Subject: JUICE Pioneers to Israel 4
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 00:43:56 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: pioneers@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Pioneers 4
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World Zionist Organization
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
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Course: Pioneers of Israel
Lecture: 4/12
Lecturer: Doron Geller
Meir Yaari and the Settlement of Bittania
One of the most fascinating and enduring legacies of the Second and Third
Aliyot was the establishment of socialist systems of living, sharing not
only all of one's possessions but one's most innermost thoughts as well.
While the kibbutz and the socialist mentality is rapidly changing or in the
process of disappearing in modern Israel, the establishment of what could
sometimes be characterized as near-mystical communes in the early part of
this century provided the impetus and moral justification for the mostly
very young settlers to endure the rigors of the harsh and often foreboding
Palestinian landscape.
Meir Ya'ari became an integral part of these experiments in communal living
among the settlers. Because of his extraordinary intellect and magnetic
personality he is one of the most interesting figures of the Third aliyah,
which is generally designated as beginning soon after World War I, in 1919,
and ending in 1923. During this period of intense Zionist activity about
30,000 Jews came to Palestine, about the same number of immigrants as the
First and the Second Aliyot (That is to say, about 25,000 Jews immigrated to
Palestine in the First Aliyah and again in the Second Aliyah). The Third
Aliyah settlers were quite similar in their socialist/Zionist outlook and
orientation to the Second Aliyah. Together, the members of these two aliyot
(plural of aliyah) determined the character of the Israeli nation at the
time of its establishment in 1948, and for a considerable period of time
after that.
Meir Ya'ari was born in Polish Galicia in 1897, then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. He moved to Vienna before World War I and
volunteered for the Austrian army at only 17 years of age, where he served
as an officer. Despite what appeared by such an act to be an obvious
inclination to assimilate, Ya'ari was in fact deeply imbued with Jewish
feelings and loyalties. He was a committed Zionist who supported a social
revolution among the Jewish people; he firmly believed in the physical and
spiritual (but not in the traditional religious sense) rejuvenation of the
Jews in the Land of Israel. To that end, he began agricultural training on
the estate of a Jewish landowner close to Vienna in 1919, and became one of
the first members of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair youth movement in Vienna.
The Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair organization was founded in 1913 in the Polish
province of Galicia and soon spread to Austria and then Germany.
It was initially dedicated to scouting and athletic
activities, and in many ways was modeled on other European youth
organizations, particularly German, who were becoming increasingly alienated
by the industrialization of society and the subsequent loosening of social
bonds and thus individual and communal identity. As a response these youth
organizations, including Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair, romanticized nature and the
rediscovery of one's most basic nature therein. While the non-Jewish youth
organizations were disappointed by encroaching industrialization and the
blurring of traditional concepts of identity, the Jewish youth who joined
Jewish youth organizations were often motivated by their lack of acceptance
in European society, in which so many Jews were so willing to assimilate
into but more often than not, could not find or did not feel genuine,
unreserved acceptance.
As we have seen in some of our other lectures, and as many of you know in
any case, the Jews had expected to be among the prime beneficiaries of the
Enlightenment, and in fact they were in many ways. But the liberalization
of thought, which accompanied the Enlightenment -which was often given the
force of law - did not always influence the masses of the European nations
among whom the Jews lived. Religious bigotry was often replaced by cultural
and national xenophobia. Despite the fact that many Jews had, were willing,
or were in the process of relegating their Jewish backgrounds to the dustbin
of history for the sake of feeling as full and kindred citizens among the
peoples with whom they lived, the nominally Christian members of these
societies could not or would not see Jews as sharing in their cultural
heritage and legacy - be it German, French, Russian, Polish or Ukrainian.
So the Jews were inevitably thrown back upon their own people. But many
could no longer bring themselves to believe in and follow traditional Jewish
religious precepts; it was passe for them, they had already forsaken it.
They had little interest in finding their way back. They had a terrible
problem; they loved Europe, but Europe did not love them. They had much to
contribute, but while their contributions were appreciated, the fact that
they were Jews was not. This gave rise to a terrible problem of identity,
to very real and traumatic emotional pain and confusion.
