The Communal Experience of the Kibbutz

Joseph Blasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351484770
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Joseph Blasidocuments and describes the workings of an existing kibbutz society to provide a model for Utopian thinking and clear up confusion con­cerning Utopian values. He details the history and development of Kibbutz Vatik (a pseudonym), providing a systematic record of kibbutz culture: daily life and social arrangements, economic cooperation and work, politics, edu­cation, and attitudes of community members.Despite its advantages as a model Utopia, the kibbutz is not a perfect soci­ety. Having eliminated the most serious forms of social, economic, political, and educational fragmentation and violence, the communal group is left with the complicated and mounting problems of keeping a fellowship alive and well. Blasi assesses the community's advantages and disadvantages, il­luminating the interlocking dilemmas that cut across social and political con­cerns.The Communal Experience of the Kibbutz updates our knowledge of kibbutz life in light of recent research. It gives a detailed account of the Utopian community in the kibbutz and its activities. The special quality of the kib­butz, Blasi argues, lies not so much in its proven success vis-a-vis other communal societies, but in that it is a communal alternative that most West­ern peoples can readily visualize as a real option.

1
History and Development

In this chapter, misconceptions about the nature of the kibbutz will be corrected, and the size, origin, and present state of Kibbutz Vatik’s system will be outlined. The special influence of persecution in the lives of East European Jews on the formation of the kibbutz movement will be explored in terms of an alienation from the narrowness of life, powerlessness, and a struggle with the definition of progress. This and Zionist socialism led to the movement to establish the kibbutzim that evolved in an unorganized manner from intimate communes to the cooperative village-towns of today, of which Kibbutz Vatik is an example.

The Kibbutz Movement

One problem of considering the small community as a learning environment and a social policy alternative is that few examples exist that have been tested over time on a large scale. Because of the possibility that the traditional forms of small community life will encounter stress under the pressures of modern change, their importance is minimized. On the other hand, although many communes exist and some experiments are quite impressive (Kinkade 1973; Komar 1983; Borowski 1984), they still remain only as shadows of the stable community life that can endure. We need, then, a modern community with a fairly long history on which a substantial amount of research has been done. Most important, it must exemplify a voluntarily and purposefully applied communitarian ideology whose goal is to achieve a better life.

The kibbutz is probably one of the most studied societies of the world (Shepher 1974). Its unique system of collective local childrearing and education is well known. Most significant, however, is that kibbutz life has been a purposeful attempt to learn and develop more just ways of achieving the quality of life. The effort permeates the whole life of the community. This work will serve as a review of the main trends and findings that are available in English regarding the kibbutz movement and in a specific description of the community under study.

The kibbutz movement of Israel offers a unique and invaluable example of a large number of people living in cooperative small communities in an industrial society. Because the kibbutz exists in a foreign country and a great deal of research and writing material about this society is in Hebrew, with little comprehensive and up to date English literature, it has not yet been recognized with the global importance it deserves. Recently Harvard University’s Project for Kibbutz Studies has facilitated the appearance of a large amount of Hebrew research in English (see Cherns 1980; Shur et al. 1981; Leviatan and Rosner 1982; Lilker 1982; Rosner 1983; Palgi et al. 1983; Shepher 1983; Agassi and Darom 1984).

The word kibbutz comes from the Hebrew word kvutzah, which means group. The first kibbutz was really a rural commune founded in 1909 (Baratz 1946). As the movement expanded and the communes became communities, the word kibbutz was invented to denote a larger community group. Today, there are over 275 kibbutzim with a total population in 1979 of 117,999 people or approximately 3.66 percent of the total Israeli Jewish population (Cheshev 1981:3–4). The population of an individual kibbutz ranges from 50 to 2,000, though most are between 250 and 500. The size of most settled communities is between 500 and 700 (Criden and Gelb 1974).

