Where Community Happens. the Kibbutz

Part One The Collective Experience Henry Near - 9783035301281 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 05:43:25PM via free access Henry Near - 9783035301281 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 05:43:25PM via free access Chapter 1 The Collective Experience: Universal and Particular Why do people join communes? And, having joined them, why do they stay in them, despite the peculiar dif ficulties and discouragements of everyday life in a closely-knit community? The answers are without doubt complex and manifold. I want to concentrate on one of them, an element in communal life which, in my view, has not been adequately discussed in the research literature. I shall refer to it by the deliberately neutral term, “the collective experience”. Let me open my discussion with an ostensive defi- nition. Here are two descriptive pieces which will give some idea of the nature of this phenomenon: How often in the brooding warmth and stillness of summer nights, when the senses are fairly oppressed with natural beauty […] does the charm of nature grow so intense that […] the senses are sublimed to an ecstasy […] Through this and a wealth of similar experiences, the author comes to realise that: The instinct of universal solidarity, of the identity of our lives with all life, is the centripetal force which binds together in certain orbit all orders of being […] [The] passion for losing ourselves, which rebels against individuality as an impedi- ment, is the expression of the greatest law of solidarity […] It is the operation of this law in great and low things, in the love of men for women, and for each other for the race for nature […] that has ever made up the web and warp of human passion. (Bellamy 24, 31–2) This quotation is quite familiar to many students of communal societies. Here is another, more concrete, but less well known: Henry Near - 9783035301281 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 05:43:25PM via free access 4 Chapter 1 It was a magical night; the stars blinked and smiled at me and I understood what they were saying; they saw in me an old friend, and called me to themselves. And I felt that my soul was lifted up close to the sky and the stars, and a delightful feeling of love suf fused all my limbs […] I ceased to think. I felt only one thing: I am alive, I am alive. And every moment is an eternity of beauty, delight, and eternal life […] Suddenly I was awakened from my dream by the sound of many voices singing together […] I hastened to the camp, and leapt into the circle [of dancers …] and so we danced round and round, to the point of […] surcease […] Then were we all as one man, and one feeling beat within us. We were drunk with joy and youth. (Tsur 76; my translation) The first quotation is from a short essay by Edward Bellamy entitled “The Religion of Solidarity”. The second is from one of the classical texts of the early history of the kibbutz: the collective biography of the first group of graduates of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatza’ir, written as a summing-up of their first year of communal life. Note the common elements. There is a feeling of wonder at, and oneness with, nature, and with one’s fellow human beings within their natural setting; and this oneness – “solidarity”, in Bellamy’s word, “love” in that of the young kibbutzniks – is felt so intensively that it leads to a state close to ecstasy, a sort of semi-mystic experience. In the words of another well- known description, also of a young kibbutz in the early 1920s: There was a sort of mutual yearning, a desire to sit together far into the night, and thereby to penetrate the very depth of the vision of communal life. Soul touched soul. We longed to become a sort of river of souls, whose tributaries would merge, and together create a fresh and mighty current of friendship and fraternity. (Likever 146–7) So much for the content and quality of the collective experience. As for its provenance, let me note at this point that in both cases – and, in fact, quite typically – it happens to young people. Bellamy was, in his own words, “a boy of twenty-four” when he described these experiences, and doubtless much younger when he began to have them. The members of the Hashomer Hatza’ir group were roughly twenty years old. Both of these events were of very great importance in the lives of those who underwent them. Bellamy wrote: “This paper […] represents the germ of what has been ever since Henry Near - 9783035301281 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 05:43:25PM via free access The Collective Experience: Universal and Particular 5 my philosophy of life”; and, more than forty years after the publication of the collective diary, some of its authors told a visiting anthropologist that what happened to them in some nine months of intensive collective experience had been the basis of their values and actions ever since (Bellamy 48; Spiro 51–9). This, then, is the collective experience which will be discussed in this chapter. It is, of course, not unknown to students of the kibbutz. Indeed, through the writings of Herman Schmalenbach and Yonina Talmon-Garber it has undergone a sort of process of reification: the wordBund (in Hebrew edah) is frequently used to denote the small, close-knit community which such experiences are thought to typify (Schmalenbach 64–125; Talmon- Garber 2).1 I have no quarrel with this, in the context of sociological theo- rizing. Here, however, I am concerned to attempt to define the experience itself rather more closely, and to ask whether the claims made for it by many who have undergone it can be rationally justified: a philosophical discussion, rather than a sociological or psychological one. I have used the phrase “semi-mystical experience”. I shall start my analysis by asking which half is which: to what extent can this “ecstasy” or “yearning” properly be called a mystical state? But let me first settle a preliminary issue. Could it not be that our semi-mysticism is half true and half false, half real and half imitation? In other words, that we have here no more than a socialized – some might say a debased – form of one of the major mystical traditions? It certainly looks as if Bellamy leads us in this direction; for much of what he has to say amounts to little more than the shibboleths of American nineteenth-century transcendentalism; and, indeed, the same path leads us to Brook Farm and similar experiments. Transcendentalism itself was, of course, not a purely indigenous school of thought, but a reworking of various imported ideas, including Eastern mysticism. (Frothingham 1 Schmalenbach himself sometimes uses Bund (badly translated in the English version by “communion”) to denote an emotion, sometimes a social structure (contrasted with both Gemeinschaftand Gesellschaft). Gemeinschaft and, in Hebrew, hevruta, are also often used to denote the same phenomenon, or one like it. Henry Near - 9783035301281 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 05:43:25PM via free access 6 Chapter 1 chs. 6, 7; Christy). Moreover, to cite two parallel cases out of many: Gustav Landauer found inspiration for his theories of communitarian socialism in the pantheism of the medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart; and the predilections of many contemporary communards for their own ver- sions of oriental philosophy are well known.2 So perhaps this is the best interpretation of the collective experience? There is some backing for such a view in the intellectual history of the kibbutz. In 1961 David Ben Gurion, speaking of the concept of community as fundamental to the kibbutz, said: “Community is not only a supreme human principle […] it is also a cosmic principle which embraces a whole universe.” In words which were almost a paraphrase of Bellamy’s he elaborated the view that men do not only form a community with each other but are part of a cosmic whole “in which there is no dying or with- ering away but constant renewal and eternal revitalization” (Ben Gurion, “Ref lections”).3 Although Ben Gurion was never a kibbutz member he had a pretty good idea of what goes on in the kibbutz; and there may be some significance in the fact that in his only attempt at a philosophical treatment of this phenomenon he turned to the Eastern philosophers. Martin Buber, whose social philosophy inf luenced and was inf luenced very deeply by the kibbutz movement, was widely read in Jewish and non-Jewish mysticism. And others have looked for an ancestry of the collective experience of the kibbutz in the ideas and practices of Jewish mystics.4 Maybe all that one 2 Lunn, 1973, ch. 3. In the 1960s and early 1970s “the doctrine of Eastern religions […] blossomed like a springtime orchard in the emerging counterculture” (Zicklin 11). Of 120 communes studied by Benjamin Zablocki, twenty-two professed Eastern religions (Zablocki 209). 3 For a more detailed discussion of Ben Gurion’s view see below, ch. 4. 4 One kibbutz group – among them many of the authors of Kehiliateinu – deliberately adopted the word “kibbutz” to describe their community because it was used by the Bratislav Hassidim, an ecstatic Jewish sect, as a name for their periodic gatherings (Near, “Language of Community” 26–123). It should be emphasized that the kibbutz members referred to in this chapter are not orthodox or, as a group, religious in any formal sense.

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