An ode to the kibbutz – in memory of those who were massacred

Last week, I listened with tears and great sadness to the eulogies for Oded Lifshitz, who was buried at Kibbutz Nir Oz, the kibbutz which he helped to found many years ago on the edge of the Gaza strip, from which a large number of people were either massacred or taken hostage. The eulogies were given by his wife, Yocheved, and his son. They were naturally very loving, poignant and heart-felt. Of course, I also listened to the eulogies given by the relatives of Shiri Bibas and her two children, and mourned along with so many millions of other people in Israel and around the world.

I have already read many blog posts and articles in the press about Oded Lifshitz, including by my friend Hillel Schenker and by the veteran journalist Nachum Barnea (of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s mostly widely read daily newspaper), whom I read religiously every week. Barnea wrote in his column  Friday nine days ago that he served together with Oded Lipshitz in the reserves since 1964 and he knew him and his family well. In his column he wrote:

His career was filled with struggles: founding a small kibbutz in the Negev, leading it during its struggles for survival, struggling against the political and economic establishment of his movement, Hashomer Hatzair, struggling against the deportation of the Bedouins in the Rafiah Salient, struggling on behalf of his Palestinian neighbors in the Gaza Strip.

Lifshitz is also well known by now in Israeli society for bringing sick children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals within the framework of “The Road to Recovery” project. He was a socialist Jew through and through, a man of profound moral principles, who was committed to working for social justice and to peace all his life.

All of a sudden, once again, the image of the kibbutznik — the Jewish pioneer who not only tilled the soil but wanted to build a community of caring and committed Jews, who also sought to build a country (and a world)  built on principles of social justice and peaceful coexistence — is being praised and honored in Israeli society. This has happened since so many of them were massacred and kidnapped on October 7, 2023 by the militants of Hamas and other Islamic groups from Gaza. Because of these terrible tragedies, the kibbutz as an ideal of communitarian living — and the people who live in it as pursuers and builders of the ideals for which it stands — are returning to center stage in our consciousness as Israelis in recent months.

When I was a young man, I spent my first summer in Israel on a kibbutz in the south called Kefar Menachem (named after the famous Zionist ideologue and practitioner, Menachem Ussishkin). This was 1964, the summer after I finished high school. My father, Rabbi Leon Kronish, of blessed memory, had a friend from high school named Yehuda Ben Chorin (formerly Julie Freeman) from Brooklyn, who was one of the founders of the kibbutz. I loved my first summer in Israel on that kibbutz. It was a place of hard work but much beauty, with wonderful people who were committed to living a Jewish socialist way of life. I loved walking around without a wallet, and hearing my host quote the famous Jewish socialist Karl Marx every day: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Many years later, when I was finishing my doctorate in education in Boston and was planning to make aliyah with my family, I once again considered living in a kibbutz and teaching in a teacher training college in the lower Galilee. I made serious inquiries but, in the end, this did not work out.

At any rate, I have always admired the kibbutz as an ideal way of life, even though I know that it is not without its own unique problems. In the good ol’ days, when Labor Zionism ruled the country (until the “mahpach” [shake-up] of 1977, when the Likud rose to power), most of Israel’s great leaders lived on a kibbutz, including David Ben Gurion (Kibbutz Sde Boker), Yigal Alon (Kibbutz Genossar) and many others. I remember seeing a great documentary film in the late 1960s, after the Six Day War, about the kibbutz, in which people remembered the dream that Israel was once one big collective  socialist community, where everyone cared about everyone else. By now, I know that it was somewhat of a myth — and undoubtedly  naïve — but what a beautiful dream it was. The idea, has come back into consciousness this year, mostly due to the work of the Forum for the Hostages’ Families and their friends and supporters from all over Israel.

When I spent a year of study in Israel, in 1970-71 at the Hebrew University, I was friendly with many kibbutzniks and visited them in their kibbutzim often.  I liked the people, respected them for their values and their way of life, just as Israelis from all walks of life are now showing honor and respect for Oded Lifshitz and many others who were killed on or after October 7, 2023.

(By the way, this does not include Prime Minister Netanyahu and most of his extreme right-wing partners in the government, who have yet to visit Kibbutz Nir Oz or other kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, from which many people were kidnapped and in which many people were massacred. It seems that he and his fanatic  colleagues don’t care too much about this part of the population, who don’t vote for them. Indeed, many commentators in Israel have said that if the hostages were “religious Zionists”,  or yeshiva students, they would all have been redeemed a long time ago, and I tend to agree with this.)

The great Jewish Israeli philosopher and peace activist Martin Buber once wrote that the kibbutz was “an experiment that did not fail”. Historians will judge whether he was correct or not, but the fact is that the kibbutzim still exist in Israel, even though they and Israeli society as a whole have gone through great changes in recent decades. They sill represent some of the finest communities and noblest values of the Jewish Zionist socialist tradition, with people of commitment, courage and caring living in them.

At this difficult time, I believe that we should not only honor the memory of those who have been killed in the kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope*, but we should also salute those in the second and third generations of the kibbutzim who keep these important communities alive and thriving.

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*The kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope which suffered greatly from the massacres and kidnappings of October 7, 2023 are: Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Nahal Oz, Kissufim, Re’im, Nir Yitzhak, Alumim.