Give us Your Hands - Meir Yaari

We want to create a steadfast, strong generation without illusions. Our youth must prepare for a life of toil, must face its responsibilities in the diaspora and in the homeland. The task of redeeming waste-land, rocky soil, sand-dunes, and desert areas can be achieved only by the mighty hands of the courageous...

Yes, to develop the mind and the heart, the will power and the character, let there be joy and faith. But the ultimate goal of our activities is not here. Here is only the preparation for a Shomer-halutz life. Here is the potential energy to be converted to a life of labor.

The Shomer in the Jewish homeland is not a day-dreamer. Our forefathers have dreamt for tens of centuries. We must raise a generation of activists, we must return to the tradition of Jewish fighters.

What we need are not pen and ink, not odes and hymns, not confessions and lyrics. What we need are saws and hoes, first and foremost - hands! Give us your hands! You still live in a world of ideas and books. We must live six days in the world of reality and toil and celebrate Shabbat on only one day of the week. Only through work and activity shall we consecrate the name of the Shomer. We must be guided by realism and not romanticism...

The Hehalutz Movement - Berl Katznelson

Pioneering, halutziut, is not merely an idea and a theory; it is a way of life, essentially a personal act. We believe this to be the true harbinger of history. We hope it will be the foundation on which our future will be built. It is an act whose roots lie deep within the community, yet it remains essentially personal and individual. In this lies the true strength of the entire aliya movement, the main source of our hope for the future. And this is what makes every single individual so very important for the movement that knows no conquest other than the conquest of one's self, the individual struggling with his own world and gaining mastery over it.

This is the one characteristic which distinguishes our movement from all others - the striving to build the nation's future by rebuilding the individual's life. This is the reason our movement really know no leaders and no led - only people, living and working people, individuals whose life and work go to make up the national wealth. This is perhaps the only movement in our time that has at its core no leadership, no fixed platform, only the life and the work of its individual components. The individual is its central aim - his life, his experiences, his failures and his successes, his weaknesses and his strengths.

If the Hehalutz movement is to remain true to its essential character, it will retain the personal striving toward pioneering work as its central aim. To unveil the hidden forces that live within the individual, to bring them into the open by education and training, to focus them on deeds of purity, friendship and mutual trust - this is what the work of our movement is really about.

The New Man - Martin Buber

The Halutz is the new type of man born of the movement of Jewish renaissance. In him that movement finds its complete expression. The test of every national movement is its ability to produce this type of man, and his ability to control the forces of history and fulfill his historical task. Through his very personality he helps to effect a decisive change in the life of his people. His is a two-fold task: external liberation from the yoke of strangers, and inner liberation and recovery of spiritual independence, refusing to live on foreign cultures.

Socialism, My Temple - Yosef Chaim Brenner

I am a socialist. To me Socialism is the holy of holies. The ideal of ideals. All other ideals have no warrant except when bound up with Socialism. What value is there in beauty and art at a time when all humanity is sinking in a swamp of ugliness and degradation? What sense is there to science and moral preaching, to deep emotion and exalted concepts at a time when there are tens of thousands of human beings who live on moldy bread, without a ray of light or hope, at a time when human dignity is being crushed by the iron heel, when a man's thoughts can be bought for money, when human tears flow like flood waters, and the slaughter of human beings is like the dying of the flies in the fall. In the light of all this what values is there to man's conquest of nature, to advancement of culture, to poetry, philosophy and the like? And what meaning can there be to all human existence, to all of man's spiritual striving and ideals? It is only my faith in Socialism, my hope in a free and bright future that gives value and meaning to human existence, social progress, and cultural development.

Socialism is my temple, my comforter in everyday experience, that creates harmony out of the chaos of the world and protects all that is dear to me and close to my heart. Only in the field of Socialism do I find a basis to my cultural activities and life, aware that through my work, together with thousands and tens of thousands of others do I bring nearer the day of redemption.

However, in addition to all this I am also a Jew, connected through thousands of fibers to my people. I am part of it, flesh of its flesh. Strong and solid are the bonds that tie my life to it. Dear to me are the Jewish masses to whom I would want to devote all my life, my work, all of my energy and talent. I would like to pour into them all the warmth of my heart, all the blaze of my soul, for the social ideals that I have. The Jewish community serves as the land upon which I can labor, the framework within which I can work. I am an integral part of this community; I grew up in its bosom; within it I live. It is within Jewish life that I want to work for my socialist ideals. I cannot fight for Socialism within the non-Jewish society, for within it I cannot find satisfaction. Only within a Jewish environment can I rise to heights of fruitful creation, only there can I reach self-fulfillment. All my inner satisfaction is derived from working for the Jewish masses and through them for a Socialist world.

Essence of Halutziut - Haim Arlosoroff

The very character of a movement like Hehalutz means action, not formula. Ideas, convictions, programs, - whatever may be their character - are here not to be preached, but to be lived up to. Nothing more, nothing less. Zionism is neither a political platform to which one subscribes, nor a social club which one joins, nor a fundraising machinery, nor even a party organization for its own sake. Zionism is primarily the movement of those whose belief in the future of the Jewish Nation in Palestine is strong and sincere enough to make them throw their own lives into the scale, wherever they are called upon to do so.

Zionism is not the result of needs that change constantly nor of casual circumstances. It is the outcome of deeply rooted, historical forces affecting Jewish life. It has outlived tyrannies and regimes; it has overcome many temporary setbacks and critical periods. Turning Zionism into reality cannot be achieved by mechanical devices within a specific period of time. There will be a fifth, a ninth, a tenth Aliyah. There will be a fiftieth anniversary of Hehalutz. And the movement will live on. Once it has risen, it cannot come to a standstill until its aim is achieved and a free, laboring Jewish People is rooted in Palestinian soil. Is not the rise of a movement like this in itself proof of the amazing vigor and vitality, a sign and promise that we shall live and not die?