Time to end faribles with Habonim

“Where’s the milk? Where’s the honey?!” exclaimed Moshe Rabbeinu upon seeing eretz Yisrael for the first time. 

One might experience the same phenomenon when entering the gorgeous Habonim campsite in Onrus. “Where’s the burning Israeli flag? Where are the condoms sold at the tuckshop?!” 

I’m quite happy to report that Habonim isn’t the bogeyman painted by Shabbat table gossip. In my year as head of the organisation, I have heard it all. And although I’m coming at this with humour, in all honesty, it hurts me to see a robust organisation which has had tens of thousands of Jewish South Africans go through its gates hurt by nasty rumour spreading. 

Habonim is the first place that I fell in love with being Jewish. Onrus is where I became invested in Israel. What if I hadn’t gone to camp? This question fills me with dread. My confidence and Jewish identity would be non-existent. Going on camp felt like an explosion in my life. 

For the first time, I was having meaningful conversations with madrichim about topics I never knew other people were also thinking about. Camp gave me the opportunity to get off my phone and make real connections with my friends and my age group. It was the perfect mix of meaning, fun, and humour like no other. Each child who doesn’t come on machaneh feels like the death of 1 000 worlds. 

And so, to address the elephant glaring at you from this newspaper: Habonim has shrunk. We are certainly growing every year, and will reach pre-COVID-19 numbers. But it’s time for the farible with Habonim to end. We need to be responsible community members. 

In the post-7 October world, Habonim has come under attack from Al Jamah-ah and Willem Petzer over its connection to Israel. There are public calls to shut down “the Zionist camp in Onrus”. Habonim needs support from our Jewish community. Instead, the narrative from within is that we “aren’t Jewish enough”. 

Besides the fact that we are fully kosher and shomer Shabbat on machaneh, Habonim’s madrichim take great pride in its Jewish expression. From Martin Buber to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, regarding Jewish culture and history, our Jewish education is well-founded. It’s enough to experience attacks from the outside; it’s difficult when they come from home. 

We cannot be a community with only one youth movement. Our kids need healthy options for their December holidays. Without choice, we take away a foundation of connection, and we lose future committed and impassioned community leaders. 

Among our channichim and madrichim are the children of top community leaders; the heads of the South African Union of Jewish Students and the head boys and girls of our Jewish schools. We aren’t the woke vegans with blue hair; we are the people who have passed the torch down at Mifkad Eish (the closing ceremony): top chief executives; creatives and storytellers; effective activists; and of course, the builders of four proudly Habonim kibbutzim in Israel. 

I’m not a religious Jew, but I want to end on the lesson we draw from Tisha B’Av. We are taught that sinat chinam (baseless hatred) led to the destruction of the Second Temple and our two thousand-year exile. The times in which we are living feel biblical. In Israel, the divide between Kaplan Street protesters and religious nationalists is starker than ever. In the diaspora, families are broken up across ideological lines. How did we fall into the trap of sinat chinam (baseless hatred) so easily? In only a matter of a few years, the internal health of the Jewish world is suffering. Will we rise above the noise? 

• Brad Gottschalk is secretary general of Habonim Dror and chairperson of the Zionist Youth Council. Raised at King David Linksfield, he has sat on the boards of the South African Union of Jewish Students and Limmud.