Introduction

OK, let's get down to business.

First things first. I consider myself to be a non-Messianic Religious Zionist. What this is means is that I firmly believe that the creation of the State of Israel and all the events surrounding it were and are of Divine origin. I believe that in the creation of the State there exists the potential for the coming the final redemption and the messianic era, but it has been left up to us to complete this process. Hence the terms Atchalta D'Geula and Reishit Smichat Geulateinu fit in perfectly with this ideology, i.e. something began, it's up to us to determine what that something becomes.

In the spirit of Rav Kook I believe that the secular Zionists who literally built this country from the ground up undertook a divine mission, whether or not they themselves viewed it that way. They created a magnificent physical vessel into which it was the duty of the religious world to fill it with spirituality. To a large extent, whether intentional or not, this has happened. Israel is now the center of Jewish religious life for the entire world. Something that could not have happened without the foresight and hard work of the early Zionists.

Even though many of the early Zionists rejected religion on the surface their energies where nevertheless powered by an underlying religious ethos. As the new generations of secular Zionists move further and further from this ethos the engine that drove their fathers is slowly petering out. This combined with booming religious demographics is rapidly changing the social fabric of the country. The only ideology truly positioned to bridge the transition from a secular driven Jewish society to a religiously driven one are the religious Zionists. The recognition of this fact, or lack thereof, will ultimately decided the fate of this endeavor.