Jan 19, 2010
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All the past we leave behind;
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We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
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Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!
—Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
What must it have been like to be one of the founders of the kibbutz—to be a pioneer? That word carries such precious meaning in the history of Israel, of many nations. It invokes a sepia-tinted vision of the young people who uprooted from Europe to break the rough soil of Palestine, who dreamed not just of forging a new nation but a new way of living.
I’ve tried to imagine my way under their skins, into their minds, but the high walls of history, of language, of culture, of my own tidy 21st-century Canadian life, block the view. I suppose I’m a descendant of pioneers, too, a generation off the farm. Every summer, we made the pilgrimage—four days of relentless driving westward on the Trans-Canada—to my mother’s birthplace and her family’s wheat and canola fields near the Turtle Mountains of Manitoba. But the English and Belgian farmers who settled around Deloraine were hardly the same kind of dreamy ideologues that broke soil 100 years ago along the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
I’ve been reading excerpts from these pioneers’ early writings. The most famous book is a collection, translated as Our Community, taken from the communal journal of the 27 members of a youth group who lived for nine months at Beitania Eilit, atop a mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee. They slept together, in tents, while working agricultural jobs until they could be assigned a community of their own. Their nights were filled with intense conversations about the destiny of their project, their fears and doubts, the sublimation of their desires for the larger goals of the group.
The words recorded in their communal journal are as angst-ridden as the secret diary of any hormonally flustered teenager sent away to summer camp. The emotional ups and downs are raw and manic, a gushing forth of innermost thoughts—what historian Henry Near describes as a “special, somewhat eccentric style of speech and thought.” (I can’t imagine the laconic farmers I knew from my summers in Manitoba ever subjecting each other to such Freudian analysis.)
I try to picture this group—23 men and four women—huddled around a campfire on a Galileean hill. To feel the exhaustion in their bodies after a long day’s work, plowing fields or building the road to Tiberias. To eavesdrop on their anguished group confessions, voices emerging from the shadows, competing visions of a new nation. In the words of one of the authors:
From the beginning our life was hard and bitter… [D]aily matters joined us together; however, each person in his own corner lived through the awful transition from idea to practice. … Erotic relationships were limited by the hardness of reality. Pointless matters filled the empty spaces between one person and another and silenced the soul’s cry with no hope of escape. The word “substance” became a fetish for everyone.
While these pioneers were secular socialists, fleeing in many cases from the religion of their parents and grandparents in the Old World, there was a quasi-spiritual dimension to many of their lengthy debates and discussions and philosophizing. Beitania, as another participant recalled, “was more like the solitary monastery of some religious sect, or an order with a charismatic leader and its own special symbols. Our ritual was that of public confession. … This was a rich mental feast, but also involved self-torture which served no purpose. … The individual was under the continuous scrutiny of the group, which was not afraid to show mental cruelty at times.”
And then one long night, as two Beitania members confronted each other before the group, these pioneers had a “breakthrough”—at least according to the record of “Our Community”—on what became known as the “Night of Atonement”. Hidden jealousies were confessed to. Secret desires revealed. The inequalities between the men and women acknowledged. “And from that night on,” the Beitania journal records, “the life of the group began.”
While I was at Shamir, there was a camaraderie amongst the volunteers, perhaps even a late-night confession or two. But there was nothing like the deeply felt emotional enterprise of these first pioneers, who had left their home countries and parents behind, likely never to be seen again, to journey to a rough new land amid an already existing population of Arab tenants who were at best skeptical of the young Jewish immigrants. The physical intensity of the work, the psychic intensity of the group—what one Beitanianite called its “social eroticism”—proved too much for many of these pioneers. Some abandoned the first attempts at settlement. Others committed suicide in despair. But out of their tears and frustrations grew the first shoots of the kibbutz movement—and the hardier myth of its pioneers.
