Youth prove dialogue key to Jewish unity

With a Jewish community of fewer than 10,000 people, Habonim Dror Aotearoa and Bnei Akiva New Zealand operate out of a single location. On paper, the two movements are ideologically opposed – one built on Labour-Zionist, secular-socialist foundations, the other on Religious-Zionist principles and Torah v’Avodah.

Yet madrichim and chanichim move between both movements, help run each other’s events, and grow up treating this as unremarkable. Neither movement has softened its politics. The community’s size is simply not large enough to sustain two self-sufficient worlds.

We didn’t grow up in that community. Australia has a Jewish population roughly 10 times the size of New Zealand’s, with a community large enough to allow our organisations to thrive independently, as silos, most of the time. We come from two of Australia’s Zionist youth movements – Hineni and Habonim Dror. These are organisations that sit in very different places on the religious and political spectrum. This year, at Bogsem, we found ourselves asking the same question New Zealand answers every year out of necessity: How can ideologically opposed youth movements build something meaningful together?

Bogsem (bogrim seminar) brought together 80 madrichim from across the religious and political spectrum of the Australasian Zionist youth movements, alongside other organisations actively engaging 18–23-year-olds. Religious and secular, left and right – movements that disagree with each other on almost everything, except that a Jewish future in Australia matters enough that we volunteer years of our lives to building it.

Shabbat was one of the seminar’s points of real tension, but also where it provided the clearest picture of what unity can look like. For the seminar to work, it was critical to create a shomer Shabbat environment in which halachic observances were upheld, while ensuring that those who do not keep Shabbat still felt that the space belonged to them. Rather than force one form of observance, we ran two prayer services in parallel.

The Orthodox service, led jointly by Hineni and Bnei Akiva, was full of spirit, with leaders sharing each other’s tunes and traditions to create an inspired and unique spiritual environment. At the same time, Habonim and Netzer – one humanist movement and one progressive – jointly ran a service of their own, joined by Betar, Jazy and Tzofim. They respected each other’s unique Jewish connections, shared songs and created an equally electric atmosphere.

Unity was never about making everyone pray the same way in the same room. It was about sharing one Shabbat and one community, with both services taking place without either feeling like an accommodation. We concluded Shabbat in the same spirit: with a shared tish and Havdalah, where every movement chose a song that mattered to them.

Shabbat was not the only place where this tension emerged. Ideological disagreement is a constant reality in such a diverse environment. Place people from across the political and religious spectrum in a room and ask them to talk about Judaism, Israel or Zionism, and you can usually expect a shouting match – or polite avoidance of the subject altogether. Yet the discussions that worked best at the seminar were those where disagreement was not treated as a threat, and where the goal was not to convince the person across from you, but to understand what placed them there.

Our differences created opportunities for rich discourse and learning, while we united around a common goal: educating Jewish youth and instilling lifelong skills and values. Understanding and respecting each other’s ideologies is a stepping stone towards working together on that common goal, and AZYC’s Bogsem gave us the opportunity to do exactly that.

Overall, Bogsem was an incredible demonstration of what collaboration and unity can look like in our community. Those who attended walked away with a stronger sense of understanding and confidence in their role as madrichim.

A campsite full of young Jewish leaders from across the political and religious spectrum, sitting in a room together, sharing a Shabbat and engaging in productive dialogue is proof that the Jewish community does not need ideological uniformity.

What we need, rather, is a shared commitment to being in that room together to begin with.