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April 6, 2012
A part of something bigger
A first Pesach on kibbutz teaches the importance of community.
EMILY SINGER
In this continuing series, Emily Singer shares her family’s aliyah experiences and stories from their first year in Israel, where they live on Kibbutz Maale Gilboa, a small religious community in the lower Galilee.
Passover has always been my favorite holiday. I love the gathering of family and friends, the powerful story of our journey from slavery into freedom and the exciting culinary challenges of making a variety of delicious foods out of primarily several consistencies of matzah. Being in Israel takes Passover, the celebration of our people setting out on our journey to the Holy Land, to a whole new level.
One of the highlights of Passover in Israel for us is hiking during chol hamoed, the days after the seder(im). The whole country hits the trails with their families. While Israelis are notorious for being pushy tourists, this has not been my family’s experience on the hiking trails. It feels more like, everywhere you go, you are with extended family. At difficult points on a hike, someone will stop for as long as necessary to help those behind him, and adults will rebuke each other’s children for behaving inappropriately.
And the best part – in a country where only an estimated 20 percent of the Jews are religious, everybody is eating matzah! At a spring where we have stopped for a rest, there are yeshivah boys wading in the water with their tzitzit floating, women in bikinis sunning on the rocks and young men smoking a water pipe, but not one person is eating chametz! People have packed varying degrees of kitniyot (rice and legumes) depending on their traditions, which sparks conversations between hikers about who comes from Syria or Morocco or Tunisia, followed by a friendly swapping of tastes and recipes.
Our first Passover in Israel was bittersweet, due to a tragic incident that happened on our kibbutz. That spring we learned a lot about what it means to live on kibbutz, and about our new community.
When the first kibbutz was founded, it was based on the socialist principles of shared work and shared resources. People worked where they were needed, and everyone lived in similar homes and ate together in a communal dining hall. In the beginning, even children were communal, sleeping in special children’s houses and being raised more by the collective than by the family. Since then, most kibbutzim have gone through a process of privatization. There are kibbutzim where people keep their entire salaries, and furnish and eat in their own homes, and others where the group still votes about who can go to university and when families may go on vacation.
Our kibbutz has an unusual history. On the face of things, it is not clear what makes Maale Gilboa more communal than any other kind of neighborhood. There is no more dining hall. All that remains of that group aspect of life is the tiny home kitchens that were obviously not designed for cooking, and certainly not for hosting one’s neighbors. In many homes, you have to close the fridge before you can open the oven, and if you extend your dining room table for company, some guests may need to sit on the kitchen counter.
We still have the traditional kibbutz industries of agriculture, dairy farms and turkey coops, but most residents do not work in them. Some of the older members run the facilities, but they hire experts and foreign workers from outside, a development that is contrary to the original value of Jewish self-reliance in labor.
On Maale Gilboa, most residents either are teachers, social workers or rabbis. One day, we gave a ride down the mountain to another resident and he laughed to us about how they just welcomed a new family in the weekly newsletter, and it seems the husband is a rabbi and the wife is both a teacher and a social worker. We laughed too, and told him that we are that family!
For many years, Maale Gilboa was a very traditional, idealistic kibbutz. A while back, they were struggling and some members wanted to go the privatizing route of their fellow kibbutzim. They sold the dining hall to the local yeshivah, and people went off to look for their own work. Today, what connects the members financially is a progressive social welfare system. Everyone pays a certain percentage of their salary, depending how much they earn. People who earn below a certain amount are eligible to receive a portion of what is collected.
The social welfare system only applies to members, but one need not be a member to live here, even build a home, and be an integral part of the community. This is unique to our kibbutz. On Maale Gilboa, all residents enjoy the same privileges – use of the pool, inclusion in cultural activities and even voting on almost all kibbutz decisions. Everyone serves on committees. Surprisingly, most residents are not members. In fact, even our representative from the absorption committee is not a member.
