The Great Not-so-white North

After a more or less smooth trip (as smooth as getting up at 3 am for a taxi, two planes, a train and a rental car can be), I made it to Israel and have slept off most of my jet lag. I paused briefly, to rest  and get my bearings at Nes Ammim—a "kibbutz" of German Christians in between Nahariya and Akko. I return there tomorrow for three more days to learn  about their history, their evolution, and the interfaith dialogue workshops they run, as part of their dream of healing the rifts between Germans and Israelis, Christians and Jews.

On Friday afternoon, I drove north to the Hula Valley and my old kibbutz at Shamir. I'm staying with friends and visiting old acquaintances and, later this morning, interview Uzi Tzur, the first-born ben kibbutz (i.e., child of the kibbutz), who has played a huge role in both the defense of Shamir (he shot the terrorists who tried to infiltrate the kibbutz in 1974) and the success of Shamir Optical as a multinational enterprise.

I made it in time foe one more shabbat dinner on Shamir, always one of my favourite nights (the weekend, at last!) when I was a volunteer. The dining hall is privatized (open for lunch and Tuesday and Friday dinners now), and was maybe two-thirds full—not quite the clamouring packed hall from years past, but still alive with conversations between old friends and family members. You pay for your meal now, at the cash register till, and there is no longer free (albeit cheap and watery) white wine to be poured into jugs by the litre from industrial beverage dispensers. 

I'd seen evidence of religious leanings on other kibbutzim, but Shamir seems still to be resolutely secular: no prayers, no candles, no shabbat songs, none of the Jewish rituals I'd witnessed at erev shabbat on Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava or the Ravenna Kibbutz in Seattle. If anything was sacred here, it was the family—Shamir seems in the midst of a baby boom—and Friday night, the communal dinner was honouring the extended family, related by blood or proximity, so central to kibbutz life.

Yesterday, after a restful sleep-in, my friends Kari and Danny took me for a shabbat day trip. We tried to go to the Agamon-Hula Park, but the parking lot was crammed with bird-watchers and other tourists for the annual Hula Bird Festival—the valley's blue sky is alive with migrating cranes and hawks and other Rift Valley migrants—so we headed up north, nearly to the Lebanese border, and walked the forest trails (much quieter) of Tel Dan instead. We had lunch beside one of the streams that feeds the Jordan River. 

The Hula remains as beautiful as I remember, this crook of farm fields and marsh land, peppered with kibbutzes and moshavs, in between the Golan Heights and the Napthali Mountains. It has been a pleasant reminder of my time here 22 years ago, during the same autumn season when I first arrived as a volunteer, the days still sunny and yet the nights cooling quickly, the rainy season and the cold winds off the snowy top of Mt. Hermon on the horizon. Harvest over, a new year marking off its days. 

Nobody seems optimistic about the immediate future of Israel, with the looming showdown with Iran and the uncertain changes in neighbouring countries, with a right-wing government firmly entrenched in power and completely at odds with the traditional values of the kibbutz. But it's hard not to find a certain peace, here in the hills of northern Galilee, amid the tree-shaded lanes and bird-song and cries of children in the playground, here on Kibbutz Shamir.

Review: Keeping the Kibbutz

The Hula Valley extends into the northernmost reaches of Israel, what’s often called the “finger of Galilee”, and borders Lebanon and the Golan Heights. It’s a stunningly beautiful landscape of rolling hills, swamps drained and tilled into lush fields and orchards, and the earliest (and best conserved) flow of the Jordan River, all shadowed by the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon. It was the picturesque backdrop to my life and work for nearly eight months on Kibbutz Shamir. The fiery, lingering sunrises and sunsets are still burned into my memory—and, for that matter, the photo at the top of my blog.

