Page 23 - Issue 19

movement chanichim are encouraged to develop an
image of reality as it is today, to ask questions about it
and criticize it, in the fiercest terms possible. In the
youth movement, youth are to be seen and heard; they
are to create a space of their own, a lookout point that
allows them to observe existing society, its iniquities and
injustices. And at the same time youth movement
members are not permitted to despair - they are
demanded to create an image of a better reality, one that
they dream of, one that they educate their chanichim
towards. Hagshama then is an ideal and an act: an
attempt to continue sketching
out both images of reality (the
present and the dreamed-of)
while striving to minimize the
gap between them.

What does it mean then that
the spirit of Israel is the spirit
of Hagshama? According to Buber, the attempt is the
elimination of the rift between spirit and life - between
the ideal and the reality. He warns that we can fall into
the trap of ideology. Ideology occurs where the ideal
remains in the heavens, higher than life, ‘hovering over
it’, so much so that it in fact serves as a justification for
the rift. That is, the dream of the better world is so far
removed from present reality that it ‘thrills and comforts
us, but does not obligate [us]’. We gladly teach ideology,

since as an ideology it does not demand anything of us.
With ideology, we do not need to change anything about