Utopia is something we dream but never possess. I came to
this conclusion after tasting several utopic contenders - living in harmony
with nature, farming, vagabonding, and living on various Marxist kibbutzim.
One of them was Kibbutz Yehiam in the western Galilee, where
our daughter was raised communally for the first five months of her tender
life.
She made a hit with the attendants. She smiled at each as if
they were treasured friends. We would come for her each evening for two hours
after our work was done.
I was therefore thrilled to find Yael Neeman's account of
her early life in Yehiam. In "We were the Future: A Memoir of the
Kibbutz," she illuminated the kibbutz life that I had never perceived as
an outsider.
The preface provides an overview:
·
The kibbutz movement is one of the most
fascinating phenomena of modern history and one of Zionism’s greatest stories.
Several hundred communities attempted to live the ideas of equality, freedom,
and social justice by giving up private property, individualism, and the
“bourgeois” family unit to create an Israeli utopia following the Holocaust—the
only example in world history of entire communities voluntarily attempting to
live in total equality. However, for the children raised in these communities,
the kibbutz was an institution collapsing under the weight of an ideology that
marginalized its offspring to make a political statement.
The Marxist kibbutz movement, Hashomer Hatziar, represented
the most radical social experiment where all forms of "ownership" had
been rejected. Instead, everything was to be "owned" by the
collective - children, clothing, and even decision-making. Neeman explains:
·
Public and private issues were decided upon at
the kibbutz meetings, and committees were elected there. If someone wanted to
leave the kibbutz for higher education, the secretariat, the Education
Committee and finally, the kibbutz meeting decided whether he would go or wait,
and also, what he would study: Did the course of study he wished to pursue
correspond to what the kibbutz needed? If it didn’t, he had to adjust himself
to the needs of the community.
Even coupling with one specific sexual partner had originally
been disdained.
However, this perspective had been disbanded long before my
arrival in Israel. Eventually, human nature overtook this severe ideal, and
eventually, everyone settled down with their chosen spouse and were visited by
their biological children for between one and two hours every evening.
At the time, I had thought that this had been an ideal
arrangement, which allowed the parents to spend quality time with their
children. However, according to Neeman, the youth did not connect with their
parents. Instead, the parent-child relationship felt artificial and
uncomfortable.
This discomfort became magnified when the youth from a
neighboring kibbutz visited, necessitating the Yehiam youth to stay with their
parents for three days. About this Neeman writes:
·
Our parents’ close proximity seemed sick and
crazy, as if we were locked in an embrace with death...We could hardly wait for
morning to come.
In this Marxist utopia, there was no room for God or for
anything that might undermine Marxist purity. Neeman writes:
·
And not only did God not exist in Hashomer
Hatzair, but he was forbidden; he was an irrational, pagan obstacle to the
remarkable abilities and productivity of the sublime human being. God was a
vestige of the dark Middle Ages.
Anything that smacked of the bourgeoisie was disdained:
·
The [kitchen] workers called us [children] over
for a minute, quickly, so no one would see or hear them pampering us, and let
us taste the food. And they also asked us if it was good, fishing for
compliments because there were no compliments on our kibbutz. Applause at the
end of a performance was frowned upon too; that was a bourgeois custom.
Meanwhile, the children would sing:
·
We were born to the sun. We were born to the
light.
The vacuum created by the banishment of God had to be
filled, and the children "born to the light" had to fill it.
I hadn't been aware of this burden that the youth carried,
the weighty expectations placed upon them to fulfill their commune's Marxist
ideals. Nor had Neeman in her early years:
·
We were proud that we worked on Yom Kippur and
ate wild boar that we roasted on campfires. No circumcision ceremonies were
held on our kibbutz. No rabbi set foot on it to perform weddings. The dead were
buried in coffins, the Kaddish prayer was not said over them, and any mention
of the Bible was forbidden.
Later the vacuum would become oppressive. Meanwhile, the
ideal was accepted as the unexamined norm in the automatic way that lunch would
follow breakfast. Neeman reflects:
·
The boys and girls who graduated from the
educational institution [where they would go at age 12 on a neighboring
kibbutz] had been born on the kibbutz, had absorbed its values from the very
beginning, and had not been damaged by the bourgeois institutions of family and
education. They would lead the kibbutzim and the city dwellers, who came from
the various city branches of Hashomer Hatzair to fulfill their ideological
dreams in the kibbutzim, to a better world. During his years in the
institution, the new child would mature into a new man living on a kibbutz,
fully connected to and involved in the life of the country.
However, the ideal was never able to fill the vacuum. Neeman
reports that, once into their teen years, they began to be plagued by questions
of the meaning of life, which would not be satisfied by the standard kibbutz answers.
While they felt a debt to the kibbutz, it had a stomach that could never be
filled:
·
We worked out of a guilty conscience for a
system that would never be satisfied. We felt as if our conscience was a
biological, organic part of our body, like an invisible inner hump.
It was an ideal Neeman knew she could never meet. In this
regard, I found a recent interview quite revealing:
·
Nevertheless, her childhood memories are happy
ones. Contrary to popular characterizations, she said, separating children from
families was not an inhumane policy: “It was created from a belief that it would
make a better human being and a better family, After all, families are not so
ideal all the time. When we ex-kibbutzniks speak among ourselves about this
issue, we call it a paradox because most of us were really happy in this
strange arrangement. Yet none of us want our children or grandchildren growing
up like that.”
As a result, most of the kibbutz youth have voted with their
feet and have fled their utopia for the world of the bourgeoisie.
Time has passed its verdict on what seems to have been the
world's most successful communist/socialist experiment and has found it
wanting.
Time has also been ruthless with other communal experiments.
The 70s had been the heyday for communal living in the States. My wife and I
visited several, none of which can be found today. Nevertheless, in each
instance, it members had been convinced that they had found their permanent
home.
We had also spent time in the Longhouse in Borneo, where the
tribesmen live communally under their chief. They share games, singing, and the
communal connectedness of a large extended family. But once again, the youth
gladly give it all up for their own dream of an education, a city job, and
enough money to buy a pickup.
Why can we not find
utopia? Why is it only vapor that we cannot grasp and keep? Perhaps we can
understand this with the help of a couple of analogies:
A man saw a butterfly struggling mightily to emerge from its
cocoon, and so he helped free it. However, it died. Why? The butterfly needs
the benefit of the struggle to pump its liquids into its wings.
Similarly, baboons build stable communities through the
practice of grooming. However, grooming loses all its relevance without the
troublesome pests – ticks and lice. Without these predators and other threats,
the baboon community cannot survive.
Is it possible that we too require an assortment of threats
in order to prosper? To use an extreme example, perhaps we also need death. I
remember seeing a video of a woman recovered from the rubble of an earthquake, after
five days. The hugging and the tears of joy shed by the husband were touching,
to say the least. I wondered, “Had he been complaining about her the week
before?” If so, what had changed his disdain into joy? The prospect of losing
what he had had!
What would we be like if we lived in a perfect utopia where
there was no death and no loss? Wouldn’t we become callous and take every
relationship for granted or even as a burden? Would we have any room for
gratefulness and love?
Instead, it seems that there are many blessings that we
cannot yet handle, blessings that might destroy us. Perhaps all we can do is
just dream about a more perfect world. Perhaps we would again just spoil Eden
if we were there. Perhaps the door to this enchanted Garden will swing open to
us once we have been readied for it.