Kibbutz Vatik is a part of the HaShomer HaTzair Kibbutz Federation, the second largest association of kibbutzim. This federation is associated with Israel’s United Workers’ Party (Mapam, in Hebrew). It has generally been more dove-ish on foreign policy issues, and oriented toward a smaller, more ideologically homogeneous membership in its kibbutzim. Many of its members have been educated in the youth movement of the same name. Unlike the Kibbutz HaMeuchad Federation, Kibbutz Artzi (a nickname for HaShomer HaTzair, literally meaning “the national kibbutz”) stressed the ideological preparation of members in the youth movement and political education. It opposed less selective open-membership procedures that led the HaKibbutz HaMeuchad Federation (literally translated as “the united kibbutz”) toward developing larger, less homogeneous communities with a strong, centralized movement federation. Another federation, the Ichud HaKvutzot veha-Kibbutzim (the union of kibbutzim and kvutzot) stressed smaller kibbutzim with more autonomy for individual communities vis-a-vis the federation, again with a weaker emphasis on ideological homogeneity than Kibbutz Artzi. A religious kibbutz movement (HaKibbutz HaDati) combines socialist communal organization with strictly orthodox Jewish religious practice as a vibrant and rich religious alternative to the more secular majority of the kibbutz movement.

Founded in 1927, the HaShomer HaTzair Federation in 1981 had 80 kibbutzim with a total population of 39,475. Recently, the Kibbutz HaMeuchad (founded in 1927) and Ichud HaKvutzot vehaKibbutzim (founded in 1951) united to form the United Kibbutz Movement with 162 kibbutzim and a total population of 71,096. The Religious Kibbutz Movement had 15 communities with a population of 6,570. It was founded in 1949. Three other kibbutzim are not affiliated with these movements: two are affiliated with the Poalei Agudat Israel Movement, and one is a communist kibbutz (Cheshev 1981:3–4). It is not the goal of this volume to include a comprehensive review of the history of the kibbutz movement (for further reference, see Yassour et al. 1986), or its position within the Israeli labor party and trade union (Histadrut) establishment (see Medding 1972).

This case study cannot propose generalizations for the whole kibbutz movement. Variations both within the federation and between movements do exist. But, given the general similarity in organizational changes observed by a number of authors in social surveys of multifederation samples, the examination of these phenomena in one community can be a useful addition to the literature (see Leviatan and Rosner 1982; Rosner 1983; Rosner et al. 1986, forthcoming). A few differences should be mentioned. Kibbutz Vatik is less industrialized than most kibbutzim, which often have more than one highly automated factory. As a Kibbutz Artzi Federation community, Vatik has a unique system of high school education in that the adolescents do not return to their kibbutzim after school, as in other movements, but live in a regional kibbutz high school institution. Unlike an increasing number of kibbutzim, Vatik still has small children sleeping at night in the children’s houses, and views this separation of children from the family apartment as an integral part of its educational system. Finally, the community has consistently resisted the introduction of hired labor. Except for these dissimilarities, however, the author considers Kibbutz Vatik to be widely representative of the social transformation most kibbutzim have undergone since Spiro’s classic anthropological study in the 1950s. Given that we will be examining the ideology and attitudes of the members of what has been considered the most ideologically homogeneous kibbutz federation, ideological diversity and attitudinal disagreement would be especially meaningful findings in this case study.

Our community, called by the pseudonym Kibbutz Vatik, was founded in 1936, almost thirty years after the beginning of the movement in Israel. Its historical development can be viewed as a result of the previous three decades of the perfecting of the kibbutz structure. That is, Kibbutz Vatik did not develop by chance: its members were trying to build a social form that for thirty years had been replicated consistently and regularly throughout Israel. Jeshua, the counselor at the kibbutz high school, now in his sixties, discussed some of the preparations he and other Polish Jews were making in Eastern Europe years before they founded Vatik:

The youth movement from which this community sprung was founded in Poland in 1928. Many of our members even before then were reading a lot of philosophy, examining their consciences, and pursuing the issue of social life on a very high level. Ours, unlike other Zionist movements, put a great emphasis on kibbutz. Our newspapers stressed this theme. Some of our preparation came from the Pfadfinder, an apolitical countercultural youth movement which developed in Germany in the 1920s. It emphasized a return to nature through scouting groups, freer relations between people, and not simply following in the footsteps of our parents. The youth often asked themselves if this style was a game. How long could we play it without changing our lives? [Conversation reconstructed from notes.]¹

Background for a Counterculture: Persecution and Its Special Influence on Vatik

To understand the historical development of the Kibbutz Vatik—today a stable, well-defined settlement—one cannot ignore the influence of the conditions affecting European Jewry at the turn of the century. Jeshua, a member, addressed this issue in our conversation:

The liberalism of Europe at that time gave much power to a move to secularize the Jews. Many felt that they could be intellectuals and begin to branch out into many professions in the universities. Many a person went to Berlin or Budapest to study and never returned. They changed their names and put off other forms of Jewish identification. But anti-Semitism continued to rear its head. Jews helped in the Russian revolution and afterwards they were liberally killed. We felt like the oil on the wheel of history. Our group wanted to build an independent and just future and strive for what we called the independent realization of our ideals.

