Behavior: Change on the Kibbutz

My life is full of joy, for I am in my motherland. Work, my country and my language—to them I dedicate my youth and my strength. I can see in my imagination how we shall build the foundation of a national life. Stone by stone we are rebuilding the land laid waste thousands of years ago. I am happy that I am one of the builders. —Shmuel Dayan, 1913

As a founder of Israel’s first kibbutz, or communal settlement, Shmuel Dayan* was often in an exultant mood. His enthusiasm reflected the spirit of other Utopian experiments—virtually all of which failed. Now, in Israel’s 25th year, the conditions that sustained the kibbutz in its early days have changed, and some Israelis are questioning whether their experiment can last.

American and Israeli behavioral scientists, who have long studied the kibbutzim as the most interesting and durable collectives ever established anywhere, believe that it can. “The trouble with 19th century communes,” explains Israeli Sociologist Menachem Rosner, “was that their founders set a fixed pattern from which they did not want to move.” By contrast, he says, the kibbutz can survive because its members are willing to change and to give old values new forms of expression.

The kibbutzniks (commune members) lost a powerful source of motivation when the State of Israel was founded in 1948; they had long regarded their settlements and way of life as essential to the establishment of the new nation. Ever since that goal was reached, the kibbutzim have had trouble recruiting members willing to make the sacrifice that communal living demands.

A more subtle threat has recently appeared. Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s 231 kibbutzim now operate factories, and their residents are undergoing psychological crises as a result of rapid industrialization. Many of the factories have been so successful that it has been necessary to hire outsiders to supplement kibbutz manpower. That practice is considered socially destructive by some kibbutzniks because it sets salaried workers apart from members, who are given the necessities of life without being paid in money. “Something happens when we become managers and employ workers,” admits David Tal, economic administrator of Kibbutz Givat Brenner. “With only members in factories, work is based on cooperation and faith. The motivation is different when you pay salaries.”

Industrialization has meant other disruptions. “It has created a social gap,” says Yavin Rosen, a chemical engineer from Kibbutz Degania. “Managers are driving around in cars, and some have phones. We are out of the kibbutz more than previously and with our families less. Our whole way of life is changing. Some of us are resisting: I’ve refused a TV set and a telephone.”

Trips to Europe. Rosen is in the minority; most kibbutz members are yielding to the temptations of materialism. On Kibbutz Givat Haim (Hill of Life), every adult couple has a 21-room apartment or cottage, two radios, a refrigerator and a hot-water supply, and gets a trip to Europe every five years. Other kibbutzim are beginning to permit TV sets, not just in the dining hall for group viewing but in members’ private quarters. Says David Tal: “Attendance at our Saturday night meeting is way down now because Ironside comes on at 9 o’clock, when the meeting begins.”

Nevertheless, according to the American Council for the Behavioral Sciences in the Kibbutz, which is making a five-year study of the collectives, industrialization need not destroy the movement. For one thing, factories provide the prestige of work for the aging, a group that did not exist in the youthful pioneer days. The emotional problems of the elderly can be serious: according to Social Anthropologist Melford Spiro, loss of ability to compete with younger men at heavy farm work is a major cause of psychological insecurity in older chaverim (members).

Industry has also made food, shelter and clothing easier to come by, leaving time for intellectual and cultural pursuits. Most collectives have large libraries; some have museums, drama groups, choirs and orchestras. In fact, Psychologist John French of the University of Michigan speaks of a “cultural flowering” on the collectives.

But the kibbutzim have produced few major artists, writers or musicians. One explanation is offered by Psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. He has interviewed many young kibbutzniks and found that they suffer from feelings of guilt and shame when their personal aspirations conflict with their loyalty to the kibbutz. Those who resolve the conflict sufficiently to ask for permission to study outside may run into resistance. “If a girl’s heart’s desire to become a ballerina is not just a whim, and if she is talented, then she will get ballet lessons,” says Asher Golan of Givat Haim. “The final decision is up to the general membership.”

Open Doors. These days the membership is saying yes more often. Sociologist Rosner reports that “only seven years ago there was still strong opposition to higher education: the fathers wanted to get their sons out on the land. Now they want them to go to college.” After a five-year study of the generation gap, Rosner concluded that while older members remain strongly committed to kibbutz ideology, doctrinal ties have loosened among youth. As Economic Administrator Tal puts it: “My father was an idealist. It did not matter to him what he did so long as it was of benefit to the Jewish nation. But whatever I do, I do for myself, my family and my home.” To rekindle idealism, many collectives now require young people to serve for a year on a newly established kibbutz. For this reason, and because kibbutzniks performed so heroically in the Six-Day War, the movement is regaining the prestige that it lost when statehood came, and Israelis are seeing the communes as symbols of self-sacrifice.

Kibbutz life remains attractive to most of its members: between 70% and 80% return to it when they finish their required military stint, and the kibbutz population has maintained a growth rate of 2% to 3% a year even when Israel as a whole was growing more slowly. The appeal of the collective seems to come partly from its stability. “We still do not have the evils of the city. We live with our doors open,” says David Tal. Indeed, there are no courts, no police, no crime, and virtually nothing that can be called juvenile delinquency.

Although they have always been concerned about child-rearing practices, members have recently intensified their efforts to promote the mental health of every kibbutznik. Over the years the communes have modified their original intention of giving metaplot, or special nurses, full responsibility for the care of infants, who grow up in special buildings away from their parents’ homes. “We have learned that the metaplot are not enough; the first year is a critical one,” says Educator Benjamin Katznelson. Mothers now get six weeks off from work to nurse their newborn children; for six months after that they work only half time, spending the rest of the day with their babies.

Another recent change has been to allow boys and girls to shower and sleep separately after the age of ten or eleven, if they find a mixed group disturbing—as many do. For this and other reasons, kibbutz young people seem to have few serious sexual difficulties. Even when older boys and girls share the same dormitories, there is little sexual activity or even dating among roommates, apparently because a kind of incest taboo develops. There is no known homosexuality on the collectives, and practically no illegitimacy. Divorce is infrequent. Kibbutzim have their share of neurotics, but no more than cities have, and for those who want it, psychiatric help is readily available.

Yet some Israelis are concerned about the apparently cool, flat personalities that kibbutzim seem to develop. “Our children are ashamed to be ashamed, afraid to be afraid; they are afraid to love, afraid to give of themselves,” says an Israeli psychoanalyst. But Ron Shouval, formerly chief psychologist of the Israeli defense forces, has a different view. “It is true that kibbutz kids are shy and on the defensive. But their lack of giving easily to outsiders creates the wrong impression; they are warm underneath. It is just that the young kibbutznik does not give up his first layer easily.”

Experts agree that the collectives nurture a special kind of person who is particularly well suited to group endeavor. Michael Chen, head of the department of education sciences at Tel Aviv University, believes that kibbutz youngsters are both ambitious and anxious: “They are good in the army just because they are anxious,” he says. “They cannot fail, because if they did, they would bring shame to their group.” Psychologist Shmuel Nagler of Haifa University believes that “the kibbutz youth may be lost without the group.” To some observers, this dependence on the group is one reason that the lessening of doctrinal orthodoxy does not threaten the kibbutz. But a more important factor in the continuing durability of the kibbutz is the younger generation’s willingness to replace fanatic idealism with realism. Observes Sociologist Rosner: “The kibbutzim met the challenge of life outside and thrived.”

* On the other hand, one quarter of Israel’s Cabinet members, 40% of its air force pilots and a large proportion of its army officers were born on kibbutzim, which account for only 3.3% of the population.