building something, when it does.
This was the blueprint that carried the Jewish people through two thousand years of exile. And it is also, it turns out, a blueprint for ordinary life right now, in Israel, in 2026.
My son has tomato, pepper, and carrot plants growing on our windowsill. A friend of mine just broke ground on a house she is building. Two of my own children, a son and a daughter, were born here, in the land Jeremiah was writing about three thousand years ago. Build houses. Plant gardens. Sons and daughters. It reads like a checklist, and somehow, in my own small life, in this particular week, I am living through almost every line of it.
Here is where Rabbi Pesach’s conversation gets even more remarkable. He points to a prophecy in chapter 16, where God tells Jeremiah that a day is coming when people will no longer swear by the God who took Israel out of Egypt, but by the God who gathered the exiles from the four corners of the earth. The ingathering, Jeremiah says, will eclipse the Exodus itself.
Think about how enormous that claim is. The Exodus had the ten plagues, the splitting of the sea, signs and wonders that happened in a flash and were written into a book for all time. And Jeremiah is saying that the future ingathering of Israel will be even greater than that.
How could anything top the splitting of the sea? Rabbi Pesach’s answer is profoundly simple, and, simply profound. The Exodus was one nation moved out of Egypt in one dramatic sweep. The ingathering we are living through now is happening one family at a time, from every corner of the earth, over decades, against every rule of how history is supposed to work. A scattered, exiled people, conquered and dispersed for two thousand years, simply does not come back. Nations do not survive that. And yet here we are.
There is a teaching in the Talmud that the last person to recognize a miracle is the person it is happening to. When you are inside the miracle, you only see yesterday and tomorrow, the ordinary texture of your own life, and you get tricked into thinking it is normal. A windowsill garden. A new house going up down the street. A baby born in Ichilov Hospital. None of this feels like a miracle while you are living it. It feels like Tuesday.
But it is not Tuesday. It is the fulfillment of a promise made by a man who sat alone for forty years, grieving a destruction he could not stop, who told a broken and exiled people to keep building anyway because the story was not over. It was not over then, and the proof is that I am sitting in my home in Israel right now, writing this, while my son’s tomatoes grow on the windowsill behind me.
Here is how to keep going deeper this Bible Month. Subscribe to The Israel Bible YouTube channel, where every day this June a new video drops, Orthodox rabbis and leading Christian voices going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible together, free, all month long.
And if a conversation like this one moved you, imagine what an entire course could do. Bible Plus gives you hundreds of hours of in-depth Torah teaching from Israel-based rabbis and scholars, the same caliber of teaching you just experienced, but going deeper into every book, every story, every prophecy. This June, annual access is just $49.99, the lowest price all year. If you want to understand the land you are living in or praying for, this is where that understanding begins.
Build houses. Plant gardens. Have sons and daughters. Jeremiah told a broken people exactly what to do while they waited for the promise to be fulfilled. We are the fulfillment. We just have to remember to notice.