It’s also home to the kibbutzniks of Kfar Giladi, one of the first communal settlements in the area, founded in 1916. Nine decades later, Giladi voted to privatize in 2003. Since then, the landscape—on the opposite side of the valley from Shamir—has remained the same, but the life of its members has changed. Keeping the Kibbutz, a new (and as yet unreleased) documentary from two young American filmmakers, charts those changes and some of the disappointments felt by kibbutzniks left behind by privatization. Co-director Ben Crosbie was born on the kibbutz but moved to the U.S. at age three and visited occasionally growing up. In 2007, he returned to Giladi with his co-director, Tessa Moran, and let their cameras roll as kibbutzniks talked candidly about their feelings and the increasingly market-driven, individualistic management of their once-communal home.

The film (Crosbie and Moran generously sent a preview copy to me) begins with a quick introduction to the history of Giladi and the early ideals of the kibbutz movement: the philosophy of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; the communal child-rearing; the socializing in the dining hall; the collective harvests in the cotton fields. Flashforward to the present: the children have long since moved into their parents’ home, the dining hall is half-empty, day labourers are hired to do field work (and cotton is no longer grown), and everyone gets a different wage—just like the rest of the world.

Many of the kibbutz films I’ve watched seem to follow the famous stages of grieving: Degania (anger and bargaining); Kibbutz (depression). In Keeping the Kibbutz, we get to see kibbutzniks who have reached that fifth and final stage—who have accepted, however reluctantly, the changes that have overtaken their community but still look back with fondness and nostalgia at the unique communal society from which they all emerged.

The film does a sumptuous job of evoking that nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality, thanks in large part to the humour and honesty that the handful of main interview subjects bring to their experiences. Throughout, the filmmakers juxtapose archival footage and photos with similar contemporary images of farm and fisheries workers, children and parents, to show that for all the changes, there is a continuity of life and community on Giladi.

During the filming, two of the older residents get told that their wages are being cut or their services are no longer needed on the kibbutz, and we see their pangs of self-doubt (or bemused resistance on the part of puckish Frankie, a former lager lout from South Africa who came to Israel to dry out and ended up marrying a kibbutznik) that accompany the loss of the identity they had formed working for their community. Giving retirement-aged members meaningful work was always a key part of the original kibbutz ideal. In fact, the optical factory where I worked at Shamir—and that has since become a multi-million-dollar international enterprise—was originally created as a make-work project for oldsters.

“I’m like excess baggage,” says Frankie when he reads the "Dear John" letter from kibbutz management. “Only you can take care of yourself and your needs,” one of the managers later tells him. He just shrugs and says, “I hate the word ‘money’.”

Uzi, another member, gets laid off from his repair job on the kibbutz—even though he is never given a chance to explain the reason the repair shop never shows a profit in its accounts is because, for decades, the kibbutz wasn’t supposed to make money and therefore fudged its accounting in various ways. “I like to do things for people,” he admits. “This is my god. I don’t need religion.”

In a later scene, Uzi takes one of the filmmakers for a glider ride high above the Hula Valley and viewers get a panoramic sense of why the kibbutz members are so deeply attached to this landscape, so reluctant to leave, even as their community changes from its original ideals. The film is filled with beautiful images of the kibbutz and its hilly environs, evocatively backed by a gorgeous piano and guitar score by composer Preston Hart.

“I love the kibbutz,” says Uzi’s wife, Kathy, who arrived as a volunteer in 1968 and married into Giladi. “It breaks my heart that it has to change. I’m sad that my children grew up in a special society that doesn’t exists anymore.”

But she says these words with a smile on her lips, and not a bitter one. She seems to have accepted the changes, adapted to them even (she "buys" and then runs the kibbutz store), and the film ends with a scene of a backyard barbecue in the last light of dusk, with friends and laughter and a sense of community that has altered perhaps but hasn’t fully disappeared. The old socialist principles have been shed, but the members are still “keeping the kibbutz”.

Check out this trailer for the documentary and watch out for the film at festivals in the coming year…

KEEPING THE KIBBUTZ: Trailer from Eidolon Films on Vimeo.