Inline image 1   Israel Ramble for Shabbat - and now to the not so good news.. 

 I said we are going to zoom out, but but but but…. We have to zoom in again. And why is that? Well, I am afraid you got a very skewed view of Kibbutz life, and it is all my fault. Yes, we had all this fun and Shabbat peaceful times, a free roaming everywhere, and bicycles which took us to all the corners of our miniature universe, and it was all good, but..

 The other aspect of living in a Kibbutz was that you were always tested to the limit, you tested yourself as a young person, and you were being tested constantly, there was no space for showing weakness or getting too feely, we still had a country to build, to protect, to be its soldiers and care taker, the individual wishes were pushed aside, suppressed if needed, ignored at times, who cares about individuality when you have all these important tasks still ahead of you.

 So yes, you may feel like an adult, given responsibilities from a young age but then you may have to work in the fields 8 hours in the sun, doing the same darn thing under hot sun all day, like weeding lines of cotton fields, and dare you be a sissy and say it is hard and you want to do something else? Oh no, your personal honor will be tarnished. So there was that rough and tough side to Kibbutz life, but it also made you feel proud and strong.

 
 Cotton plant

 I remember (we are into nostalgia again aren’t we?!) waking up before sun rise on freezing cold winter days, fueling and riding this dinosaurs like 4 wheeled machine called Michelzon, kind of a lift that gets you up into the olive trees to pick up the olives, working from down to dusk alone, pushing myself to fill out the large basket connected to the Michelzon with olives as fast as possible, day after day after day. There was a Spartan aspect to life in the Kibbutz then. I doubt the Kibbutz youth of today will carry this kind of burdens silently.

           
Michlzon                                                                                              Picking up olives

 One of the ideas of Kibbutzim was to build a new model of a Israeli Jew, who is afraid of nothing, with physical endurance and stamina, ready to serve his country, we were or supposed to be the fruits of that endeavor, a mini North Korea if you like (a bit of exaggeration here..). The truth is that we were considered to be the spoiled generation, “The T’nuvah Children” meaning the children who got it all with a silver spoon, who did not know what it was like to have food quotas like our parents had. But we still had to wait a whole 3 weeks to get a piece of ice cream that was brought especially from the “outer world” once every 3 weeks and they were counted, one ice cream stick per person, no seconds. It was such an event that we will anticipate it days in advanced, thinking if this week was the week for the ice cream, then it was a special week, something to look forward to, checking each day on the Kibbutz’s black notice board if today was the day. If god forbid you missed the ice cream distribution hour, well then, life was over, 3 more weeks of waiting felt like eternity. Those were small but defining moment in the life of a child growing up in a Kibbutz in the sixties.

 Disclaimer: It is written from a boy perspective, not sure how similar or different the girls’ experience was, but am open for comments on that.

 Shabbat Shalom,

Boaz Pnini
Bridges 2 Israel