At the same time the Jewish youth were questioning the nature of their lives for reasons not connected to persecution. A prominent defender of this questioning put it this way:

We are an ancient people, submerged by too much inheritance, by a deluge of thoughts, feelings, and values transmitted to us, so that we can no longer live our own lives, just be ourselves; our dreams and our thoughts are not our own, our will is not one implanted in us; everything has been taught to us long ago; everything has been handed down to us. Everything is confined and defined within set limits and boundaries, measured and weighed, ruled and legislated, so that those among us who crave to fill themselves are lost and can never discover themselves. Is it possible to begin again after fundamental changes in our lives and hearts …. There is no construction without prior destruction, and there is no being without ceasing. [From an early critic of established Jewish life, M. J. Berdichevsky]

The founders of the kibbutzim were mostly of East European origin, especially from Russia and Poland. Vatik was founded mostly by Polish Jews from Galitzia. Galitzia, an area of Poland on the Austrian side, was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire before World War I. When the members of Vatik grew up there, it was under Polish national control. The Jews there spoke Yiddish; this factor contributed to the central influence of the German counterculture on the early Jewish youth groups.

Kibbutz Vatik differs from other kibbutzim founded in the 1920s and 1930s in two ways: first, most of its population was from Galitzia, but many of them never experienced anti-Semitism. For them, the question of achieving a new social identity as Jews was influenced by what they knew about persecution rather than how they experienced it. An older woman, now principal of the Ulpan (Hebrew school for foreign volunteers in the community) explains:

We [referring to the first group] were Israelis when we founded this kibbutz and we formed our youth movement in Israel. We were the first ones and we really had many ideals. We came from well-to-do homes, we did not come from any holocaust, and we didn’t come from starvation. On the other hand we were not rich, because there were not rich families in Israel, but we lived and studied because we really wanted to do something special. We had an ambition not to be like the other kibbutzim which were formed by Jews coming from Europe. We wanted to be better than them.

The fact that the first founders of Vatik were born of East European families who had already emigrated to Israel had a strong effect on the founding of the kibbutz. The initial founders were not running from anything. They were already in Israel, and they sought to build a cooperative rather than a private life there. The small group of twenty or so initial founders were joined in the early 1930s by about fifty youths from Galitzia. This group had been in the leftist, socialist-Zionist youth movement there, and unlike the Israeli founders, their experience of anti-Semitism was strong. The Jews in Poland of the 1930s were prey to a vicious kind of persecution: economic anti-Semitism, discrimination in social situations, and a rightist Polish nationalism that was suspicious of minorities. Persecution as a factor had a more indirect effect on the founding of Vatik.

Vatik also differed from its peer kibbutzim of the 1930s in the socioeconomic background of its members. Unlike the richer families of Germany and parts of Russia, these members’ families were lower middle or middle class, mostly craftspeople and small business people. Thus the educational standard of members of Vatik differed radically from that of kibbutzim where the parents of members provided a more university- and study-oriented youth. Despite these differences, these Jews knew their long history of persecution, which included not only social discrimination but also physical attacks and pogroms. From the time of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and dismantling of the Jewish state in 70 A.D., European Jewish life was a series of grand attempts to build small communities, which were destroyed when the local Christian ruler changed his attitude or wished to appropriate their property or art (Durant 1957).

Several other aspects also define their experiences at the turn of the century: alienation and the narrowness of life, powerlessness, and a struggle with progress.