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Jan 18, 2010
If the dining room is the centre of communal life of the kibbutz—where gossip is traded over meals and decisions debated at general assemblies—then the volunteers’ bar (or “Volly Bar”) was the hub of volunteer life, for better or worse, during my tenure at Kibbutz Shamir. Every Friday evening, after Shabbat dinner, most of the foreign volunteers and a handful of the younger kibbutzniks would gather in the ramshackle cabin to drink too much and get to know each other. There was much craziness and camaraderie, but also some serious sharing and learning, too—at least for a kid from the suburbs of Ottawa, encountering for the first time people of my own age who were living through the geopolitical dramas of our age, rather than just reading about them in the newspaper. My first bar night on Shamir was a revelation.
Thurs. Oct. 27 [1988]
I don’t think I could begin in my awkward writings to do justice to the events of the last evening, but I must give it a try anyway.
I spent most of the night pulled up at a stool at the volunteers’ bar, quaffing “Goldstar” beers (only 60 agora for a pint—that’s about 2 pints for a Canadian dollar) and chatting with other volunteers. The beer was surprisingly good, relatively light tasting (I think it is 4.8% alcohol) but not like American piss-water beer.
Paul, a South African, and I exchanged stories on a number of topics and common interests including music (he likes Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd among others as well as despising the throbbing disco music that is apparently played continuously at the bar), sports (he was interested about the Wayne Gretzky trade and how the Oilers were faring), politics (he knew a great deal about the upcoming American and Canadian elections), and travelling (he and a friend had spent 4 months driving across North America in a van).
The most fascinating conversation of the evening, I was just a mediator in. Ali, a young Arab living in an area of the Golan Heights captured from Syria by Israel during the Six Day War, and Paul took turns questioning each other and discussing the tense situations in their respective nations. Paul feels that change is a necessity in his homeland of South Africa, but a slow change, one that he says is already in process, not the violent revolution proposed by Nelson Mandela whom Ali said he respected greatly. Paul does however feel that Mandela should be released as he could cause more damage to the government by becoming a martyr in prison than he could as an old man with his freedom. Ali says, despite living in Israeli territory, he still considers himself a Syrian, though he doesn’t seem to harbour any resentment for the Israelis, as he works beside them, picking fruit for the kibbutz.
Jan 12, 2010
“Of all that happened in our time, only one thing will remain in our collective memory: the kibbutz. Not the yeshivas, nor the towns, nor the ‘build your own house’ neighborhoods, nor the shopping centers. All these, along with the materialism, privatization, property sales, exist all over the world and are of no interest to anyone. The kibbutz is the most original creation, not only in Israel, but in the whole twentieth century. It will become more and more significant as time passes.”
—Joshua Sobol, playwright, former resident of Kibbutz Shamir, and screenwriter of The Galilee Eskimos, quoted in an interview reprinted in Kibbutz Trends (Fall/Winter 1998)
Jan 12, 2010
On Tuesday, October 25, 1988, I arrived in Israel in a light-headed daze of dislocation, sleeplessness and culture shock. I can’t recall how long it took to travel by plane to Tel Aviv all told. I’m pretty sure we stopped in London, at Heathrow, before continuing on. I vaguely remember sitting between two large middle-aged men in the dark suits and brimmed hats of the ultra-Orthodox. One complained to a steward that his special-order meal, while labeled “kosher”, hadn’t been approved by his particular rabbi. I was starving and tempted to ask if I could eat the meal but pretty certain that definitely wouldn’t be kosher.
Once in Israel, I thought my luggage had been lost (I note this in my journal) but later located it, although I can’t recall the panic I must have felt. I do remember the abrupt shift in climate: I’d left amid an early snowstorm in Canada and arrived in (what felt to me) a sweltering heat wave in Tel Aviv. I recall lugging my backpack and duffel handbag (both with the requisite Canadian flags stitched across them by my mother) through the sliding doors of Ben Gurion airport, into a wall of heat and a clamorous throng of people. My eyes felt blurry. Signs were being thrust out, covered with words that I could almost but not quite read, like the bottom line on an optometrist’s exam. Then I clued in: Hebrew, of course. (Yes, I was either that naive or that out of it!)
Back in Canada, I’d arranged for a kibbutz stay and carried a letter of introduction, but I hadn’t been assigned to a specific community yet, so I had to journey into downtown Tel Aviv (by bus, taxi or sherut—I don’t recall) and locate the volunteer office. I remember a small, dimly lit room, and the coordinator indicating a map of Israel, the narrow geography of (to me) an unknown nation. Where would I like to go? he asked. The south, the north, or the centre?
