Jewish
Frontier

Our group of ten members of the halutz training farm in New Jersey made Kvutzat Hasharon (near Moshav Nahalal in the Valley of Jezrael) its base. From there we were given certain options for permanent settlement. These included: Kvutzat Hasharon, Kibbutz Gezer, Kibbutz Bet Haarava (near the Dead Sea) and Kibbutz Anglo-Balti in Binyamina on the Coastal Plain. We chose Kibbutz Anglo-Balti. From 1940 to 1943 we remained in Binyamina, supporting ourselves by working at various places in the neighborhood including a quarry, a British army camp, orange groves and other farm crops. We set up a business of our own: cutting down eucalyptus trees and turning them into clothes pegs. In our search for employment for our members we found ourselves running a hotel in the far northern settlement of Metulla and working in the first artificial fish ponds in Israel. We fell in love with the Huleh Valley and founded Kibbutz Kfar Blum so that we could make it our home.

Thirty-five years have passed since I left Kfar Blum. Plenty of time to forget—but I have not forgotten. Ten years in the Kibbutz have left their imprint. It has irrevocably changed the way I view Judaism, Zionism, the State of Israel, and society in general.

The kibbutz was not something I learned about in school or something handed down to me by my parents. It was my privilege to have been one of the founders of a kibbutz and to have lived in it for ten years from 1939 to 1949. After leaving the Kibbutz, I spent another ten years on a Moshav Oudim (a small holders farming cooperative), worked for Koor Industries (an industrial conglomerate belonging to the Histadrut Labor Union) as well as for private companies. The time has come for summing up my life in the kibbutz.

One of the things I learned in the kibbutz was how to work hard and enjoy it. It is true that there were some lazy members of the kibbutz and even a few parasites. While living in the kibbutz, I thought that one of its weak points was the way it encouraged laziness by not penalizing it directly. On the other hand, many responsible members worked very long hours without being compensated for overtime. After ten years I left the kibbutz and entered the dog-eat-dog world of capitalistic industry. I discovered to my surprise that the proportion of idlers in the so-called market economy was no lower than in the kibbutz. Many highly paid executives were quite lazy. Apparently, a lazy person will be lazy wherever he works, while a naturally industrious one will be industrious in any environment.

We used to worry about the presence of crime in the kibbutz. For example, there were occasions when high-spirited young kibbutznikim would steal a watermelon from the field or take produce from the kitchen in order to liven up a campfire. There was no violence and no drugs. We never locked our doors. Crime was the least of our problems.

Nobody bothered getting married in those days. If a boy and a girl decided to live together and to have children, it was nobody's business but their own (and that of the housing committee). Most of those boys and girls were very family-centered. Some of their liaisons broke up, and the kibbutz had its share of scandals—but no more than in conventional society. Pairing off in a kibbutz is more romantic than elsewhere, since it is based on pure love without having to take into account the economic and social status of the intended spouse. Today, young people in the kibbutz get married under religious auspices, but I doubt whether this has significantly changed their lifestyle.

Young people today cannot understand how one could possibly survive, to say nothing of being happy, without a private car, a personal computer, and cellular telephone. Yet the happiest period of my life was when we had none of these. Nor did we have electricity, running water, refrigeration, or sewage. I pity those unfortunate young people who have never experienced the miracle of water flowing for the first time from a faucet at the turn of a knob—instead of having to haul water in pails from the well. And they surely have not experienced the joy of switching on a light bulb for the first time—no longer having to worry about the wind blowing out the kerosene lamp. Still, I must admit that I enjoy the luxury of sitting on a modern toilet seat. It is much better than having to make a hundred-yard dash in the rain in order to sit over a hole in the floor of the outhouse.

After leaving the kibbutz, I was involved in personnel management and took courses on the subject. I learned that people worked in order to satisfy psychological as well as material needs. The theoretical approach to motivation was quite similar to what we practiced in the kibbutz. For others who attended these courses, it was a new and interesting approach—which many considered impractical and against human nature. For me, this was more than theory. I had seen it operate in practice in an entire community for many years.

The kibbutz provided me with the opportunity of doing all kinds of work—some for a period of years, some for a short time. I learned how a person can enjoy meaningful work at any level in the social hierarchy. The smooth, rhythmic movement of the scythe can be as sensuously satisfying as dancing or sport. One can enjoy monotonous mechanical jobs, like assembling clothespins in the clothespin factory of the kibbutz for a short period of time. As long as you are seeking the one best way to produce as much as possible as quickly as possible, the work can be quite interesting. I must admit that after that stage, though, it becomes quite monotonous.