For some it even seemed insurmountable, they no longer identified with the
traditional Jewish community and the larger, non-Jewish society had rejected
them. Elana Margalit writes; "In some the consciousness of their position
reached the point of self-hatred, an almost pathological sense of
deficiency. 'We are neither full and healthy men nor full and healthy
Jews...There is no harmony in these elements within our character.'" one
Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair guidebook insisted. This kind of thinking was
representative of most Zionist thought regarding the identity of the Jew in
Europe. Furthermore, the guidebook argued, "Young Jews lacked resolution,
energy, and joie de vivre, they were consumed with despair.suffered from
excessive spirituality, immersed themselves in the study of faded writings
of an out-of -date and irrelevant culture." The lack of integrated
identity, of inner harmony, was due to their failure to assimilate. This
was often through no fault of their own, but the lack of emotional
stability, in the eyes of Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair members, was inescapable, and
they meant themselves as well. ".young Jews were incapable of spiritual
identification and emotional unity. They could not dedicate themselves to
love or love anything with all their might. And since neither the Jewish
nor the surrounding society could provide solutions, this uprooted youth
sought salvation and redemption from within, in almost eschatological terms
and out of sheer despair. What was required was personal improvement of
character and mores within the community of youth which should create its
own independent values." And that is what they set about doing. They
argued for the necessity to return to the historical Hebrew, the prophets of
the Bible, who were particularly concerned with social justice, which found
its modern expression manifested in the socialist communes established by
Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair and other left-wing Zionist youth movements.
Indeed while the Bible, and in particular the prophets, was a source of
inspiration for these young men and women, they were not bound by
traditional Jewish religious dogma in any sense of the word. They admired
the Essene sect by the Dead Sea, who during the Second Temple period,
withdrew from the social and religious life of Jerusalem - and in particular
from the Temple - to establish a commune in many ways a precursor of the
modern socialist kibbutz. Among the Essenes concern for inner purity and
salvation, coupled with their criticism of outer forms of religious
observance and religious stagnation, could provide many interesting points
of comparison with the Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair communes. The Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair
youth members admired the early Hassidim as well, who in the 17th and 18th
centuries, threw off religious ritual and dogma and emphasized the beauty
and self-discovery to be found in nature and silent contemplation. (Later,
of course, Hassidim were to become as rigidly orthodox in all manner of
external observance as those orthodox Jews they had originally rebelled from).
They studied Buber and A.D. Gordon, both known for their emphasis on truth,.
inner beauty, and religious sensibility without adherence to external
religious formulae. But they drew much of their inspiration from the
non-Jewish society as well - from Nietszche and Schopenhauer, from
Dostoevsky and even from Jesus and the New Testament. The Ha-Shomer group
active in Jewish self-defense also was a source of inspiration; indeed
Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair took its name from them.
>From all of these thinkers the ideas of Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair become more clear.
Meir Ya'ari was particularly concerned with the search for inner truth and
authenticity, the ability to find ways for creative self-expression within
communal life. They aspired to view the world and each individual, Jew or
non-Jew, with all-embracing love (the influence of Jesus, Buber, and
Gordon), they aspired to self perfection, and at the same time wished to
reinstate Eros back into Jewish life (not a major calculation in diaspora
Jewish life for a variety of historical reasons) Meditation and
self-analysis (Freud was an influence as well) was an integral component of
their efforts to unite the often hopelessly divided inner nature of the
young Jew, lost between his/her past and the confusion of the present.
But more than that, Ya'ari and other Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair thinkers saw the
pioneering Jewish youth in Palestine as heroic, even martyrs to their
ideals. The activity of building their lives in Palestine from scratch was
to be a stabilizing and motivating force - a cause for great hope, for a
future where they would re-enter the family of nations proudly, as Jews and
as human beings. .
This kind of thinking, representative as it is of most of early Zionist
thought, makes clear why the movement for the restoration of the Jews in
Palestine has often been called the "Zionist revolution." Young Jews looked
to their Jewish and non-Jewish society, found no answers there, but drew
from both in order to create something completely new in response to the
exigencies of their day.
This great experiment in personal and social transformation was to occur in
the tiny cooperative settlements they wished to set up in Palestine. During
the Second Aliyah the first successful attempts at cooperative farming had
taken root - the first to actually be established was Deganya on the
Kinneret in 1909. I have not used the word "kibbutz" in general yet,
preferring the term cooperative farming settlement. That is because during
the period of Zionist settlement through 1914, the cooperative farming
settlements were quite small, generally with no more than 50 members -
called kvutzot (singular kvutzah). "The early kvutzot had small memberships
based upon the idea that the community should be small enough to constitute
a kind of enlarged family." By 1914 there were 11 such settlements in
Palestine, and by 1918 there were 29. These kinds of settlements, in which
the members took complete responsibility for the fate of their settlement,
owned the means of production, and shared whatever belongings they had and
whatever profits they made - was the successful implementation of socialist
ideals in Zion - which did not work for any appreciable amount of time
anywhere else in the modern world, including the Soviet Union. The early
Zionist settlers, marked by a fiery, almost messianic commitment to
succeeding in making Eretz-Israel a true socialist state, poured
unparalleled energy into their endeavors and were justifiably proud to see
them flourish.
