Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Friedkin Philanthropies and the Koret Foundation, and is inspired by ISRAEL 21c. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or if you just want to say hey, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
Before we start, as always, check us out on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, all the places. Just search Unpacking Israeli History and hit the follow or subscribe button. Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
Welcome back to our two-part series on the kibbutz movement that shaped Israel. If you haven’t listened to Part One, we talked about the principles that animated the movement – socialism, communal living, egalitarianism, shared responsibility, lack of private property, good old fashioned hard work of the agricultural variety. We covered the founders of the very first kibbutz, whose utter commitment to the cause provided a kind of national blueprint for later generations of Israelis, whether they chose to live on kibbutzim or not. We discussed the slightly baffling experiments in communal living, from the lack of private property to the Children’s Houses that embodied the axiom “it takes a village to raise a child.”
Last week, I said that the story of Israel goes way beyond war and conflict. That’s true. And it’s also true that the Jewish state is located in a volatile region, and early Zionists, many of whom were refugees from the raging and violent Jew hatred, the antisemitism of Eastern Europe, were committed to defending themselves against any and every enemy that came their way. These bronzed and brawny “New Jews” refused to rely on the mercy or whims of the rest of the world, as their ancestors had done for so many years. If they wanted to survive in the land of Israel, they had to get serious about defense – and to understand the cost of living on the frontier of a country that didn’t exist yet. A cost that continues to this day.
So that’s where we’ll start today’s story: on the front lines. This is chapter 3 of our 2-part series on Kibbutzim:
Chapter 3: Danger, Defense and Defiance
On October 6, 2023, most people in the world had never heard of a kibbutz. Sure, they had once been an iconic symbol of the Jewish state, back in the 60s and 70s maybe a little bit of the 80s. Young people of the time flocked to Israel, whether they were hippies, socialists, Jews, or just tourists ready to experience Mother Nature and see the mythical Israeli up close.
But by 2023, the allure of the kibbutz had faded, and most people had no idea that Israeli culture had been shaped, in large part, by a bunch of idealistic young people who spent their days mucking swamps and their nights dancing around a fire and glowing with purpose.
Then came the seventh of October, 2023. And suddenly, the word kibbutz was splashed all over international headlines, often in conjunction with the word “massacre.” Here’s a typical headline from the time: October 12, 2023. NPR. “What is a kibbutz? The roots of Israel’s communal villages where violence raged.”
But here’s the thing.
Long before Hamas burst into the Israeli kibbutzim that ring the Gaza border, long before the country even had anything approaching borders, these small agricultural communities put themselves on the front lines of an existential battle. Many early Kibbutzim were intentionally established on the outskirts of the Yishuv, living cheek by jowl with some very unfriendly neighbors. And that is why so many kibbutzim are clustered along Israel’s northern and southern borders. This is Amir Tibon, an Israeli journalist, kibbutznik, and former guest on my other podcast, Wondering Jews.
“It’s not a coincidence that the first governments of the state of Israel, led by David Ben-Gurion, invested a lot of resources in these border communities like Nahal Oz.”
Nahal Oz is Amir’s kibbutz, established in 1951 along the Gaza border, first as an outpost for soldiers in the Nahal brigade, though civilians began arriving two years later. Now, the kibbutz and the military base are distinct from one another, but both the kibbutz and the base gained an unwelcome notoriety the morning of October 7th, when horrific videos began to circulate of Hamas murdering or kidnapping its residents. Amir and his family survived the attack by hiding in their safe room for ten hours. 15 of his neighbors were murdered and another 8 taken hostage, while the nearby military base was set on fire with soldiers still inside.
It was the worst attack in the kibbutz’s history. But it was far from the first.
Nahal Oz was founded in 1953 as a direct order from Moshe Dayan, who was at the time the most influential general in Israel. Based on this idea, that there needs to be civilian communities along the borders, that it’s not enough for Israel to have military presence on its borders because militaries can easily be redeployed and structured back. You need to have communities there that will hold these borders and that will send a message to the people on the other side that Israel is here to stay.
But this was true of all kibbutzim, not just those that bordered Gaza. Remember, in the early 1900s, the future shape of the so-called “Jewish national home in Palestine” was anybody’s guess. So nearly every kibbutz was on the “front lines,” no matter where it was located.