Working in a quarry is a source of pleasure to one who is young and strong. You are sure to sleep soundly after such strenuous physical activity. Even guard duty provides an opportunity to be alone with the moon and stars, and to learn the regularity of their movements. I have worked at many jobs since leaving the kibbutz and found them all satisfying. Since there is no reason to believe that it was my luck to find unusually interesting jobs, I've come to the conclusion that the ideology of labor and the experience of working in the kibbutz have helped me to find interest in any kind ofwok. My kibbutz background has eased the transition into retirement. Since work to me is a normal human function (and not merely a way to earn a living) the only way retirement has changed my life is that now I am free to choose my work. Eighteen years have passed since retirement and I am no less busy than I was as a wage earner—due largely to my experience with kibbutz life.

In those days we did not join organized bus tours. We did not even go on organized hikes. What we knew of nature we knew because we lived in the midst of it. In that sense, the members of the palmach (the Israeli paramilitary before the establishment of the State of Israel) were fortunate. As part of their job, they had to know the countryside, and their interest in the environment went far beyond what their job required. No flag waving patriot loves his country as much as does a person who works its soil and knows its topography.

I spent most of my working life in the kibbutz in the fields of Kfar Blum, at some distance from the kibbutz and often in solitude. Every day I looked at Mt. Hermon to the North, the hills of Naphtali to the West and the Golan Heights to the East. One might think that seeing the same hills every day would become boring in the course of time. Far from it. The scenery would change from season to season, from day to day and from hour to hour. We did not look at the beauties of nature—we lived them. The use of mechanized farm equipment did not break the spell nature cast over us. On the contrary, sitting on the tractor, plowing a thin furrow foot by foot, I saw myself as a dot in the landscape, communing with nature and awed by it, and, at the same time, playing a significant role in building a new and better world.

One of the finer aspects of kibbutz life is its impracticality. Had the early pioneers been more practical they would have found an easier way of making a living than by founding kibbutzirn, and the State of Israel would have remained a utopian (or messianic) dream. Establishing a kibbutz on land occupied mainly by anopheles mosquitoes certainly seemed a stupid thing to do since it was inevitable that all its members would suffer frequent attacks of malaria. Even without the malaria, it was obvious that thirty people, within rifle range of three Arab villages, would have no chance of survival. During World War II, Rommel was advancing in the direction of Egypt and Kfar Blum was surrounded on three sides by tens of thousands of enemy troops. As a rational person, I was, to say the least, pessimistic about the future. It amazed me to find that other less rational members of the kibbutz were sure that things would turn out all right. This was a good example of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which means that strong belief that a wish will be fulfilled increases the probability of its fulfillment. My more rational prediction proved to be wrong. Since then, I have become an optimist.

This lack of practicality expresses itself in other surprising ways. Sometimes a member of the kibbutz would become obsessed with the idea of setting up a new kibbutz enterprise. Because he may have little experience on the subject and since it is unlikely that he has made a feasibility study to strengthen his case, the kibbutz would probably turn him down for practical reasons. However, if he is very patient and very obstinate, resistance will wear down in the course of time. Because he is by now an old timer kibbutz leaders might decide in a moment of weakness that if it makes our would-be entrepreneur happy, the kibbutz could bear the cost. That is how many profit making kibbutz projects were started.

If today I am an inveterate optimist and one whose love of freedom borders on anarchy, it is largely because of my kibbutz experience. I am an optimist because I have seen the impossible come to pass. I believe in freedom because I've seen it work. I've seen how cooperation, social discipline, respect for life and property, and a normal family life can exist without the need for legal or clerical sanctions. I've seen people dedicated to their work without being motivated by greed, ambition or fear of hunger. I learned that a free society is a possibility—but not a certainty. The truth of the matter is that the kibbutz today has lost much of its relative advantage over other ways of life. Members of the kibbutz today get married by an Orthodox rabbi; crime does exist; and the activities of kibbutznikim are controlled by a complicated legal system worked out by the kibbutz movement. Members of the kibbutz tend to adopt the materiali st, capitalist culture that today pervades Israel and much of the rest of the world. As I look backward at the kibbutz I realize that not all its ideals were carried out in day-to-day life. The ideal, however, is still valid and can and should serve as a guide for building society today and in the future. The United States Declaration of Independence has not lost its influence on the American people in view of the fact that its framers kept slaves and gave no rights to women. The importance of a myth is not how true it is but how it affects people's behavior. The American myth, many decades later, no doubt influenced the abolitionist movement and the suffragettes who eventually succeeded in turning the myth of the Declaration of Independence into reality. Similarly, the kibbutz myth of a just society based on cooperation, social justice and commitment to social issues may well be realized in the future.

Whether the myth of the Kibbutz will have an impact on the future or not, Kibbutz Kfar Blum, which had such a great influence in molding my life, remains for me a reminder of the myth I once lived and still love.