Filling in some gaps

I’m in Jerusalem now, and have been here for about 48 hours. There’s a lot to say about it, including about Shabbat which was time off from the tour, and which I spent with my friends Naomi and Dan and their kids. But I’m behind on writing, so I’ll post now what I started to write on the bus ride to Jerusalem on Friday, about the kibbutzim and my 1981 trip to Israel.

The kibbutzim, or as I've just learned to say, the kibbutz movement in Israel, is a topic I have a longstanding interest in, at least since I stayed on a kibbutz for 5 weeks when I was 14. Just like much of my knowledge of Judaism, which is what my rabbi calls "pediatric," until now my learning about kibbutz life stalled at the age of 14.

I guess I have to back up and tell you about that trip overall first. It was an unusual setup. That year, 1981, I was cheppying to be sent to Camp Ramah, a Jewish overnight camp. My father asked me why I wanted to go to there. The true answer was that I had a crush on a boy, Daniel Feigelson, who was going there, but I didn't admit that to my father. Instead, I said, “to learn Hebrew”. He said, “well, if you want to learn Hebrew, you should go to Israel.” I said, thinking it was impossible, “I'd love to go to Israel!” And he said, “okay, we can arrange that. “

My bluff having been called, I didn't back down. My father had some distant relatives in Israel, and although my mother was deeply opposed, he arranged for me to stay with them. In most disagreements between my parents, who were divorced by this time, I tended to side with my father, and this was no exception. Of course I agreed that I was mature enough to travel to Israel by myself! I must have already known a little bit about kibbutzim, because I imagined I would be working in the fields. I'm not sure what my father imagined my time there would be like, but the reality was less than ideal.

My relatives had four generations living on kibbutz Givat Chaim, one of the older, more successful of the kibbutzim. I was staying with the elderly couple, Eliakim and Sarah, who were the great-grandparents of the family. Eliakim's mother was my grandfather's sister, I believe. They were lovely, gracious hosts, despite the facts that 1) they didn't know me at all, 2) I barely spoke Hebrew and they barely spoke English; and 3) I had terrified them upon my arrival in Israel by not being there when they came to pick me up at the airport.

Far in advance of the trip, they had written my dad a letter describing where I should meet them, which he read to me on one of my visits to him in New York. Unfortunately, by the time I actually made the trip and arrived in the Holy Land (I did feel the holiness, and a deep ancestral connection to the land, as the plane flew in), I did not even remember the existence of the letter, much less its contents. As I said, my mother was not excited about the plan, and was much more of a helicopter parent than my dad. In her worry, she had arranged for an Israeli friend of hers and former babysitter of mine to also meet me at the airport. Ora found me right away in the terminal as I emerged from customs, and, not seeing anyone looking for me, and not knowing I’d been instructed to look for them outside the terminal, she whisked me off with her to her home.

Looking back, it seems it was the combination of too little worry on my dad’s (and my) part and too much worry on my mom’s (and Ora’s) part that created this major snafu. Eventually we got it straightened out, though not without some difficulty, and I’m sure, considerable consternation on my kibbutznik relatives’ part. After all, there were not only no cell phones back then, but most kibbutz dwellings did not even have phones at all; you had to go to the central office to make a call!

So anyway, they were very kind to me, giving me their living room sofa bed to sleep on, including me in all their family gatherings (all 4 generations would gather for tea, cake, and schmoozing every shabbat), and making me breakfast every morning (other meals were in the communal dining hall). However, my expectation that I would work in the fields did not mesh with theirs. I was either too young, too American, too female, or didn’t understand Hebrew well enough to make the grade. I did eventually convince them to give me something to do, and they had me helping a few hours a week in the Gan (the children’s house) – I mostly remember mopping floors. I had no peers to interact with, in part because the people of my generation in the family there mostly were already older and had kids.

I did spend one week in Tel Aviv with a branch of the family who lived there, and who had two children, Na’ama and Liron (?), who were close to my age. We went to the beach (I think we might have hitchhiked!) and I flirted with Liron’s friend Menasheh. Someone (Ora?) took me to Jerusalem for a day. Other than that, I spent my 6 weeks in Israel on the kibbutz. I spent most of my time writing long and fascinating letters home, watching TV, trying to solve Rubik’s Cube, and hanging out at the pool and flirting with the (much older) lifeguard.

Despite these drawbacks (and a bout of travelers’ stomach upset), my Hebrew did improve substantially. And, I was also very impressed by life on the kibbutz. I had arrived near the end of their school year, and I attended three different year-end or graduation celebrations of cousins of mine. Each one involved a theatrical production by the students. Despite my poor grasp on the language, I could tell that they were extremely well done compared to anything comparable in the US. My belief at the time was that because all the children lived, worked, and played together, the depth of relationships and the simplicity of coordinating schedules made possible a degree of artistic dedication, orchestration, and sophistication not possible in most other places.

I also remember believing that children were better off because they had lots of adults to learn from and take care of them. This offered a wider variety of role models, rather than the (in my world) usual two parents whose particular strengths, weaknesses, and ways of polarizing with one another (e.g. overprotective vs. overly laissez faire!) can be fairly constraining when experienced in isolation.

This belief later translated into my living and working in intentional community and consensus-based groups in the US, and my continued belief that when people work together cooperatively, phenomenal things are possible. But where did the kibbutz movement come from, and what was its trajectory? I had heard vaguely from an Israeli friend in Madison that it hadn’t turned out so well; that a lot of people who grew up in the children’s houses experienced them as neglectful and sometimes abusive; and that the kibbutzim had fallen on hard times or even fallen apart.

The other night in K’far Blum, we were treated to a presentation by one of the current leaders of that Kibbutz. His parents’ generation were among the founders, who were communist Zionist idealists. Filling in some of the gaps in my “pediatric” understanding, I realized that not only were the kibbutzim communal, but they were founded by Communists (and Socialists). Duh. I really hadn’t realized this before. I also learned that many of them were strategically placed to populate areas of Palestine under the British Mandate so that when the boundaries were drawn later for a proposed Jewish state, more areas would be included because there would be Jews living there. (I found this piece of the puzzle fairly disillusioning, though having spent this morning at Yad VaShem, the holocaust memorial, I may revise that assessment further).

There are lots of interesting and complicated nuances to the story that I don’t know well enough or have time to go into here (political splits within the kibbutz movement, for instance, which in some cases literally split Kibbutzim into two). Later, when the next generation came along, and there was an economic crisis that made it hard to keep the kibbutzim going, some of them made a difficult transition to become more privatized. I’d heard this, but wasn’t sure what it meant. Well, it apparently means different things in different kibbutzim. Most of them stopped raising children separately from their parents in the second generation; the 2nd generation of parents just announced, we’re taking the kids home. In some cases it means the founding members own a share of the land, and newer residents have to buy in, or in some cases are not able to buy in but can live and work there. It also may mean that people get individual salaries that are different depending on the work, and buy what they want and need, rather than living by the strict principle of “from each according to ability and to each according to need.”

Ok, so, the Jerusalem hotel has a pool (it’s an outdoor pool, but unlike the Haifa hotel which closed their outdoor pool for the “winter,” this one closes for a week so they can enclose it in a giant temporary structure that is sort of like a tent, but you enter it through a revolving glass and metal door) and if I stop now I can fit a swim in before the next tour event, so I’m going to post this, even though there’s much more to be said...!