Today, Kibbutz Deganya is idyllic, its lush pastures ringed by towering palms. But back in 1910, the so-called “mother of all kibbutzim” was in constant danger of raids and attacks. And its first casualty was 16-year-old Moshe Barsky.
Moshe had fled Russia just eight months earlier, arriving at Deganya in 1912. When a fellow kibbutznik fell ill, the teenager volunteered to fetch medicine from a nearby Jewish community. But Moshe never made it back to the kibbutz. He was ambushed and murdered by Bedouin raiders, the medicine still in his hand.
The murder struck the entire Yishuv with the ferocity of a lightning bolt. As the first kibbutznik to be murdered, Moshe became a symbol of the perils of frontier living – and of the profound importance of self-defense.
After the murder, Deganya and the surrounding settlements dramatically upped their security, organizing guard rotations and armed escorts for travel, no matter how short the distance.
The sick kibbutznik survived, in case you were wondering, so overcome by the Barsky’s sacrifice that he named his future son Moshe. In a poetic quirk of fate, little Moshe also became a symbol of Israeli self-defense, though his notoriety far outstrips that of his namesake.
Few people have heard of Moshe Barsky. But if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you definitely know Moshe Dayan, the second child born in Deganya.
Like I said: the kibbutzim have produced more than their fair share of Israeli icons. Many kibbutznikim – including Moshe Dayan – ended up joining the Haganah, the pre-state militia that eventually became the core of the IDF. In some cases, the kibbutzim themselves became battlegrounds: just a bunch of farmers with guns doing their best to defend their homes. Sometimes, these battles ended in tragedy – like the battle at Kfar Etzion, which we’ve recounted on this podcast before.
But sometimes, they ended in unlikely triumph.
Like the time two dudes from Deganya stopped three Syrian tanks. Yes, you heard that right.
Just days after Israel declared independence in May of 1948, as the countries surrounding Israel descended for war, Deganya squared off against the neighbors. Living next to Syria and Jordan, the kibbutznikim knew it was only a matter of time before one or both armies would show up. They had already evacuated the women and children, leaving roughly 100 poorly trained and barely-armed men to defend the kibbutz, since the experienced, well-trained fighters had been called away to defend other fronts. With old rifles, short-range guns, and beer bottles filled with gasoline – aka Molotov cocktails – the remaining men dug in to defend their home.
Three days later, the Syrian infantry showed up, guns blazing. They fled the moment the kibbutznikim returned fire – but everyone knew the battle wasn’t over. When the Syrians came back, they brought the big guns, rolling into Deganya with either six or eight fully-armored tanks, depending on who you ask.
Like all legends, the details of this one get blurry, depending on who is recounting the story – but this is the version that I like best. Before the tanks could begin shelling, two brave kibbutznikim peeled away from the front lines, Molotov cocktails in hand. These guys were not the brawny, don’t-mess-with-the-Zohan types that you might imagine. Shalom Hochbaum was a 25-year-old chicken farmer who had survived thirteen concentration camps, while Yehuda Sprung was described as quote, a “thin, timid little man who looks like a tailor.” According to a report in the Guardian, neither man had ever even seen a tank before. But that didn’t stop them from hurling their homemade explosives towards the Syrians with all their might.
And though Molotov cocktails might seem pitifully ineffective against actual military hardware, the men’s aim was true. Two tanks caught fire, and a third was entirely immobilized after one of Shalom’s gas-filled beer bottles exploded underneath it.
The Syrians still had a handful of operational tanks at Deganya. But the remaining tanks – either three or five of them, depending on who you ask – turned around, leaving the three burning tanks behind. Eventually, the IDF refurbished two of them – no sense wasting a perfectly good tank. But that third one, the one that Shalom had immobilized with a well-aimed explosive, remains outside the gates of Deganya to this day – a tribute to the role of the Kibbutz in defending the new state.
Like I said, this is a legend. Details soften and collapse in each retelling, and eyewitness accounts from the fog of war should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. But even if the details are simply too perfect to be true, that doesn’t change the fact that Deganya’s farmers nonetheless stood their ground, confronting fully armored tanks with beer bottles.
Were they particularly brave? Especially heroic?
I think they were. It takes a lot to survive thirteen different Nazi camps. But I also think they were desperate. Vulnerable. Fully aware that Deganya, and Israel, were the end of the line. So they fought with the ferociousness of people abandoned. People with nowhere else to go.
