Page 14-The Canadian Jewish News. Rosh Hashanah Supplement. September 12. 1985
"Experiment which did not fail"
DAVID TWERSKY is the editor of Shdemot and a member of Kibbutz Gezer, In the following article, which appeared in Sefer Hashother Hat-zair, Twersky explores the question of whether the kibbutz is exportable. - *.    *'■
There is u long and ongoing debate AVjthin the kibbutz movement, one, our friend should take heed of. It concerns the question ol Avheiher we arc actual)) part and parcel ot" an! international.movement to change .society, to create something new,.
That sentiment, has become iricrea.singly.difficuli to. sustaiii.as- the decades haveunroldedf'orall kinds ot' gbod reasons. And yet the question persists: to what extent is kibbutz an experience capable of being adapted to other cultures: t(^ what extent is it. an experience, though growing (lut of a particular milieu that has parallels m other .cultures: to what degree does it belong to the specific time and place of its origin?
To what extent can the kibbutz experience be adapted to other cultures?
Those who deny that the kibbutz is, as it were, an international ethic speaking thrqugh the Jewish particulars, place it within another context: it demands a meaningful context because if cannot merely be said to be. It means something. They usually p>oint to the deep roots in the Jewish past and the Zionist national embrace as singularly distinguishing features.
One is reminded, of the .debate on the'role of the J ev\- ish \vo rki ng c 1 ass i n the Russian Social Democratic Parly:  the anti-Zionist. J e w 1 sh. \V 0 rk e rs ■, Bu n d re -jected the assignme.m given-it by the majority. We do not e.xist to translate the par- ■ t\ line into Yiddi.sh; they iTiainiained. a task later accepted without hesitation by the Yevsektzia. the Jewish section of the Gommunist Party.    . .
The Bund insisted oh a right to a unique voice of its i)\vn, Plekhano\ andnther unsympathetic .Russian • MarxiSt.s dubbed them ""Zionists with sea siek-riess'" in return: Is kibbutz a unique Jewish \-oice v'vith-:in the socialist,choir, or a uni\ersal hariiKiny transposed into the minor Jewish key? ,
The choice for kibbutz isn't black and white. Even a kibbutz thoroughly conscious of and at honrie,, with its Jewish heritage and vocation may be of some emulative value to those women and men of g(K)dwill the world over who seek a way without blood to remake" their social lives and the lives of their nations.
When Arthur Koestlcr iind Igna/io . Silone arid " countless other e\-conr-munist intellectuals bctian
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to liiove ifway from Stalin-ij-nv they coined the lenn "'the light that failed. L/i;/!/u{)uld become interchangeable with god or, cxperimenl.
And in that terrible dec-lide. the 30s, when human po.ssibiliiy seemed a Iragile flower caught between the . heir of Hitler and Stalin's Siberian fro.st. Martin Bubcr pointed tothe kibbutz ■ as the '."experiment which ■ did not faik" quite a claim, to make within that context
N()w.  decades, later.,, when the Soviet.s have put oh a new suit but otherwise refuse to clean up theiraci; and when the p'roniisc of . democratic socialism has bogged down, in the gray • welfare state, the heart hunts.again, hungry lor a human alternative.
And our (question isn't merely aimed at American communards and Tanzanian bu.sh farmers. It is also internal, within
kibbutz itself: can the kibbutz ethos be transferred to its own children? Does kibbutz have anything to .say to the people in Israel? Is it expoi-table to young Jews in the affluent suburbs of the West?
Or is it irnprisoncd in time, an existential moment .of revolt and affirmation which grev*,' in the fertile soil of Eastern shtetlach and found expression in the rocky.- barren :lahd of Palestine?
. Irving H.owe hasasked: ■"We have learned ihai the effort to force men into Utopia leads lo barbarism, but we have also learned that to live without the ini-age of Utopia is to risk the death of the imagination. Is^ there a path t\>r lisV a crooks ed path for men of discipline hope? .
Perhaps we are an answer, one. of the answers, to. those who still ask the question.
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