We begin this prayer with the words: “Sound the great shofar.” Note that here we offer no reason for our request, we just state it. In fact, the wording is closer to a demand than to a humble request. And we ask for no less than a musical fanfare accompanied by a flying banner. This is much more than just a simple request for God to bring us back to our land. We are all familiar with the emotional experience of hearing shofar blasts on Rosh Hashanah (the Day of Judgment), when this piercing sound spiritually awakens us to our true inner selves. When we sleep, we are passive, but when we are awake, we are active, able to take control of our lives and express our true selves. The same analogy applies to living in exile, where we are as if asleep, versus living in Israel, where we are comparatively so much more spiritually awake. Returning to the Land of Israel is true liberation for the Jewish people, and the sound of the shofar signals our freedom. It means having the freedom to be who we are in our own land rather than living as strangers in a strange land. Outside of the Land of Israel, we are displaced, like an uprooted tree replanted in the wrong climate. Only in the Land of Israel can a Jew naturally be who he or she was meant to be. “Lift up a banner…” we continue. The thought of returning home is so joyful that we are envisioning a parade with great fanfare. This idea parallels the words we recite just before the morning Shema, “Bring us in peace from the four corners of the earth and lead us upright to our land.” With this request we affirm that we do not want to leave exile just because the host nations do not want us in their land, and we have no choice but to go to Israel. Rather, we want to return home with excitement and joy, reclaiming our right to independent nationhood, eager to fulfill our mission and destiny. We ask that we leave exile proudly, not as bent-over Jews who would have preferred to stay in the Diaspora. No, we want our return to be a celebration of our self-actualization. We are not talking here about the New York City “Israel Parade,” where thousands of Jews march in support of Israel but are not yet ready or able to actually go there. We are talking about the ultimate Israel parade, where we actually parade ourselves out of New York (and everywhere else, for that matter) and board a flight to Israel. To go home is what we are praying for because the Land of Israel is where we Jews are supposed to be. Only in Israel can we reach our true potential. Coming home to Israel is a dream come true. As long as Jews are in exile, we represent just a religion, but not the priestly people—“the light to the nations” —that we were meant to be. Only in Israel, our homeland, can we fulfill our national destiny. Just as an individual cannot exist in this world without a body, so too, a nation cannot exist without its own land. As the body is to the soul, so the Land of Israel is to the collective national soul of the Jewish people.