Throughout the 1948 war, similar stories replicated themselves all over Israel, and especially in the 82 kibbutzim that had cropped up over the past 37 years. The movement that had begun with 12 kids determined to tame a swamp had spread – and over the coming decades, it would explode.
CHAPTER 4: Equality for all… for some
Deganya didn’t remain the only Kibbutz for long. By 1913, Kibbutz Kineret had popped up nearby, and the movement was off and running. By 1920, Deganya had grown so big that it couldn’t maintain that cherished “big happy family” feel, so it split into a breakaway kibbutz creatively named Deganya Bet, or Deganya B, while the OG became Deganya Aleph.
Among the new residents of Deganya Aleph none other than the original visionary of the entire kibbutz movement: 63-year-old A.D. Gordon, who spent his days working the fields and the nights writing by candlelight. Gordon died in 1922, so he didn’t live to see a Jewish state. But even pre-state, he did have the satisfaction of living out his vision, exactly as he had dreamed it. By that point, the kvutza at Deganya wasn’t merely an isolated outpost, full of misfits with a utopian dream. It was a movement that had taken off the year before, with the establishment of the biggest kibbutz yet: Kibbutz Ein Harod. Here’s how Ari Shavit describes what is probably the most influential kibbutz of them all:
“The young founders of Ein Harod are ecstatic. ‘It’s all astounding,’ writes one of them. ‘I cannot but think of the sons of Israel in their tents in the desert. But this is our last stop. Here our wandering ends.’ The excitement is not only personal but collective. The brigade builds the land shoulder to shoulder, male and female. The collective also dances and sings. …Faces flow, eyes flitter. They dance around a bonfire, as if dance is a prayer. They dance as if the act of settling in the valley is of Biblical significance. Shots of celebration pierce the air.”
Where Deganya had 12 founders, Ein Harod had seventy four. And as the largest kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, it soon became a hub for the kibbutz movement itself – the unofficial center in the years before Independence. Eventually, one of the founders of Ein Harod would go on to found the United Kibbutz, bringing most of Israel’s kibbutzim under the same umbrella.
But like all growing movements, the kibbutz project eventually confronted an existential problem. The philosophy worked really well, it was great when it was confined to a tiny community full of people with the exact same values. But as kibbutzim spread across a rapidly changing country, would the original vision, the original values, remain sustainable?
By the 1950s, Israel’s population had more than doubled, and nearly one million of the newcomers were neither Ashkenazi nor secular. Could the movement expand to include the traditionally observant Jews from Muslim countries? Could a socialist philosophy survive in a capitalist world? And as the country industrialized, growing more technologically advanced by the decade, was the commitment to agriculture holding the kibbutzim back?
The answers to these questions are maybe, ish, and kinda.
Come on, you had to see this coming. This is Unpacking Israeli History! Nothing is black and white, and the kibbutzim were no exception.
Let’s start with the first, and most troubling, issue at hand.
For a community devoted to egalitarianism, early kibbutznikim had some troubling ideas about who deserved equality. And this is me going into op-ed mode. This is my take.
Secular Ashkenazim, mostly – Jews of European descent who were willing to dispense with old-timey traditions in service of building a New Jew. Religious people just didn’t fit with the socialist, secular vibe of the kibbutz. So while a handful of observant Jews somehow made their way into the early kibbutzim, the system was not built for them. To this day, some kibbutzim are still debating whether religious members should be allowed to build a permanent synagogue on the premises.
The discrimination got a whole lot worse if you were Mizrahi. Remember, Mizrahi is a term for all Jews from Muslim lands, that lumps together diverse communities into one convenient catch-all category. As the Muslim world disgorged its Jews, hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews showed up in the only place that would take them: the State of Israel. Which meant authorities had to find homes for close to one million immigrants, and fast.
Prime Minister Ben Gurion looked to the Kibbutzim as a potential solution. After all, the movement had been founded by immigrants, and by 1948, they had already absorbed thousands of refugees and survivors fleeing Europe. Why not take in these newcomers, too?
But most, if not all, kibbutzim flatly refused to absorb immigrants from the Muslim world. They pointed out that the system only worked because of shared socialist, secular values. What did traditionally observant Jews from decidedly non-democratic countries understand about egalitarianism? Or socialism? Or secularism?
