Last year, French aliyah surged 45 percent. Israel’s government launched an emergency absorption program — officially titled “Aliyah of Renewal” — fast-tracking immigration for Jews fleeing France, Britain, Canada, and Australia, countries where antisemitic incidents have risen by hundreds of percentage points since October 7. Tens of thousands of Jews around the world opened immigration files in 2025. And Rabbi Moshe Sebbag, the Chief Rabbi of Paris, said publicly what many have been thinking for years: “It is clear today that there is no future for Jews in France.”
Most people watching this story see nothing more than Jews fleeing persecution — victims of hatred, in need of shelter. They are missing the point entirely.
This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, contains one of the most terrifying passages in all of Scripture. The tochacha, the rebuke, describes with harrowing precision what will befall the Jewish people if they abandon God’s covenant: disease, famine, military defeat, and ultimately exile from their land. In synagogues around the world, it is customary to read these verses in a lowered voice, almost a whisper.
We are not reciting ancient warnings. We are reading our own history.
A century ago, Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk — author of the Meshech Chochma and one of the most penetrating Orthodox minds of the modern era — added a haunting commentary to this very Torah portion. Writing before Hitler came to power, he warned that Jewish communities in Western Europe had grown so comfortable, so thoroughly absorbed into the cultures around them, that they had forgotten who they were and where they belonged. They had begun to treat Berlin as their Jerusalem.
God would not allow it, Rabbi Meir Simcha wrote. When Jews mistake exile for home — when they settle so deeply into foreign soil that they abandon their distinct identity and mission — the exile itself becomes intolerable. The very nations that had welcomed them would turn against them, and the resulting expulsion would serve as a violent reminder of what had been forgotten.
He wrote those words before a single Jew had been deported to Auschwitz.
What makes the Meshech Chochma‘s warning so difficult to dismiss is precisely what makes the tochacha itself so difficult to dismiss: its accuracy. The Torah does not speak in vague spiritual metaphors. It describes specific historical consequences — and those consequences materialized with a specificity that no merely human document could have predicted.
But if the curses were real, the promise embedded at the end of Bechukotai is equally real.
That promise appears in verses 44-45:
God will remember His covenant, the Torah says, l’einei hagoyim — in the sight of the nations.
The exile was never a private Jewish tragedy. It was always a public act, witnessed by the world. And so, the Torah is telling us, is the return.
As Rabbi Tuly Weisz writes in Universal Zionism, Scripture suggests that God’s miracles on Israel’s behalf will first be recognized by the nations of the world, even before the Jewish people themselves fully grasp what is happening. Psalm 126 captures this precisely: “Then they said among the nations, ‘God has done great things for them.'” The nations see it first.
Our Christian friends understand this. They are not supporting the Jewish return to Israel out of sentiment or politics. God made a promise to Abraham that has never been rescinded: “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3). The nations that align themselves with Israel’s restoration are not merely observers of history — they are participants in it, and they understand that participation carries its own blessing. What is unfolding in France, in Britain, in Canada today is Bechukotai‘s drama playing out before their eyes, and they want to be on the right side of it.
Rabbi Sebbag is right: there is no future for Jews in France. What the Meshech Chochma understood, and what our Christian friends supporting that return understand, is that this is not a Jewish story being watched by the world. It is the world’s story — and the Jewish return is its turning point.
