This summer, please God, I will make aliyah together with my wife Judith and our son, Tal. We will be joining close family already living in Israel but leaving behind, at least for the moment, other immediate family members.

Ever since I was a teen in Bnei Akiva in London, It has always been one of my greatest ambitions to make aliyah. In many ways, I regret not having built a career in Israel or bringing my children up there – though family ties in the UK, friendships, and meaningful work in the rabbinate have provided deep compensation.

The easier option for my wife and me would have been to wait several more years and then go to Israel simply to retire, but we want to be active in Israel while we are still relatively young.

I sometimes think: imagine that before your birth, you are up in Heaven in God’s great store of souls that He is planning to send down to earth to live their lives before eventually returning to Him. Would you not beg God to place you in the world at precisely this time? And indeed, God has decided, for all Jews alive today, to send us to live in His world at what is, in terms of the broad sweep of Jewish history, a nanosecond after the Shoah and an era in which we have a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel for the first time in two millennia.

What backdrop for our lives could be more meaningful, more fulfilling, more heroic? At the end of our lives, when we reflect back, one of the deepest questions facing us all will be whether we physically took part in the miracle of the Third Jewish Commonwealth.

After October 7 2023, I feel more, rather than less, impetus to make aliyah. Not because Jewish life in the UK and elsewhere in the diaspora has become less secure and comfortable, but because throwing one’s personal lot in fully with the people and state of Israel feels like the only adequate response.

In our own very small way, our family has the opportunity to help repair and rebuild – and to do so in a setting in which living Jewishly is as natural as a beautiful sunrise over Jerusalem.

Rabbi Dr Harris is the minister of Hampstead United Synagogue