Zion and the Youth - Martin Buber

The youth are humanity's eternal possibility for happiness. This possibility occurs repeatedly and humanity misses it again and again. Generations of people in their twenties return to the stage again and again with the passion of absolute yearning in their hearts, devoted to ideals, ready and waiting to break through the blocked gates of Eden.

Nothing stands between this generation and the fulfillment of its obligation but the deed itself; and hence they prepare themselves. But in the hour of preparation an abundance of inferior and unimportant goals from the society around them take control of the youths' souls. Vain urges of egotism and the urges for excellence and power take control of them. Their environment preaches the perception that the 'facts' are stronger than the ideals and that we are subjects in a sequence of events that we cannot change, shape, or control, and that the aspiration to escape from the rituals of the all-powerful “greater good” will turn the rebel into an outsider from society and a hallucinatory person. He will become a man that lives a life of celibacy, who isolates himself from society, and is unsuccessful. This preaching overcomes the longings and devotion; the pure force, which was going to actualize a life of truth on earth, was coerced into becoming a burden of lies and the burden of the soulless walking on the sidelines. And the remaining few rebels, who were abandoned and left behind by their friends become – as was foretold – the exceptions that do not succeed in life. And again the empty mechanism was saved; it was proven again that inertia is stronger than the flight of the free spirit, which aspires to legislate more exalted laws. And again humanity did not receive the achievement and the chance that fate summoned for it, and a new generation rises up, a new youth, and what had happened to its predecessors will happen to it too.

However, the uniqueness of times in which great internal and external crises occur in the lives of nations and humanity as a whole, is that they refuse to surrender to the decree, they rebel against the law of inertia and dare to save the youthful vigor that did not yet disintegrate, and from it they dare to grow an act of revolution, an act of renewal. These times speak to the youth with lungs of fire, they demand from the youth, even command of it, not to surrender, to face the evil, to save the soul, and to do its deeds. And the youth listens.

This youth stretches via great exertion and shakes itself free from the coercion of the empty mechanism, and is not tempted by it. This youth dares to do what is beyond. It performs an act like Yehoshua in Givon: it delays the sun from rising in the sky until its endeavor is completed. It prolongs its youth by one hour, one great hour, and performs what is necessary for the turning point to occur.