Posted: 16-April-2007 at 4:15am | IP Logged

Ok, so Bnei Akiva obviously pushes aliyah, first and foremost. But it would seem to me, that what we best TRAIN for is hadracha. So here's the question: Is that an ideal situation? Must a good chaver tnua be a madrich? If not, are we leaving enough room within the tnua for those not inclined to hadracha? Is that where we meant to put the emphasis?

(While it's occured to me before, this question was really inspired by an article by Avidan Freedman in kadima. On this website, under chinuch, go to publications, kadima, Oct 05 issue, "Hachshara in the 21st Century". Totally worth reading that, and other stuff on there if you've never noticed it before.)

Posted: 04-June-2007 at 8:43am | IP Logged

Right, I was at the veida, and I remember them presenting it. It was also discussed in the "Snifim and Hadracha" committee. I think the idea was to find ways to make other work within the tnua as "presitgious" as hadracha is considered.

Chaim, you mention that some sniffim have very active chevraya bet activities, but I'm not sure that's what I was thinking of. Is what you have in mind primarily social and educational? I was thinking that there has to be other ways besides hadracha for people to give back and do something productive for the tnua. Like, maybe form committees for Israel activism, fundraising, chesed, publicity, Snif librarian (Just thought of that one. They could organize lots of educational resources for madrichim or something), maybe someone could do specifically aliyah oriented research and become an expert for people to consult, you could have one person in charge of logistics who could organize housing/transportation/meals/etc. for shabbatons and make sure there's food and a room for snif each week. That's just off the top of my head.

I think these roles could just provide a different outlet for leadership, that might be more appropriate for some people than hadracha, but would still allow them to be active and productive chavrei tnua.

Chaim, why do you think is hadracha to be prefered over any other of these leadership roles?

Posted: 26-September-2007 at 3:14am | IP Logged

Sometimes it's tough for those of us involved in Hadracha to understand this, but not everyone wants to do hadracha. Some people would rather have tafkidim that don't involve weekly commitments or getting up in front of chanichim.

When I was growing up in Detroit, one way we solved this issue was that people doing jobs other than hadracha were given a status comparable to a Rosh Chevraya, rather than to a madrich. So if you were picked to be in charge of Special Events, or Chesed, or Pirsomet, you were in the tzevet bachir.