The Third Aliyah was made up of much of the same human material as the
Second; a commitment to pioneering and continuing to establish cooperative
settlements. The Third Aliyah pioneers proposed often larger
self-sufficient cooperative villages than their predecessors of the Second
Aliyah, calling for a combination of agriculture and industry. These were
named kibbutzim. The first kibbutz, Ein Harod, was established in 1921 and
many others were to follow. Soon after 1921 the distinction between kvutzah
and kibbutz virtually disappeared; all cooperative farming villages, whether
large or small, were simply called kibbutzim.
These kibbutzim received much of their manpower from Eastern Europe and in
turn the kibbutzim provided much of the leadership in the political life of
the yishuv and after 1948, the state of Israel. The same went for defense.
Up until quite recently children of the kibbutzim disproportionately held
leadership roles in the Israeli army, a tradition extending far back into
the pre-state era. In general, the experiments in socialist living which
eventually came to be known as kibbutzim, and which today are
internationally known as the quintessential Israeli institution, were at the
vanguard of the development of the state in the economic, cultural,
political and security areas. In some sense kibbutz members did wish to
create a utopia, a new world order; they did far less than that, but their
efforts were still unparalleled. The creation of the kibbutz and its
success for over half a century (until quite recently) is a fascinating
testimony to the potential for cooperative activity based on complete
equality. Later, those ideals began to change. But at the time of their
inception, the kibbutzim proved to be a truly remarkable cauldron of minds
brewing with the most messianic ideals for self and human perfection.
****************************************************************************
One of the most interesting of these experiments in Zionist/Socialist living
was in the settlement of Bittania, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Like
many dedicated socialist workers in Palestine, the settlers of Bittania,
numbering about fifty men and women, came from middle class Eastern European
backgrounds and willingly accepted a lower standard of living for the sake
of an ideal.
Meir Ya'ari became a member and a leader of the Bittania group. He was a
guru to a group of people historically reminiscent in some ways of the
ancient Qumran Community by the Dead Sea, as we have seen. New members had
a trial period, in which a potential member was tested for his/her
suitability, much as the Qumran Community did, and worked from ten to
fourteen hours a day. The Socialist value system of the Bittania settlers
included a considerable disdain for the diaspora Jewish experience in which
they had grown up, and in the fashion of other, contemporaneous European
youth movements, included the romanticization and even worship of nature.
They de-emphasized traditional morality, and theoretically and to some
extent in fact, advocated a greater openness to erotic experience. Their
socialist value system naturally included a disdain for the values of the
industrializing, progress-oriented world. They saw themselves as close;
more than brothers, and called themselves an "edda" - community, where they
shared all with one another. In their insularity, exclusivity, and focus on
extricating themselves from the common values of the world around them they
are indeed in some ways reminiscent of the Dead Sea sect of the Essenes, but
with far more emphasis on the cult of youth than the Essenes. One former
member of Bittania wrote: "Perhaps we will be the first torrent of youth to
remain forever young, humanity's first chance to escape failure. Let us go
far between mountains and deserts to live in simplicity, beauty and truth.
Perhaps our new edda will be the nucleus of a new culture of new
relationships between humans leading communal lives. We shall be the
pioneers who shall carry the revolution through to the masses of miserable
Jews, who will stream to the country to live by our principles. Let us
create a new land of Israel free from the shackles of European capitalism
and of the diaspora."
They worked hard by day to fulfill their labor ideals in the natural,
beautiful surroundings which permeate the area of the Kinneret, as the Sea
of Galilee is called in Hebrew. But life for them really began in the
evening. While these young settlers were not at all religious in the
traditional Jewish sense, their dual preoccupation with rebuilding the land
of Israel while redeeming and discovering themselves required a sense of
near-religious dedication. Indeed, their settlement has been described by
former member David Horowitz (who later became president of the Bank of
Israel, a decidedly non-socialist/utopian occupation) as a "monastic order
without God". He further compared Bittania to a "religious sect.with its
own charismatic leader and set of symbols, and a ritual of confessions in
public reminiscent of efforts by religious mystics to exorcise God and Satan
at the same time.'"