To be fair to the kibbutznikim, this wave of immigrants was different from all the ones that had come before. Until the late 1940s, most of the immigrants clamoring to join the kibbutzim were young, idealistic, and physically fit, so eager to experience a socialist utopia they didn’t mind the punishing conditions.
But this influx of Mizrahim was different. Entire communities had been emptied out and relocated: infants, the elderly, the sick, families with 8 or 10 or 12 children. Sure, some of the young people would be able to share in the work, but families mostly came as a package deal. And the kibbutznikim had no intention of letting freeloading grandparents who often didn’t even speak Hebrew into their utopia.
Ben Gurion was furious, putting the whole movement on blast in a 1950 speech to the Knesset. Quote:
“The pioneering movement [you know, the kibbutz movement] among us […] has failed at this great and difficult time. For two years I have been ashamed and embarrassed as I witnessed this failure of the pioneering movement. The greatest thing in our entire history has taken place, … the bringing together of the diasporas has started, and what have our pioneers done? Have the kibbutzim stepped forward?
Look, I’m not trying to call the guy a hypocrite, but Ben Gurion and his government had said some pretty nasty things about Mizrahim, and I think he was largely ticked off because the kibbutznikim refused to solve a problem for him.
So with an exploding population and very little infrastructure or money, the government stuck these new immigrants in ma’abarot, tent cities that eventually graduated to rows of corrugated tin shacks without running water, adequate sanitation, or privacy. It wasn’t just mizrahim that got shoved into these hellish conditions. It’s hard to overemphasize how poor the country was at the time. Most countries don’t have the infrastructure to support a population that doubles itself within three years, and there was plenty of misery to go around no matter where you came from.
But Mizrahim were disproportionately shoved into these transit camps. And if they ever stepped foot on a kibbutz, it was as cheap labor – exploited, abused, and sent home to a tent at the end of a long day. A.D. Gordon would have rolled over in his grave. What happened to not outsourcing work? What happened to dirt under your fingernails? To reestablishing a personal connection to the land?
I’m not telling you about this ugly history because I want to rain on your parade. I’m telling you this because it’s true; it’s part of Israeli history, and well, that’s my mission to share the shades of the story, not just one side. And also because, in some ways, it’s inevitable. We don’t always live up to our ideals. To our beliefs. Our aspirations. The bigger a movement becomes, the more it can, and often does, stray from the original vision. Scaling comes with consequences.
Outside of Israel, however, the kibbutz movement was free PR. People were charmed and delighted by these exotic socialist utopias, full of bronzed young people who picked oranges by day and danced around bonfires by night.
After the Six Day War in 1967, when world sympathy and admiration for Israel were at an all-time high, volunteering on a Kibbutz became all the rage. Teenagers flocked to these socialist utopias, delighted by the romance of it all.
Many were Jewish and seeking connection to their heritage and their homeland. But many were not. The movement attracted socialists rebelling against the capitalist status quo, flower-power types hungry to connect with Mother Earth, and many others who wanted to experience something different for a while. It didn’t hurt that Israelis had garnered a reputation for being both tough and hot. Even Playboy – according to the internet – did a spread on the so-called “Land of Milk and Honeys.”
Some pretty big names showed up through the 60s and 70s. Some were obvious – I mean, Bernie Sanders? Of course he was into the whole socialism thing. But others are more surprising. Helen Mirren. Sigourney Weaver. Noam Chomsky. Boris Johnson! Jerry Seinfeld even credits his stint on Kibbutz Sa’ar in the 1970s with his decision to become a comedian.
The kibbutz ethos didn’t soften just because a bunch of Americans and Brits and South Africans showed up. All volunteers were expected to live the kibbutz lifestyle, eating in the dining room, working all day, even taking shifts on guard duty.
Kibbutz volunteerism was a win / win. The volunteers got an exotic and maybe even meaningful experience. The Kibbutzim got free labor. And the Jewish state enjoyed phenomenal international publicity. Foreign minister Abba Eban urged the government to promote the trend as a, quote, “fundamental and long-term investment in Israel’s international standing.”
You can still volunteer on a kibbutz today, by the way, though you’re a lot less likely to find yourself rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians. Israel’s global popularity took a serious hit in the 1980s, with the First Lebanon War. And it didn’t help that by that point, the Kibbutz movement itself had begun changing.
Maybe it was inevitable. The Israeli economy was shifting and industrializing. Agrarian communes were nice in theory, but if the country wanted to stay economically competitive, it had to modernize.
