By Toni Hellman
Located in the middle of a city in the northwestern corner of the United States, Joel Rothschild understands that his Ravenna Kibbutz may confuse some people.
“No one imagines that this is a biblical land, so there’s definitely a different relationship to this land than many Jews have with Israel,” said Rothschild, one of the kibbutz’s founders. “But some of the pioneers of the Kibbutz movement were more interested in building a socialist utopia than returning to the biblical land of the Jews. The land they took ownership of was somewhat arbitrary.
Located in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle, the Ravenna Kibbutzniks have worked their limited amount of land to grow food and foster a sustainable Jewish community. They don’t fit the traditional definition of a kibbutz: they dwell in the diaspora, maintain private funds and personal property and aren’t on a farm. Rothschild says, however, that he chose to call the commune a kibbutz because of its connotations within the Jewish community.
“We wanted a word that was a little unusual and would at least get people in the right ball park and not make totally off-base assumptions,” Rothschild said. “Jews who never had anything to do with [kibbutzim] are kind of proud of them. It’s motivational for people, they want to come and pitch in.”
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During the early waves of Zionist migration to Palestine, swarms of European Jews were abandoning their modern, cosmopolitan lifestyles for backbreaking labor in the field and exposure to a variety of fatal diseases. Labor Zionist thinkers like Aaron David Gordon posited a religion of physical work and a love of the land. Land, they said, is what the world’s Jews needed. A lack of physical nationhood doomed Jews to alienation from their surroundings and dependence on other, unfriendly nations. The solution was the settling of Palestine with Kibbutzim: agricultural collectives working to create a new Jewish society free from the perils of superstition, religion, capitalism and, of course, anti-semites.
The drive to work the land was an assertion of ownership, making the bond between Jews and their historic homeland tangible. This school of thought also engendered an appreciation for nature that most city-dwelling Jews had not encountered. Aliyah to kibbutz eventually dwindled due to a host of reasons including Israel’s rapid industrialization, a lack of enthusiasm for sharing and the exploitation of cheap foreign labor.
Today, Jews are seeing a resurgence of something akin to Gordon’s religion of labor, only this time it is happening in the diaspora. The focus is still on social and environmental justice but without the emphasis on a Jewish state. Instead, American Jews are organizing scores of Jewish environmental projects in their respective diaspora communities, cultivating their own relationship to the local land.
“One of the defining tragedies of the Jewish historical experiences is we’ve been denied the opportunity to actually assume ownership over a place,” Rothschild said. “We’re trying to take that incredibly powerful, transformative experience of Israelis who took ownership of the land and say, ‘actually, we can do that here now.’“
The Ravenna Kibbutz joins cooperative endeavors like The Isabella Freedman Center and Hazon, organizations dedicated to Jewish communal environmental sustainability, in what is now being called the Jewish Food Movement. A Google search of “Jewish Food Movement” turns up about 522,000 matches and seventy-five per cent of Jews polled by the American Jewish Committee in 2008 said that America should develop alternative energy sources.
Founded in 1901, the Jewish National Fund was established to purchase land for what would later become the state of Israel. Today, they are famous for the blue boxes they distribute throughout the Jewish community to collect money for their projects in Israel, the most notable of which has been planting 240 million trees in Israel—a large part of which come from American funds.
The majority of their projects are directed toward bettering Israel’s ecosphere but the JNF also conducts educational programming in the United States. Kids educated by the JNF learn about what kinds of environmental problems threaten Israel, the benefits of planting trees and the possibilities provided by the use of recycled water in a drought-ridden country.
Hazon, Hebrew for vision, is focused just as much on the betterment of the Diaspora’s land as Israel. Their programs, including the Jewish Farm School, a fund-raising bike ride in Israel, and Community Supported Agriculture initiatives throughout the United States, are all community oriented.
Their mission statement includes “meeting people where they are, not where we want them to be.” One of their stated seven-year goals to be accomplished by 2015 is “An American Jewish community in which Jewish life has been strengthened and renewed by the work of the Jewish food movement.” Hazon is behind a large chunk of the Jewish Food Movement’s success, and they show no signs of slowing down.
“Each generation evolves Jewish civilization in new directions responding to new circumstances,” said Betsy Teutsch, director of communications for Green Microfinance—a micro-loan agency in Phoenixville, PA—and a blogger for the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, one of the first Jewish environmentalist organizations in America.
Among these circumstances today is the recent dissatisfaction among American Jews with the ethical standards of the Kosher meat industry, brought to light through last year’s Agriprocessor’s scandal and countered now by a growing ethical kashrut movement.
“To me, being a responsible consumer of resources is very much the same as Kashrut,” said Teutsch, who considers herself a member of another burgeoning Jewish movement associated with food, called eco-kashrut. “It’s about being mindful of what you eat, what you consume, and how you get rid of it. To me it seems very spiritual.”
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Part of this evolution of the next generation of Jews is the rise in environmental education programs for Jewish youth such as the Teva Learning Center, a Jewish educational organization that focuses on spirituality in nature. Founded in 1994, Teva now teaches 4000 children of varying age and Jewish background in the northeast and midatlantic regions each year. Teva combines Jewish spirituality with experiences in nature to give kids an environmentally informed sense of Jewish values.
“Our mission,” Alexandra Kuperman of Teva said, “is to renew ecological wisdom inherent in Judaism and to renew the Jewish community through connection with God’s creation.”
