Why Workshop?
Dear pre-Workshopper,
I understand that it's hard to make the decision to choose to do something else with your life that you may have never before planned on doing, until right now. I understand that you feel like you are entering into the unknown, that you are "delaying your life" by one year, that you will be slightly older than your immediate peers, and that it’s scary to think that you might forget a couple of facts that you’ve been trying so hard to keep in your head from your high school career. And believe me, I see these fears as absolutely relevant. However, I'm here to provide you with some thoughts, as a post-Workshopper, as to why you should go on Workshop. Of course, in the end, it is your choice. As a madrich, I am only here to guide you – you are the only one with the ability to take the next steps. I only ask that you challenge yourself to take some time to take a real look at yourself, your life, and your goals for the future, and ask yourself what opportunities you want to take, and which ones you want to leave behind.
I want to talk a little bit about what Workshop has allowed me to do. The first thing is that Workshop has allowed me to create a strong friend base, with people who I am confident will provide support for me if I ever need it in my future – both Habonim and non-Habonim related. For me, these people have now become my partners in my life – who are dedicated to me just as much as I am dedicated to them – where the center of our relationship isn’t school and competition.
And on the topic of confidence – as a madrich, and as a person, Workshop has made me much more confident. For example, I would never have choosen of my own volition to write this letter to you all. Or I would never have called my university to tell them they should have a Modern Hebrew class, because they don’t yet.
The third thing is, a knowledge of Israel. You know that feeling of just not being able to explain your thoughts about Israel? Or that even if you can, that someone will definitely have a better understanding of what you're talking about, and will just shut you down? Workshop gave me a really solid picture of what Israel is and what it needs, and provided me with a solid base that will help me to both understand and participate in the discourse in college and in general.
The fourth thing that Workshop has given me is a break from the 13 years of schooling that has consumed the past three fourths of my life. At such a point in our lives where we have the ability to grow so much, and change so much, I think that it’s important to put yourself in a place that not only allows for growth, but fosters it. And, from what my friends have told me, that’s not the point of college. Not that people don’t grow at college, but that Workshop actually encourages it.
And finally, Workshop has allowed me to challenge my ideas, and more importantly to challenge myself. I think it’s important to at least give yourself the opportunity to examine other ways of living your life (in this case, a kvutzati and shitufi life), and to not just let what you have always passively accepted as your future path to determine what your future path will be. Choice is not a passive word, and you should not let it be.
The fourth thing that Workshop has given me is a break from the 13 years of schooling that has consumed the past three fourths of my life. At such a point in our lives where we have the ability to grow so much, and change so much, I think that it’s important to put yourself in a place that not only allows for growth, but fosters it. And, from what my friends have told me, that’s not the point of college. Not that people don’t grow at college, but that Workshop actually encourages it.
And finally, Workshop has allowed me to challenge my ideas, and more importantly to challenge myself. I think it’s important to at least give yourself the opportunity to examine other ways of living your life (in this case, a kvutzati and shitufi life), and to not just let what you have always passively accepted as your future path to determine what your future path will be. Choice is not a passive word, and you should not let it be.
All of that was about two of the three main focuses of our movement – me (a member) and society. The third aspect of Workshop, and our movement, is the movement itself - Habonim Dror. What the movement needs now, and the direction that it is going in, is a strong hardcore – people who are strong both in their ideology and in their actions. For me and many others in my kvutza (if not all of us), Workshop allowed us to explore our movement and to create what we collectively thought was a positive culture for ourselves and direction for our movement (of course with much work left to be done). A hard idea to grasp for me still is that the ma’apilim – Workshops 58, 59, 60, 61, and now 62 – are the leaders of the movement. And that soon, your kvutza – the people who choose to take a part in it – will be too.
As for my future, my madricha told me something this year that really made me think: a shitufi life is not placing extra demands on you that pile up on top of the demands of the capitalist life that you already live in. A shitufi life provides different demands from an individualistic one, and you must choose which demands you want to meet, depending on how you choose to live. The same logic is true perhaps of all choices you will make in your life. So I don’t know how I’m going to live my life, and which demands I will choose to accept – that’s a process that I’m still going through and thinking about. But what I do know is, I’m really glad I took the opportunity to spend time legitimately thinking about my life in a way that I had never done before.
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