The Ravenna Kibbutz

The following was printed in the inaugural issue (Iyar 5769) of Eruv, a new journal of Jewish thought and issues published by friend of the Kibbutz Rabbi-Maggid Sarah Etz Alon. (Contact her for info at: ravmagus AT gmail.com.)

The New Kibbutz Movement
by Joel Rothschild

There is no predicting Maggid-Rabbi Sarah Etz Alon, but when she unveils a new initiative I take notice. Always surprising, yet perfectly aligned to the moment, and Eruv is no exception. A young generation (mine, give or take) is in the process of inheriting Jewish communal leadership, and our task is exactly one of rebuilding the eruv—that is, drawing new boundaries to contain a diverse Jewish community, after half a century of our elders outgrowing, questioning, and shattering the old ones.

To illustrate, consider the hottest Jewish trend you’ve never heard of: the new American Kibbutz Movement.

Intentional community is nothing new with the Jews. Every Jewish neighborhood in the Diaspora is an intentional community. (Those that have survived.) What’s remarkable about this crop I call the new kibbutzim is: their lack of driving ideology, their modesty of idealism, and their suddenly rapid growth.

The Kibbutz Movement of Israel was founded on ideological belief, in Zionism and Socialism—necessarily, because secular pioneers needed a religion, so to speak, on behalf of which to strive against frontier adversity, and around which to forge a Jewish national identity. It worked. In fact, it worked so well, secular Israel was empowered to pursue new frontiers—technological, entrepreneurial, intellectual, and artistic—leaving real doubt that the Israeli Kibbutz Movement has much of a future.

By contrast, my 20 month-old kibbutz in Seattle stands out for not being ideologically defined. As a Jewish community, my fellow kibbutzniks and I are bound by shared culture and geography more than by shared beliefs. For religious identity we affiliate with our synagogues, meditation circles, and social action causes of choice. These institutions, Jewish and otherwise, are tightly focused. Their narrow boundaries target certain dimensions of our lives. They don’t engage us holistically and we don’t expect them to. For service, for worship, narrow boundaries are pretty comfortable. For brotherhood, sisterhood, neighborhood, they are much too narrow. So we, like the grandchildren of Israel’s founding kibbutzniks, have migrated in search of a more diverse, mixed-up, vibrant Jewish community. In Israel they move from kibbutzim to Tel Aviv and Haifa. Naturally, then, in Seattle we have moved to a kibbutz.*

Why a kibbutz? For years I’ve carried a copy of this open letter from our elder Shonna Husbands-Hankin, a call to build Jewish cohousing—that is, intentional Jewish communities with modest family homes oriented around a Commons. The vision inspired me, and so I met Shonna at a gathering of would-be pioneers all drawn to this physical, rather than ideological, model of a new Jewish community. I was 24 and came away with two powerful impressions: everyone involved was my elder; and their aspirations were too heavily contingent to make it from dream to reality. Not just Jewish cohousing, but Jewish cohousing and an ecovillage. Not just Jewish cohousing, but Jewish cohousing and a new spiritual center for Jewish Renewal. Not just Jewish cohousing, but Jewish cohousing and an organic farm on acreage outside Eugene, outside Boulder, outside New York. I despaired that such a beautiful idea might have too much riding on it to survive transit from dream to reality.

Now I am 30. Social science has declared my generation to be the first Americans who will be less wealthy than our parents. We have inherited mighty ideals, from social equality to ecological balance, but these have evolved from personal crusades into general ethics, and typically my peers and I aren’t looking for new crusades. We are looking for a way to survive, as much pragmatic as idealistic.

So we took the received model and stripped it down. Our jobs are in the city, so we picked a nice neighborhood on good bus routes. Land is expensive, so we rented houses with modest yards and a little greenhouse. Incentive aids sacrifice, and a grant was available to make events for Jewish 20-somethings, so we started putting on programs and accepted the subsidy.

We still don’t own property, but our two houses and eight residents will soon multiply. The residential waiting list is long, the membership list is longer, and the gatherings range from multigenerational Shabbat dinner to 20-something havdalah with glow-in-the-dark bowling, from mini klez-camp and Israeli cinema to a monthly Jewish open-mic night to rival those in Tel Aviv and New York. This community is electric, because it simply fulfills the need for cultural togetherness. Property, chickens, and other aspirations will follow (and, it seems, soon).

But again, why a kibbutz? Roundabout, we have confirmed the elders’ original wisdom in calling for Jewish cohousing plus. Cohousing with Jews for its own sake is just a fancy voluntary ghetto. Voluntary ghettos don’t work. You can’t just build an eruv and await the Jews’ arrival if there’s nothing inside. Jewish culture compels us to be too purposeful for that. Cohousing with Jews per se lacks kavanah.

Instead of Jewish cohousing, then, a kibbutz. After all, what is a kibbutz if not cohousing with Jews plus a mission to serve the wider Hebrew nation—by growing oranges, manufacturing industrial goods, and raising future generations?

What the Ravenna Kibbutz has discovered is that, in North America, to make accessible gathering space for Jewish diversity is a cause in and of itself. Prior generations dug narrow channels to make focused streams: Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, Reconstructionist Jews, Orthodox-Feminist Jews, JewBu’s, eco-Jews, humanist Jews... There are ready institutional containers for every spark, and we all have parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to thank. These many ideals, like all rarified works of Creation, demand cross-pollination. Hence an American kibbutz, whose industry is simply the congregation of Jews around a commons of Place—benignly threading through different commons of Doctrine—and a kibbutz whose crop is genetically re-integrated Jewish identity.

Just as Israeli cities atomically collide the countless particles of Jewishness, so in our modest kibbutz does the long catalog of Jewish institutions, and institutions beloved of Jews, find a partner in symbiosis. The diversity rejewvinates us (sorry) when we mix inside this eruv, and then we are re-dispatched, stronger, to serve our many causes. The funny and profound upshot, therefore, is that the kibbutz model may have a longer shelf life in North America than it has had in Israel. The miracle of Tel Aviv could be defined as a bunch of Jews living together regardless of background. The same can be said of the Ravenna Kibbutz, but not of many other places in North America… yet.

The power of this symbiosis may explain its recent quick pace of growth. The Ravenna Kibbutz moved into our House Aleph not two years ago, our new House Bet just hosted forty people for seder, residents for houses Gimel and Dalet are already on deck, and we plan to start soliciting investors for property acquisition later this year. After simplifying its goals, the Tiferet Artists Collective (nee Tiferet Village) has at last launched in Cleveland. Kavod House is going strong in Boston. And in just three years, seventeen “Moishe Houses” (in the U.S. alone) have made that program one of the fastest-growing Jewish philanthropies anywhere. The Ravenna Kibbutz grew in part out of Moishe House, as did Tiferet and Kavod, so there’s no telling what will evolve from the remaining and future houses, not to mention other projects emerging from the same idea. The more I talk to people who stumble across our web site, the more I hear of my peers across the continent starting up communities along kindred lines. Some will be short-lived, but others may become persistent social hubs, bringing a Diasporic Zion to parallel the Jewish cultural alchemy of Israel, possibly even fulfilling Mordechai Kaplan’s vision of a cogent Jewish Civilization in America.

In honor to those who dared to dream, we dare now to build.

*As it happens, some of my co-generationalists in Israeli cities are in fact starting urban kibbutzim there (“irbutz” = city + kibbutz), akin to ours in their modesty—of size, situation, and social agenda.