Each evening, Ya'ari presided over a half-hour of silence followed by the
revelation of "their innermost secrets, sexual anxieties and dreams, doubts,
yearnings, and perplexities". In this atmosphere of psychological exorcism
- which sometimes reached near-hysteric proportions - individual catharsis
and group bonding was - or was at least hoped to be - achieved.
Their openness on sexual matters differentiated the Bittania settlers from
both the Qumran community of the Essenes and the modern yoga/spiritual
centers based on Eastern religious traditions which have sprung up all over
the United States, and which frequently include a disproportionate number of
Jewish participants. In these yoga/meditation centers of today, members
often work in menial jobs followed by long periods of contemplation. There
are regular meetings with the guru as well.
Naturally the emphasis in Bittania was as much on building the land of
Israel as on achieving personal liberation and group communion. Both the
Qumran community and the modern yoga and meditation centers had or have
different priorities.
As has been mentioned, these young settlers were far more open about their
sexual natures than other spiritual centers tend to be. That is not to say
that the settlers of Bittania or their contemporaries in other Jewish
communal settlements of the time were given to libertinism; as David Biale
has shown in his book, EROS AND THE JEWS. Zionism, while a revolt against
bourgeois values, did not advocate a free and permissive attitude toward
sexual relations. In most cases, the sexual drive and impulse for individual
gratification was sublimated into the urgency of national regeneration.
We do not know exactly what went on in Bittania; most of the written records
of these therapeutic sessions of self-exorcism are not available to the
general public. But there is no doubting the ability of the "guru" Meir
Ya'ari to inspire the members of Bittania to bare their souls. Members "sat
up till dawn.we confessed to each other. It was like pure prayer bursting
forth from heart to heart". Another mentioned that "in Bittania a book was
opened to us which was different from the usual; it was the soul of man".
Amos Elon writes: "In retrospect the commune of Bittania certainly seems
more bizarre than the others. But was it? The men and women of Bittania
were on the whole more articulate than the rest of the pioneers. They made
a fetish of their "openness" and left a revealing written document
testifying to their inner struggles and debates; members of other communes,
less articulate or more discreet, have not."
It may come as a surprise to learn that out of these bright-eyed young
idealistic workers came so many members of the future political elite. But
Meir Ya'ari stayed out of a leadership role in politics himself, preferring
the role of "guru"; he became a formulator and leading ideologue of the
Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair organization for over half a century. He was the prime
mover behind the initiative to change Ha-Shomer Ha-Zair from the romantic
youth movement we have seen it to be to a more political party. His efforts
bore fruit first in the establishment of Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Artzi shel Ha-Shomer
Ha-Zair (The Country-Wide Kibbutz of Ha-shomer Ha-Zair), which was
established in 1927 and remained one of the three big left-wing kibbutz
movements from the time of its inception. He played a key role in the
establishment of the left-wing Mapam party in the first Israeli Knesset of
1948, and after the Six-Day-War of 1967, he supported unity with other
left-wing political parties in the form of the Labor Party. Although he was
an important part of all labor initiatives in his time, and was a member of
the Knesset from its inception, he never accepted executive office. It
seems he preferred, as Berl Katznelson would, to remain an enigmatic,
spiritual figure, above the more petty intrigues of day to day politics.
There are certainly many interesting aspects of Meir Ya'ari's life which we
could have focused on. But I was fascinated by what went on in Bittania.
Ya'ari's time at Bittania with the other young settlers was only a small
part of his overall activity in the yishuv. But what a time it must have
been. This time was never again to be repeated in their lives, and we, the
public, are privy to only a fraction of their secrets.
The fact that the vagaries of time led many of these young settlers to
abandon the utopian idealism of their younger years does not diminish the
ardor and enthusiasm of their youth. What a wonder it must have been,
Bittania, where a handful of young men and women set out to create a new
world for themselves while rebuilding their ancient homeland, baring their
souls to one another in a spirit of self-transformation and communal bonding
on the moon-lit shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Bibliography
1 ) Amos Elon - THE ISRAELIS
2 ) ENCYCLOPEDIA JUDAICA
3 ) Yehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, ESSENTIAL PAPERS ON ZIONISM
4 ) Gideon Shimoni, THE ZIONIST IDEOLOGY
Next week we will be learning about Berl Katznelson and his experiences both
wandering around the Palestinian yishuvim and his development as a labor
leader. The following week, which I am personally really looking forward
to, we will be learning about the heroism of the one-armed Joseph Trumpeldor
and the myth(?) of Tel-Hai.
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