"It's time to go home."

Okay... but where is home, exactly?

I don’t post AI-generated content here (except images). But on a whim this morning, I opened Gemini and entered a prompt to create a short story. The result (below) dramatizes the central question of this Substack: Do Jews have a future in the Diaspora? Although the narrative is a bit formulaic, it still hit a nerve in me, which is why I want to share it with you.

This fictional scenario is highly unlikely to become fact in the United States, but is it possible? Yes, I think so. This short story rings true because Gemini’s database contains a digital record of human history, which includes many meltdowns far worse than the one depicted below.

The rain hitting the dark glass of the Bethesda diner looked like mercury in the sodium streetlights. On the small screen mounted above the counter, the ticker for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was frozen in a muted red plunge, a grim monument to a week where three regional banks had collapsed, and the national grid had flickered twice. Outside, the air felt thin, electric with the kind of suburban anxiety that turns neighbors into hoarders.

David sat in the booth, staring into a mug of black coffee he hadn’t touched in twenty minutes. Across from him, Mark was reading his Bible with a quiet, practiced reverence, his thumb tracing the margin of a page from the Book of Isaiah.

They had been friends since their sons played Little League together at Cabin John Park. They agreed on almost everything that mattered politically, including an unyielding devotion to the survival and defense of Israel. David, a secular Jew whose grandfather had fled Warsaw in 1938, saw Israel as the ultimate life insurance policy for a people who knew history’s habit of repeating itself. Mark, an elder at a Bible fellowship up in Rockville, saw Israel as the clock on God’s wall, ticking down toward a grand, redemptive finale.

“It’s not just a correction, David,” Mark said softly, closing his Bible and placing both hands flat on the laminate table. “The financial system is fracturing. The supply chains are breaking down. When society tears at the seams like this, the scapegoating always starts. You know who they blame first.”

David sighed, his shoulders tight. “I know the news, Mark. I saw the graffiti on the synagogue in Silver Spring yesterday. I’m not blind.”

“Then don’t be blind to what God is doing,” Mark leaned in, his voice warm, heavy with a genuine, agonizing concern. “The Lord is shaking the nations, David. He’s pulling the rug out from under the diaspora so His people will look up. You don’t belong here anymore. None of you do. It’s time to go home. Make Aliyah. Take Sarah and the kids and go to Jerusalem.”

David looked at Mark’s eyes. There was no malice there, no hidden threat — only an overwhelming, affectionate urgency. Mark had spent the last five years raising money through his church to charter flights for Russian and Ethiopian Jews moving to the Negev. He loved Israel. He loved David.

“Mark, this is my home,” David said quietly. “My law firm is here. My parents are buried in B’nai Israel Memorial Gardens. My kids are in college in Maryland. Israel is a country I support, a state I love, but my roots are in this soil.”

“This soil is eroding!” Mark insisted, his voice rising just enough to draw a glance from the weary diner counterman. “I love you, man. I’m telling you this out of love. The diaspora was a temporary wilderness. God’s plan doesn’t end with Jews living comfortably in Maryland while the world falls apart. He wants you in Zion. Every single prophecy points to the gathering of the exiles before the end. If you stay here, you’re standing in the path of the storm.”

David shook his head, a cold knot tightening in his chest. “I’m an American, Mark. And being an American Jew means fighting for my place right here, even when things get dark. I don’t exist to fulfill a chapter in your end-times manual.”

The conversation ended in a tense, polite silence, both men leaving enough money on the table to cover a meal neither had eaten.

Over the next three weeks, the country unravelled further. Fuel rationing began. Protests turned into nightly riots in Baltimore and Washington. On the radio, radical commentators on both the far right and the far left began floating familiar, toxic conspiracy theories about financial cabals and dual loyalties.

Mark stopped calling David to chat about baseball. Instead, he started texting links to Aliyah grant applications, airline contact numbers, and articles about rising anti-Semitic incidents in North America. To Mark, every falling stock, every smashed storefront, and every hateful banner was a divine billboard shouting at his friend to flee.

Then came the night of the rally.

A coalition of local civic groups organized a community defense meeting at a high school gymnasium in Bethesda to address the growing neighborhood break-ins and rising political violence. David was on the organizing committee. When he walked into the packed, humid gym, he was surprised to see Mark standing near the bleachers with a group from his church.

For an hour, the meeting proceeded with tense order. But as the floor opened for public comments, a group of outside agitators—young men wearing unmarked armbands, emboldened by the economic freefall — pushed their way into the back of the gym. One of them took the microphone, his voice echoing off the hardwood floors as he blamed the economic crash on “foreign loyalists” and “bankers who belong in the Middle East, not Maryland.”

The gym erupted into shouting. Pushing matches broke out near the doors.

David stepped up toward the podium to try to restore order, calling into the microphone for calm. From the back of the room, one of the agitators hurled a heavy metal folding chair toward the stage.

It never hit David.

Mark had moved instantly. The moment the crowd surged, Mark had stepped between the bleachers and the stage, placing his large frame in front of his friend. The chair caught Mark flush across the shoulder and forearm, knocking him down onto one knee with a sickening crack.

The police swarmed the back doors, clearing the gym with sirens and megaphones. Within ten minutes, the room was empty except for the officers, the paramedics, and David, who was kneeling on the gym floor beside Mark as a medic wrapped his friend’s fractured arm in a splint.

“You idiot,” David whispered, his hands trembling as he helped hold Mark’s ice pack. “What were you doing?”

Mark winced, a pained smile breaking through his pale, sweating face. “I told you... I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

David sat back on his heels, breathing heavily. He looked at the shattered folding chair, then at his friend. “You really believe it, don’t you? You think this whole country is burning down just to force me onto a plane.”

“I think the world is broken, David,” Mark said softly, his voice raspy from the pain. “And I know where God wants you to be safe. I took that hit tonight because I love you. But I can’t stand between you and the world forever. Please. Go to Israel. Help bring the Kingdom.”

David reached out and put a firm hand on Mark’s good shoulder. The gratitude in David’s heart was immense, tangled with an agonizing, irreconcilable grief.

“Mark,” David said, his voice steady and completely clear. “Thank you for taking that hit for me. You’re my brother. But you have to listen to me now.”

David paused, looking into his friend’s eyes.

“You took that hit because you’re my neighbor, right here in Bethesda,” David said. “And I stayed in this gym tonight because this is my home. If I leave now — if I pack up my family and flee just because things are burning — then the people who threw that chair win. Israel is a refuge, Mark, but it isn’t a chute for me to escape my responsibilities here. I am staying. I’m going to help rebuild this town, and I’m going to protect my synagogue right here on Old Georgetown Road.”

Mark stared at him for a long moment. The pain in his arm was obvious, but the deeper pain in his eyes was the realization that he could not move his friend’s soul. The prophecy he lived by demanded an exodus; the loyalty David lived by demanded a stand.

“You’re stubborn, David,” Mark whispered, looking down at his bandaged arm. “God help you, you’re stubborn.”

When the paramedics brought the stretcher, David walked alongside it out into the cool, dark Maryland night. The rain had cleared, leaving the pavement wet and reflecting the red lights of the emergency vehicles. They stood together on the same patch of American ground — one waiting for the end of the world, the other determined to salvage it — bound by a brotherhood that neither could break, and a future neither could agree upon.

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Postscript

There’s clearly a hunger out there, and real activism among Christians, for Jews (most Jews? all Jews?) to leave our current homes and return to our ancestral one.

Which makes me wonder: How and why did Walter Russell Mead (below) miss this? Or why does he minimize it? Best I can tell, this yearning for an “ingathering of the exiles” is no small thing.