From 1993-1994 I lived in Israel as a participant in the Otzma community service program. At the time a large portion of that program was spent living on a kibbutz and learning to speak Hebrew. I found the kibbutz experience to be one of the most rewarding and peaceful experiences of my life. It was disconnected living for the most part, completely foreign to anything I had ever known in my life as a priviledged teen-ager/early twenty something from NJ.
I worked in a plastics factory and picked potatoes. I ate hearty meals with the community and played basketball every night with my friends. All the pain and heartache that my time at Temple University had worn into me seemed to melt away in the Negev sun. In addition I was surrounded by one of the most talented and brilliant groups of young people I ever had the good fortune to meet and being around them made me a better person.
Gary Becker & Richard Posner, perhaps two of the greatest minds of our time have a blog. They recently wrote about the transformation of the kibbutz movement and postulate that the time of the kibbutz has passed. This makes me very sad.
No 1 of Consequence
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