Many kibbutzim began to follow Ein Harod’s example and introduce factories. In addition to its avocado orchards and cow sheds, Deganya opened a factory for diamond cutting tools. Today, Kibbutz Hatzerim produces drip irrigation equipment, while Ein HaNatziv makes plastics. Be’eri was – and will be again – famous for its printing press.
But the addition of factories just diversified the type of work. At the end of the day, kibbutznikim still shared everything, from property to values to their nightly dinner. The real change came in the 1980s, when Israel confronted a major financial crisis. As inflation hit record highs, the kibbutzim struggled to stay afloat, relying on a government bailout that left them in massive debt. At the same time, the younger generation was leaving, eager to experience city life. The lifestyle that had so enchanted their grandparents in the 40s held little allure. That’s the problem with success, I guess. The more you have, the more you dare to want.
The founding generation was exceptionally poor. They had to pool their resources if they wanted to survive. But their grandkids had grown up comfortably, and they wanted more than the humble life that the kibbutz could offer. They wanted to own their homes. They wanted savings they didn’t have to share. They wanted privacy and autonomy. They wanted their kids to sleep in the next room over, not half a mile away.
One by one, the tenets that defined the Kibbutz began to fall away. The Children’s Houses. The lack of private property. The equality in all things.
Today, in most kibbutzim, everything is different.
Salaries are based on the job you do, and plenty of kibbutznikim commute to jobs outside their communities. Houses have their own kitchens, and no one is shamed for wanting to eat dinner as a nuclear family. Farming jobs are often outsourced to outside labor. There are even religious kibbutzim, with synagogues, kosher food, and volunteering opportunities for observant teenagers from all over the world.
Of the 270 kibbutzim in Israel today, only 60 maintain the strict socialism of the original vision. The rest are privatized. And though the 12 founders of the original Kibbutz might be aghast at the changes, I like to think they would admire the way their movement adapted to fit the demands of the modern day.
Because the core of the movement hasn’t changed.
Kibbutzim still see themselves as a large family unit. They may not be strictly socialist anymore, but they’re still a kvutza – a tight-knit group that cares deeply for each other. They are still considered some of the safest and most wholesome communities in Israel, where kids run around barefoot and no one locks their doors, where people live modest but meaningful lives.
And some are still the first line of defense for all of Israel.
Here’s Amir Tibon again, explaining why he left his comfortable Tel Aviv life to live on the border with Gaza in the summer of 2014.
Very briefly, during that summer, Nahal Oz was bombarded heavily by Hamas and suffered a terrible tragedy with the death of a four-year-old child in the community, Daniel Tregerman was his name.
After that happened, a lot of families left the community. And then other people from other parts of Israel, including my wife and I, decided to move there. We were young at the time. We were living in Tel Aviv. And we just made a decision, a combination of Zionist ideals, adventurism and a search for community and belonging and a mission, to be a part of that, we are moving to Nahal Oz.
Can you imagine that? People saw rockets raining down, killing children, and they ran towards the battlefield, not away from it. Amir and his wife aren’t adventure seekers or adrenaline junkies. They’re idealists, fired up by the same ideals that gave rise to the first kibbutz, and to the State of Israel itself!
…we need to have secure borders. Israel is surrounded by enemies of all sorts that would like our country to disappear. And the communities alongside Israel’s borders, communities like those in the north that have been evacuated since October 8 because of Hezbollah’s attacks, and like those along the border with Gaza that were infiltrated and attacked on October 7, are the front lines of this idea that we need to protect the borders of this country.
Kibbutz life was never wildly popular within Israel, boasting fewer than 200,000 members at its peak. And yet, the movement almost single-handedly created the stereotype of the old-school Israeli. Salt of the earth, humble, hard-working, idealistic.
Fearless. Convinced that with a little hard work and a lot of chutzpah, nothing is impossible.
Sometimes, they’re right.
So that’s the story of the kibbutzim, and here are your five fast facts:
- In 1910, 12 young immigrants started a farming commune called Deganya on the shores of the Kinneret: the world’s first kibbutz.
- These founders were heavily inspired by the work of A. D. Gordon, who emphasized an socialist Jewish connection to the Land of Israel.
- These communes became hubs of Israeli culture, attracting thousands of volunteers from abroad and burnishing Israel’s global reputation.