We were in the centre of the country already, and I felt like I might perspire into a salty puddle if I had to step into the sun again. The south—into the Negev Desert—was definitely out of the question. I’d grown up in two of the coldest cities (Winnipeg and Ottawa) in one of the coldest nations in the world. I wasn’t built for the heat. I asked to head north.
The coordinator consulted his book, looked at the map, and then pointed north—far north—to Kibbutz Shamir. Before I could make out the dot, my eyes drifted farther up (but not that much farther) to the words “Lebanon” and “Syria”. I was hardly a Middle East expert, but I was news-wise enough to recognize that relations between Israel and its northern neighbours had been anything but cordial, especially since the Lebanon War of 1982. Still, I’d made my choice. I would head north, to what Israelis called “The Periphery”, nearly to the borderland slopes of Mt. Hermon.
When I found the central bus station, I realized that I was one of the few people (male or female) of my age (20 at the time) neither in uniform nor armed with an Uzi or an M-16. I think the only real gun I’d ever seen before was a Luger pistol owned by a great-uncle, a relic of the Second World War. Here, in Israel, weapons dangled as casually from shoulders like fashion accessories. I felt a little naked, and conspicuous, without one.
The bus ride took me to the town of Qiryat Shmona, and then another ride across the Huleh Valley to Shamir. By then, night had fallen, so I didn’t get a sense of the valley or the kibbutz. I had dinner in the dining room, met a few other volunteers, and then collapsed in my new room.
Reading my account of the next morning, my first on Shamir, stokes old memories. The landscape over which Shamir looks—the Huleh Valley, bisected by the Jordan River—remains a calming vista of lush farmland, orchards and irrigation ponds, although only a few years ago it was ground zero for Katyusha rockets launched by Hizbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. The sunset photo atop this blog was taken last June, just a few kilometres north and a little higher up the slopes from Shamir.
And there was a strangeness, too, to this rural landscape, with the mongoose (I’m still not sure of the plural!) that slipped between the cabins and the eerie shriek of the “rock rabbits” that lived on the embankments of the kibbutz and the keening howls of the wild dogs at dusk beyond the barbed-wire circumference.
It would take me a while to understand the perhaps unintended irony behind the reference to the volunteers’ neighbourhood, set apart from the kibbutzniks’ quarters (and now empty—Shamir hasn’t taken volunteers in several year), as The Ghetto. The name evokes the cramped shtetls and prejudice that Eastern European Jews hoped to escape by immigrating to Palestine and founding the agriculture-based kibbutz movement. It also suggests the doomed yet valiant uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust—a story I would only learn later when I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum outside of Jerusalem.
There was beauty in this land, especially for a kid from the cookie-cutter suburbs of Canada. But there was a darker story, too, that I was still too blinded by the novelty of my experiences to be able to read.
Jan 12, 2010
Wed. Oct. 26 [1988]
My first morning on the kibbutz [Shamir] and what a beautiful one it is! The view from outside my cabin of the hills of Galilee rising out of the mist is breathtaking.
I spent most of the last evening chatting with my next-door neighbour, a fellow Canadian as it turns out, though he’s been living in Europe the past 5 years, exchanging stories and learning about the different jobs he’s had to do on the kibbutz. I still can’t remember his name, he was one of the people introduced to me in the T.V. shack.
All last night I could hear the unnerving sound of mongoose (mongeese?) howling in the valley below, sounding disturbingly close at times. My bed seems comfortable enough; the sleep I got in it last night managed to work out the painful kinks in my backside brought on by lugging my massive backpack all over Tel Aviv.
It’s afternoon and I’m sitting on my porch, looking at the rest of the “Ghetto”, the affectionate moniker of the volunteers’ village. Tomorrow will be my first work day and God knows that I will be doing. I’m hoping that it will be nothing too industrial or mechanical such as the optical factory or the Shelagh [sp: Shalag].
