“Our historic obligation, today, is to raise ourselves from a people to a holy nation, from the covenant of Egypt to the covenant at Sinai…”

Our historic obligation, today, is to raise ourselves from a people to a holy nation, from the covenant of Egypt to the covenant at Sinai, from an existence of necessity to an authentic way of life suffused with eternal ethical and religious values, from a camp to a congregation. The task confronting the religious shivat ziyyon movement is to achieve that great union of the two covenants – Egypt and Sinai, fate and destiny, isolation and solitude. This task embraces utilizing our afflictions to improve ourselves, and spinning a web of hesed that will bind together all the parts of the people and blend them into one congregation, “one nation in the land”; it involves the readiness to pray for one’s fellow, and empathy with his joy and grief. As the end result of this self-improvement, we will achieve the holiness conferred by an existence of destiny and will ascend the mountain of the Lord. One great goal unites us all, one exalted vision sets all our hearts aflame. One Torah – the Written Torah and the Oral Torah – directs all of us toward one unified end: the realization of the vision of solitude, the vision of a camp-people that has ascended to the rank of a holy congregation-nation, bound together its fate with its destiny, and proclaims to the entire world, in the words of our ancient father, Abraham: “And I and the lad will go yonder, and we will worship and we will return to you” (Genesis 22:5).

Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Fate and Destiny: From Holocaust to the State of Israel, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Hoboken, NJ, Ktav Publishing House, 1992 & 2000), 74.