Why Israel? - למה דוקא ארץ ישראל?

Why Davka Aretz-Yisrael???

Written by: Cleveland

Goal: Aretz-Yisrael and Am-Yisrael are always in the head-lines-why? What's so special about us?

Suggested Age: Aleph

Suitable for Shabbat

Materials: a bunch of articles that have to do with Israel (not from Israeli newspapers) (check nytimes.com); make a timeline of am yisrael b'eretz yisrael, starting from Avraham, and split it up; map of the world; pictures of places in Israel 

Instructions:

# Put all the articles in the middle and ask every two Chanichim to choose an article, to read it and to explain what the article is about and why they think that such a thing interests the whole world, why do the CNN/NBC write about Israel?

# Play the game which one kid has to talk about a subject for one minute without stopping, give one Chanich an interesting subject which he has a lot of things to tell about and give another Chanich a boring subject (for example: my little finger nail or something like that.)

Ask the chanichim whose speech was more interesting? Who did they pay more attention, why?

We want them to say that they listened more to the interesting subject because there was a real issue here to talk about.

# Madrich conclusion: Am-Yisrael is like a good actor on a good stage, which is Aretz-Yisrael. When a nation has a meaningful job in this world everyone is listening to them, but when a bad actor is on the stage he can’t stay there for long because no one is interested in what that he has to say. Am-Yisrael exists more time than any other nation because our job never ended, we still have important stuff to give to the world and thats why everyone is watching us.

# Show to the chanichim a picture of the worlds map and point to Israel.

Is it a big country comparing to other countries? (you can show them how big is U.S.A) what is so special about this country that Hashem chose it?

·                   We saw how small Israel is but do you know how many kinds of view we have there? Show your Chanichim pictures of Chermon, Eilat, Galil, Golan, and Yerushalaim and explain that in nowhere else we can find so many different points of view in such a small place.

·                   We also have special qualities such as the dead sea that we use for many things, we have the lowest place in the whole world (the dead sea), the red sea has also special things in it, we have the only Machtesh in the whole world (and we have two of them!)

#Give your Chanichim cards with times in our history and tell them to stand by the order of the years that those things happened in.

·       Explain them that our History is in this land, and we can see it every time during our history Am-Yisrael coming back to Aretz-Yisrael because this is where we belong to. We can start with Avraham, the first Jew, Hashem told him to drop everything that he knew and to come to Aretz-Yisrael, it continued with Yetziat-Mitzraim with the Galot and of course with the beginning of our Medina.

Conclusion: Am-Yisrael belongs to Aretz-Yisrael, only from there we can do our mission, everyone is watching us because we really have an influence on the world and because of that, our land is so special that everyone wants it and that's why the whole world is interested in whats going on in Aretz-Yisrael.