- In the 1980s, most kibbutzim started to privatize, and today, only a quarter remain socialist.
- Despite their small size, kibbutzim have helped shape the Israeli ethos of hard work, collective responsibility, and chutzpah.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
In the summer of 1935, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik visited Kibbutz Kineret, not far from Deganya. He knew he was visiting a secular community that didn’t keep kosher, so he declined when they offered him a meal.
So he was shocked when this group of secular socialists reassured him that their kitchen was strictly kosher, in accordance with Jewish law. When he asked why obviously non-observant people kept a kosher kitchen, they told him about a fateful visit from another great rabbi.
A few years earlier, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook – the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine – had spent Shabbat on their kibbutz. As the kibbutznikim dug into their own meals, Rav Kook ate the wine and challah he had brought with him. Nothing else.
He didn’t say a word as the kibbutznikim violated the rules of Shabbat in front of him. When the day of rest ended, he joined in their singing and dancing and storytelling as though he were one of them. As he left, he said “Shalom, lehitra’ot, v’le’echol beyachad seudah achat:” “Goodbye, and may we soon eat together as one.”
The next day, the kibbutznikim threw out their dishes and kashered their kitchen, i.e. made it kosher, so that when Rav Kook – or any other observant Jew – visited again, they could all eat their meals together as one.
That story is often told to highlight the kind of person Rav Kook was. And I don’t want to diminish that, of course. But my takeaway isn’t about Rav Kook. It’s about the kibbutz system itself.
Here was a completely secular movement designed, in part, to separate Jewish identity – ya know, the new Jew, from Jewish religious practice, i.e. the Old Jew. And yet, the members of Kibbutz Kinneret upended their whole kitchen just in case an observant Jew happened to come by.
We tend to characterize early Zionism as anti-religious, even hostile to traditional Judaism. And that’s partially true, but it’s not the whole story. These kibbutznikim, at least, understood what Rav Kook had been saying all along: the nation they were building wasn’t just for Jews like them. It was for all Jewish people across the world. Every Jew had a part to play in this epic story of redemption, whether secular, religious, or somewhere in between.
The kibbutznikim may not have agreed with Rav Kook’s image of them as principal characters in a messianic drama – but they did believe in service to the collective.
And the collective wasn’t just the kibbutz. It wasn’t just the State of Israel (which didn’t exist at the time). The collective meant the Jewish people. All of them. Even the ones who kept kosher and the ones who didn’t.
Every morning, kibbutznikim got up and said “this isn’t about me. This is about us. About our future – as a community, as a nation, and as a people.”
And that’s the element of kibbutz life that I connect to most deeply. I’m no pioneer. I’m not about the backbreaking labor, or the lack of private property, or the obsession with agriculture.
But this devotion to us instead of me. This service to the Jewish people, to the Jewish future – that’s how I want to live. That’s who I want to be.
In one of his columns for the New York Times, David Brooks pointed out something interesting. When you ask someone how they know they’re in love, their answer usually doesn’t revolve around their partner, but how their partner makes them feel. Which is normal! As he writes, quote: “In a narcissistic culture people are naturally going to define love as the feeling they get when somebody satisfies their craving for positive and tender attention, not as something they selflessly give to another. But love is not an emotion (though it kicks up a lot of emotions); it is a motivational state — a desire to be close to and serve another. It blurs the boundary between one person and another.”
I think he might be a little harsh when he says our culture is 100% narcissistic, but I love this idea and broader point, because it feels so true – and so Jewish. Our earliest sources describe love not as a feeling, but as an act of service. An act of giving. A choice we make, again and again, to put our own ego, our own comfort, aside for the sake of something bigger.
And I’d bet, if you asked most kibbutznikim today why they chose this lifestyle, they might start off with all the standard, expected stuff about quality of life and safety and community. You know, the stuff that people like, that makes them feel good. But I’d bet that they would also say something about the collective. About living with and for the other. About serving a purpose bigger than themselves. About the collective, of thinking way beyond “ME.”
And I think about this all the time. What’s my purpose? What’s guiding my life? How am I serving a greater cause? Those questions came up again and again for me as my team and I researched this episode, as we delved into the beautiful, complicated, painful history of young people who gave everything for the sake of a bigger ideal.
If you want to experience kibbutz life, check the link in the show notes – whatever flavor of kibbutz you’re looking for, you’ll find it there.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Danny Hoffman, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.