Shiurim - A Chanich's Perspective and an Announcement

Our most recent shiyur (class) module was called Dilemmas of Nation Building. In it, we explored (as you might have guessed) different dilemmas that the chalutzim and other Zionist founders of Israel faced in the process of nation building; namely, the three main pre-state militias (the Hagana, Etzel/the Irgun, and Lechi), failed aliyot to Palestine (The Exodus, SS St. Louis) under the British Mandate (White Paper of 1939), Jewish Immigration 1948-1951 (the Law of Return, Operations Magic Carpet, Ezra, and Nechemia, and expulsion from Egypt), and many other interesting topics that I would highly recommend reading into. 

To go more into depth about just one of the things we talked about: we juxtaposed the ideas of two leading Zionist thinkers, Vladimir Jabotinsky (a Revisionist who founded Betar) and Martin Buber. While Jabotinsky believed that we should found a state in whatever way we can, and then deal with the social problems later, Buber believed that we first should make our society better, and then establish the Jewish state. In the end, we rushed a little - maybe as was necessary, because we had post-Holocaust world sympathy and nationalistic fervor from Diaspora Jewry - to create a state, as Jabotinsky said we should. This, of course, left us with many questions that we both discussed in the shiyur and walked away with: Is it better that we have our state with its problems, or should we have held off on the founding of Israel until we had a better foundation? Was that our only chance to establish the Jewish state, or could we have done better? With the way our world functions, is it possible to do better? And finally, now that we understand the foundations that Israel is built on, how can we work to make Israel a better place, a light unto the nations?

Lior Bar-El, Workshop 62, Gilboa

Below, pictures of chanichim gathering before a class starts. 

We are also happy to announce the location of the kaveret houses. Sarah and Yoav's chanichim will be located in Karmi'el, a town in the center of the Galilee. Carmi and Yael's chanichim will be located in Rishon Letzion, just south of Tel Aviv.