My husband, Ross, and I like the idea of becoming members of the kibbutz, but we have not yet made any decision. We are still learning about the pros and cons. I attended a meeting in which they were debating about the procedure for determining if a family is eligible for receiving financial assistance. In a role play, members discussed a theoretical case in which a person felt they need to take off work, and the committee had to decide if they were justified in receiving support. My initial reaction was to balk at the idea of people discussing the personal lives of other members of the community. While this would only happen if someone were asking for assistance, it still felt uncomfortably intrusive. Sometimes it seems like kibbutz members care a little too much about each other’s business.
But we saw the other side of that caring just before our first Passover, when tragedy struck the community. The baby of one of the families (who happen to not be “members”) died in his crib.
I heard the awful news when I was out for a walk. I was walking by the park where our sons, Shmuel and Abaye, were having an activity with the children’s house. As I approached, kids came running up to me to ask what happened. They had seen several ambulances and police cars pouring into the kibbutz. Another mother who had heard what happened was also passing by. She collected the kids and sat with them to share what had happened and to answer their questions the best she could. She then made sure that each kid was going somewhere where there would be an adult, before sending them home.
That whole week, a heavy sadness fell over the kibbutz. The funeral was massive – it seemed like everyone from the community was there, along with the family’s extended family and friends. We gathered for some words of eulogy (the grandfather spoke about how G-d seals the Book of Life on Yom Kippur, but clearly there had been some sort of a mistake, a typo, so to speak, because how could this sweet, innocent baby have been inscribed to die?) It was unbearably heartbreaking, and then we drove two minutes down the road to the tiny cemetery that serves our kibbutz and the kibbutz next to us. There are no more than a dozen stones. The wind outside was furious, and it was hard to hear what people were saying, but all around us, everyone was weeping.
When we returned to the kibbutz, the rabbi’s wife immediately arranged for minyanim, meals and a schedule of people to help the family out around the clock. There was absolutely no distinction between who was or was not a member.
When Shabbat came, it had been almost a week since the tragedy. Life goes on, and a brit (circumcision) was scheduled for right after Shabbat morning services. The place was tense with the sadness of the one event and the joy of the other. The deceased baby’s father was out of the house for probably the first time all week. The rabbi who gave the d’var Torah spoke very briefly, and only about the recent events. He talked about the difficulty of living in the tension of such sadness and such joy. He ended with saying there aren’t words, but that we are there with both families with love and with hugs.
After services, they began the brit. They brought this new baby into the covenant with an endless string of songs and lullabies. People were singing and dancing, and, again, a sea of tears. Tears of joy, tears of sadness and, I am sure for many, like for me and Ross, sobs that gave voice to the powerful tension between the two.
Shabbat afternoon, I attended a women’s class, and still the sadness and the joy and the tension were first and foremost on everyone’s mind. The woman who taught the class spoke about how everyone goes through what she called “their personal Exodus from Egypt.” Women shared how sometimes the most horrible events help make us stronger, while sometimes the most irrelevant and mundane things can knock us down.
The teacher concluded with a beautiful poem about how everyone needs an “Egypt.” I can’t possibly do it justice with my feeble attempt at a translation (if you can check it out in Hebrew, it’s “Everyone Should Have Some Kind of an Egypt,” by Amnon Ribak), but towards the end it says something like:
Everyone needs some sort of an Egypt
To redeem himself from it, from the house of slavery
To go out in the middle of the night to the desert of fears
To march straight into the waters
To see them open before him to both sides
The reason I attempt to translate for you despite the inadequacy is because, amazingly, just after Shabbat, I opened my e-mail and found that the parents of the deceased baby had sent out a note thanking everyone for their help and support, saying they were overwhelmed and comforted, and that they felt both very hugged and loved. They concluded the e-mail with the above excerpt of that same poem.
I could feel all week that this was indeed a huge part of what makes us the community that we are. We are so blessed to live on a kibbutz with such unbelievably creative, talented, intelligent, thoughtful and loving people who have very independent lives, but who also want to be part of something bigger.
I wish everyone a Pesach of growth, strength, health and joy.
Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. She is currently working on two books. Singer and her husband, Ross, were rebbetzin and rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation until 2004. The Singers spent two years in Jerusalem and then moved to Baltimore, Md., where Ross was rabbi at Congregation Beth Tfiloh and Emily taught Judaic studies at Beth Tfiloh High School, until they moved to Israel in 2010. They have four children.
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