Habonim Dror, a Labor Zionist youth movement with seven summer camps in North America, has also taken an active approach to environmental education, implementing a new program where each camp has its own food-producing garden and accompanying educational activities.
Yael Warshai, educational director of Habonim Dror Camp Tavor in Three Rivers, MI, says that the garden is crucial for engaging campers in what it means to be an environmentalist Jew.
“Because we have this great garden where we can physically learn about the environment, it is easier to get kids involved and excited,” Warshai said. “[One group] had an activity on the first day this session where they got to taste a bunch of things we had grown in the garden so far and they absolutely loved it. During the disucssion the kids were spouting off information about local food and the importance of growing foods organically.”
Ilana Goldfus, the “Gan [or Garden] Specialist” this summer at Philadelphia-area Habonim Dror Camp Galil, focuses her approach to active environmental education on the site of the camp because it is more tangible to the campers. At Camps Galil and Tavor, kids can see results when they harvest vegetables and herbs from the garden, fertilized by compost that they created with their own food waste.
Goldfus’s approach is rooted in the idea that Jews should care about the land where they live, no matter whether that is in Israel or not. She does, however, give credence to the influence of the Land of Israel in that vision—a vision reflected by Habonim’s camps, which are all named after places in Israel.
“We as Jews are commanded to care about the environment and spend time with it and get to know it,” Goldfus said. “And it does take place biblically in the the land of Israel, but we’ve adapted to life in the diaspora. I see myself being more successful here than I could be in Israel. I think that environmentalism is more effective when done in a community and a lot of Jews feel very connected to their Jewish community in the diaspora”
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Sarah Brown, another graduate of Habonim Dror, will embark on a three-month stay at the Isabella Freedman Center’s Adamah program this fall in Falls Village, CT, where she will take part in cooperative and environmentally sustainable farming. “Adamah is all about the connection between Judaism and farming and looking at it from a more spiritually centered approach,” she said. “It’s taking the kibbutz way of life and transferring it to America. Jews from all types of backgrounds are attracted to this place.”
Sarah’s attraction had more to do with sustainable agriculture than with Judaism or Zionism, though she has been to Israel many times and worked there as an environmental educator for Habonim.
“I just wanted hands on skills for how to be more self-reliant,» she said. “The Jewish thing, I mean, I think it definitely relates and I see the connection, but it wasn’t my first priority. I don’t relate Jewish environmentalism to Israel. I’m a Jew in America, so I can uphold all of my belief systems in America and work towards environmentalism.”
Teutsch sees Brown’s path as part of a continuous trend among young American Jews. “This whole new movement of Jewish farming is a really interesting reincarnation of the [kibbutz workers],” she said. “A lot of my generation went off as volunteers on kibbutzim. So much has happened in American organic and sustainable agriculture. It’s become romantic again. In my day, being a farmer in Israel was very cool and being a farmer in the United States was so uncool.”
Teutsch also sees political undertones in the shift from Israel-based agriculture to similar movements in the Diaspora, claiming that Israel-oriented farming is less appealing to young Jews interested in forging a connection to the land than it was for earlier generations because the debate over land in the Jewish State has become so tenuous.
“I think the political situation in Israel has attracted negative attention,” she said. “The term settler stands for Israeli hegemony and displacing Arabs is basically what it means now. It doesn’t have anything to do with farming, like it did a few generations ago.”
Going to a kibbutz is also no longer revolutionary. Most kibbutz farms are industrialized and unsustainable, and much of their working population is foreign, taking away the need for volunteers.
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That is not to say that environmentally concerned American Jews no longer support Israel. The Jewish National Fund, Hazon, and the Green Zionist Alliance—an advocacy group for Israeli environmentalism—are several examples of American Jewish groups working toward a sustainable future in the Jewish State.
But simultaneous shifts toward Jewish farming and away from Israel worry Brooklyn native and long-time Israeli citizen Carmi Wisemon, executive director of Sviva Israel, an environmental education organization based in Israel that also runs programming in the US.
Wisemon not only sees environmentalism as inherently Jewish but as Zionist as well, and takes a religious approach to the issue. “God created the world to be settled and developed.We definitely have the right to develop this world, but we have to guard it for future generations.There’s a natural instinct to take care of your own home. That’s why we’re seeing a tremendous burst of Jewish environmental activity both in the States and in Israel.”
But Wisemon is less supportive of Jewish environmental activity focused in the US, saying that it should instead occur in Israel, where workers can contribute to the growth of the Zionist homeland. He added that Diaspora observance of the biblical shmita cycle, where land must lay fallow one year out of seven, ignores “the uniqueness and holiness of the Land of Israel,” which is where the cycle was meant to take place.
“This is one of the things that I find slightly sad, to see Jewish farms in the states,” he said. “I can understand how people don’t necessarily feel that they’re maximizing their talents and skills in Israel, especially if you’re coming from the US. From a Zionist level I would like to see these wonderful Jewish environmental enterprises taking place in the land of Israel.”
To Wisemon’s dissatisfaction, Hazon has launched the Shmita Project in preparation for 2015, the next shmita year. The project is dedicated to observing the shmita year spiritually as well as agriculturally in the United States.
So a pattern emerges: American Jews may no longer need the land of Israel in order to cultivate a Jewish connection to the earth. With that in mind, it may not be so strange to find a kibbutz thriving in the middle of Seattle.
