Reflections after seeing the documentary, Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, 2010
There was a time, in the shadow of the pogroms of Russia in the late 19th century, when the situation of the Jews in Czarist Russia became so intolerable that their sufferings could only improve through work on a dry, barren land in the Middle East. That land of course was part of their ancestry but it had not seemed habitable until the secular religion of hard labor had taken hold among the Ashkenazim – the Jews of Europe.
This was the spirit in which the kibbutzim were born. And it was no coincidence that the people who arrived first came from the same landscape where socialism had found its most fertile soil. There was a moment where a people pushed to the brink in one cold land were able to imagine a radical life experiment in the new one where lavender could grow year round. German Jews, too felt the call with time. “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” Goethe’s Mignon poem asked, and Palestine answered affirmatively.
The early days of the kibbutz were a world fashioned in the image of A. D. Gordon, the old man with that hyper-masculine romanticism that superseded Hemingway. He came from the Orthodox world in Podolia and seemed to live that life for a time (a young marriage to a cousin, seven kids, etc) and then decided that the Jew’s salvation was not to be found in religion but in hard agrarian labor. He became part of the Hibat Zion movement and went to Palestine at an absurdly early year, 1904. His thoughts were deconstructive and constructive at once: he wanted to break down the walls of the ghetto through every potato plant he planted, as it were. No more nation, but rather, nature. No more living frum, but living on a farm. He was spiritual, messianist without the need for a messiah. One could imagine Gordon in a mystical hour following the footsteps of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in practicing hitbodadut, a solitary communing with nature as a path to God. Then, later returning to his socialist commune where the fruits of his labor were shared with his community. For Gordon, these were the organic bonds that could regenerate the life of Jews where nation states and religious sects had failed them.
(So everything I know about A. D. Gordon came from a professor of mine at Chicago, Menachem Brinker, who grew up himself in a kibbutz. It was a pleasant surprise to see him interviewed in the documentary. It’s been nearly 7 years since I have seen him in person.)
The good parts about the kibbutz were all the things you would imagine: your ego melting into the group, relief from the vicissitudes of your own narcissistic self-image. Against the insecurities of capitalism and the pressure of carving out some private, personal happy home life (which is never as easy as it sounds), the kibbutz offered you a New Jew identity: part pioneer, part farmer, and a little bit of utopian idealism. And things grew: houses, crops, and families. The self-discipline and hard work made good soldiers out of the kibbutzniks, which was incredibly useful in the uncertain days when only war was able to ensure Israel’s survival. The kibbutz became the spirit of the nation.
But the problems followed: the kibbutz never integrated the new immigrants to Israel from Arab lands. They simply did not belong to the fantasyland of the Jews of Ashkenaz and had no stake in the survival of the utopian project. Despite the fact that women were relieved of the household duties, children were raised communally (and away from the parents, except for a half hour visit per day, which both children and parents described as cruel and confusing), women did not prosper in the kibbutz society. Many kibbutzim had not invested their money well and began to decline. The third generation fled in droves into regular Israeli society. By the 1980s, kibbutzim had become “poor and collective, like Russia.” It was limiting, it was not something they were proud of anymore, even if they believed in the cause. One interviewee in the documentary spoke of not fitting into the social norm in the kibbutz and why he needed to escape: “I felt something suffocating there. I was not strong enough. Kibbutz life invites strong people. Assertive enough to retain their kind of individualistic self-understanding and yet to participate and to care for other people. And to live this beautiful life. It is very hard to live beautifully.” Most importantly, Israel itself had changed into a more stridently capitalist society and the kibbutz lost its place. As one kibbutznik in the documentary commented, “Today, the I in Israel is the most important element.”
Some of the existing kibbutzim survive because they have a thriving industry that sustains them. These are, we learn the documentary, the only kibbutzim that have remained truly socialist. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider that. Where there is a source of wealth that keeps its members rich, the kibbutz stays socialistic (salaries are turned over the kibbutz and reapportioned equally for each member) and exclusive. In other words, it’s not open to all.
Other kibbutzim have attracted back members because of the sense of community offered for families with young children. Probably anyone can understand why a wider community network is needed in those childbearing years since it is true that it takes a village, and not just an isolated, single married couple, to raise a child. Kibbutzim also offer an alternative landscape than the soul-crushing direction of contemporary Israeli politics today. Yiftah Goldman of Kibbutz Tamuz (an urban Kibbutz in Beit Shemesh) offers this: “What we [the kibbutzim] are doing is true Zionism. Unfortunately, Zionism came to be identified with what the settlers on the West Bank are doing. This is not true Zionism, it never was real Zionism.”
Communal life and Jewish life are no strangers to each other. “Life is with people” is the title of that canonical work by Mark Zborowski on the cultural life of the East European shtetl. There is a sense of purpose and sustainability in a collective human project that is still visible in the eyes of those interviewed in the film, even if they left the kibbutz years ago. This is clearly a strong alternative to crafting an entire identity out of one’s job and income. But it might be a one or two generation phenomenon and not capable of heralding an end-time in history. Just like religious Jewish communities are not getting any closer to moshiach. But we are still working on all that.
http://youtu.be/ht8B_OI2nMo