I just saw my first mongoose, it slithered up to the porch of the T.V. cabin to pilfer some of the weiners left for the cat. They are very slimy looking creatures, long and slender with fine, light brown hair and a thin tail, straight as an arrow with a dark, pointed tip. They have a casual, undulating gait but are inclined to sudden dashes and leaps to pounce on food or at the slightest noise.
I was given a tour of the kibbutz by Ami, the volunteer leader, a short Jewish man with thinning blonde hair and obviously stricken with some ailment as he walks with an exaggerated gait, having to lift lift his foot up distinctly higher than normal for each step and thus usually travelling in a golf-cart-like vehicle.
He briefly explained to me the history of Israel in general and Kibbutz Shamir in particular, as well as outlining the geographic area surrounding the kibbutz. It lies right on the edge of the Golan Heights, adjacent to land only recently claimed by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. Over the surrounding mountains lie the borders dividing Israel from Syria and Lebanon, only about 20 or 30 km away. In 1974, two kibbutzniks and a volunteer were killed here by terrorists. He seems to feel that if Israel is ever going to gain any lasting peace with its hostile Arab neighbours, it will have to give up some of the occupied territories. Most of the older men on the kibbutz would have fought in one or more of the six or seven “major” wars Israel has waged since its conception in 1948, actually struggled violently for the very land they now cultivate and build upon.
Jan 11, 2010
There was an informative news item in Ha-Aretz, one of Israel’s leading newspapers, about the state of the kibbutz movement as it celebrates its 100th anniversary. The article offers a clear summary plus supporting statistics of how many kibbutzim have voted to “privatize” and what that really means. (“Privatize” has a connotation in English that doesn’t capture exactly what’s happening in these communities, once run as anarcho-socialist communes—it makes it sound like they’re being sold off to McDonald’s or Procter-Gamble, which simply isn’t true.)
Most interesting, while the trend of the past 10 years has been toward increasing privatization, so that it once seemed that the death of communalism was inevitable in the movement, last year only five more kibbutzim voted to differentiate their salaries and loosen their communal arrangements. That still leaves 65 “traditional” communities and nine half-and-half “integrated” kibbutzim.
One commentator suggests that 2009 may mark the “peak” of privatization and a realization that moving from a cooperative economic model to a more market-driven one often only benefits a fraction of any community in the end. Dr. Shlomo Getz, the head of the Institute for the Study of the Kibbutz and the Communal Idea in Haifa, cautioned not to make too much of these numbers and assume that privatization has “stalled” — several more communities are considering, and will likely vote on, altering their economic structure.
Along with two American colleagues at the University of California (an idealistic institution suffering through its own financial crisis), Dr. Getz has been surveying kibbutzim for 20 years and documenting 50 types of changes that have been implemented. Dr. Getz is a member of Kibbutz Gadot — which privatized not long ago — and a hospitable exemplar of the kibbutz ideal. On my visit to Israel last summer, he took me under his wing, tutored me on the essential context of his research, introduced me to his colleagues at the institute, and even had me over for dinner with his wife when I stayed at Gadot.
As Dr. Getz reminded me during our interview, the kibbutz has never been a static phenomenon. It has always been an open, evolving society, unlike insular religious communes, which tend to coalesce around a hard kernel of unchanging faith or dogma. In the 1970s, industry and higher education became part of the agricultural kibbutz movement. In the 1980s, the sleeping arrangements in the children’s houses gave way to traditional parenting.
“But now, from the beginning of the 1990s,” Dr. Getz explained, “the change is total change—multi-system change. There are three or four crises at the same time. You have to make changes in different aspects at the same time.”
An anniversary, like 2010, makes a good opportunity to look back and reflect on where a community (or an individual) has come from, and what has been lost and found on the journey. So it will be interesting to see, if it’s true that the sense of crisis has largely passed and that many kibbutzim—both privatized and traditional—have found economic stability, whether the urge to privatize will continue or whether a nostalgia for the communal life of the near and distant past will once again come to the fore.
“This stage of the kibbutz, it’s not the final stage,” Dr. Getz told me. “It’s the new kibbutz now. In 20 years, it will be another one.”