Alienation and the Narrowness of Life

Alienation meant that although many Jews lived in stetls (ghettos), which were fairly close-knit communities, they were continually uprooted. The use of identifying badges and the fact that by law they could not own land, which prevented a normal involvement in land-based farming, labor, and manufacture, forced the Jews into business requiring little use of land, emphasizing exchange of commodities (trade), work that could be done with little capital or need of space (crafts), and the more abstract services (law, education). A hundred years before a life style detached from the land became popular in the West, the Jews found themselves forced prematurely into the modern life style of rootlessness and exchange (Spiro 1956). This situation resulted in a narrowness of existence. The early kibbutz members spoke in this way of the stetl:

Why has the glory of the Torah declined? The Rabbis marry their sons to the daughters of the rich. The sons-in-law depend on the money of their fathers-in-law, which buys them the Rabbinate. Once in the Rabbinate they must satisfy the material appetites of their wives who are unused to austerity. As a result they become servile flatterers. [Lilker 1973:9]

Life in the stetl was radically hierarchical and inegalitarian. The rabbis and the pious Jews were at the top and were keenly aware of their station and power. A worker in the chicken branch of Vatik speaks about the near disdain with which the youth movement regarded traditional religious Judaism.

In my house [the ghetto apartment house where his family lived] many of the young were in the movement, but our parents were very tolerant. But in the same house, there was another family and the parents went to the police to keep the child from going to the Shomer HaTzair (Young Guard) movement, [the youth movement from which the Kibbutz Artzi Federation arose, to which Vatik belongs.] Well, they were very religious and they used to bother us calling us “Goyim, Goyim” [non-Jews].

Powerlessness and the Definition of Progress

Another formative experience for the early kibbutzniks of Vatik was the powerlessness of their parents’ and their own lives. The promises of liberty for Jews in Europe made during the French Revolution were unfulfilled. European Jews recognized their powerlessness in society: they did not have the right to vote; they were dominated; and they were divorced from the values of human cooperation and connection with nature and the land. Even those born in Israel without as many European influences sought to take greater control of their present and future situation. They saw religion as a powerful part of their future because it resolved basic human dilemmas, as an early kibbutz philosopher, A.D. Gordon, believed:

Authentic religion cannot live in such an atmosphere. If the person is to rediscover religion the proper balance between the two powers of the human soul— intellect and intuition—must be restored. The task of the intellect is to be the servant of intuition not to overpower and repress it. This balance can only be restored by our return to a direct and immediate relationship to nature .… A genuine inner renewal of society can be achieved not by an accidentally and superficially related mass but only by an organically united community, the people. Nature has created the people as the connecting link between the individual and the cosmos. [Bergman 1961]

Although they were religious in fervor, Vatik founders rebelled against traditional Judaism—and yet the Jewish cultural and rational renaissance was their raison d’etre. Their experience of society and the radical kibbutz ideology that flowed from it was completed with a struggle over the meaning of progress. They asked: Why didn’t the intense piety of the stetl life solve severe social and economic problems? If anything, the bearers of piety intensified the inequality and were indeed the bearers of progress (Lilker 1973). This planted the seeds for a suspicious attitude toward individual wealth that became a central principle of the kibbutz.

Even during the infancy of the youth movement elements of communal sharing were practiced. Yasha, a member who came to Vatik after living in a communal house in Poland, remembers those days:

When there were poor kids among us, and we were going on a trip, the counselor would make us sell stamps in order to raise money for those who could not afford to go. There was a common treasury and every member gave a few cents, ten perhaps, a week. With that money we once bought a ping pong table.

Other members whose formative years were more ideologically informed (in the traditional Marxist sense) than Yasha’s youth movement days, speak about hours of poring over Marx and socialist writings.

These elements of persecution, alienation, narrowness of life, powerlessness, and suspicion of progress grew in the early 1900s in the minds of many Jewish youth, and became, together with influences of the German counterculture and Marxism, the root of a critique of the establishment and a new personal philosophy that bore the kibbutz.

Emergence of the Kibbutz Movement

The kibbutz grew out of circumstances and conditions lacking a clear plan or direction. Discontent was seething in the communities of Russia and Poland (mainly Galitzia) and was generally directed toward leaving Europe and with a minority going to Israel, but no clear social program had evolved other than a desire to transplant life to another land. The strong Zionist motivation in the early kibbutzniks (community members) was coupled with a desire to create a new society.

Groups had tried to establish cooperatives earlier in Israel, in 1838, 1881, 1903, and 1905, but they all failed for one reason or another. Some of these groups bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 History and Development
• 2 Daily Life and Social Arrangements
• 3 Economic Cooperation and Work
• 4 Politics and Culture in the Community
• 5 Education in the Kibbutz: Creating the Communal Environment for Further Generations
• 6 Issues of Personality in Kibbutz Vatik
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index