IDEAL AND REALITY

When you have been in Israel for some time, you feel the need to sit down and do some real hard thinking. But to know where to start is not easy, nor is it easy to define the very questions which you feel are bothering you.

As good a starting point as any is this old matter of ideal and reality. We, who were brought up in Habonim and who decided at a certain stage of our lives to come to Israel, came with an ideal and because of it. And when we got here we saw that, between this ideal and the reality that exists in Israel, there is a difference; and the difference is disturbing. Part of the disturbance is due to a natural unwillingness to track down its cause to something in ourselves. And this is due to a serious fault in our education.

The chalutz movements in the English-speaking countries have often been accused by their opponents of being "escapist." On the surface the charge is false, for every member is trained to an understanding that his life in Israel will consist of hard work. Thus the chalutz movements are not "escapist" in the sense of inviting their members to leave the burdens of life in the Diaspora for a land of lotus-eaters. But, in one respect, it seems to me its education has tended to be escapist. Those who think for a moment of the way in which
Israel is interpreted in Habonim will have to admit to themselves that the approach has always been on the following lines: "Here in the Diaspora there is a certain political, economic and psychological atmosphere which is oppressive. In Israel this isn't so because there we ourselves are creating the conditions of the life we lead. In addition to that, here, in the countries where we live, there are social and economic conditions which are oppressive irrespective of their impact on Jews. In Israel we are changing all that. There we have replaced competition by human cooperation; there we have created new social values and new social instruments, such as the kibbutz. There we can join the pioneers of a new society. There we will become the pioneers of a new society." We stress the fact that, in Israel, we are going to join something which has already been started and which is wholly good and beautiful. By putting the matter in this way, we awaken expectations, and we do not awaken a determination to create on one's own responsibility and by one's own effort. That means that we do not develop the capacity for struggle to realize an idea but, instead, weaken the capacity by arousing an expectation that all one has to do is to join in a movement which already has passed beyond the stage of struggle. That is escapist, and moreover it is unrealistic.

For the struggle for new social forms in Israel has not yet succeeded, and it is the belief that it has which is responsible for disillusion and for a feeling of impotence. What happens? Someone comes here, enters a kibbutz and, at first, it is up to expectations because he is given a welcome party and then is able to spend a week or two visiting the country and to revel in the pleasure of saying to himself every now and again: "It isn't a dream anymore, I am really here." When this honeymoon period is over, the new chalutz discovers, to his utter amazement, that the members of the kibbutz are not angels but men, that Israel is not an assembly of the elect but a collection, and a multicolored collection, of people. Just people. Ordinary people plus a lot of extraordinary people, extraordinary in the sense that, before arriving in Israel, they have lived through extraordinary conditions, which, incidentally, have not always served to render them more pliable or more "idealistic." When this happens, the newly-arrived chalutz is ready to receive his next shock. He begins to find that life in the kibbutz, in its day-to-day aspects, is colored by the struggle to live; he finds that the economic aspect of the kibbutz is uppermost, that the most important committees in the kibbutz are those dealing with economic matters, with the getting of work and the distribution of work. And if your new chalutz comes to town, he will find the same thing; that if he wants to get anywhere and do anything, he has to worry first about assuring for himself a minimum economic position. Now there are times when, particularly for an individual or a young kibbutz, the struggle may be bitter. And a bitter struggle for existence is not exactly calculated to improve tempers or to bring out the best in men, and there are times when it does not bring out the best in a kibbutz. For the kibbutz consists of people and not of angels.

The newcomer who arrives may experience a real shock—the shock of being brought down to earth with a bump. Raised on the ideals of a new society, he finds that the new society which he is joining is a society struggling on all fronts. Even on the cultural front there is a struggle. You must struggle for the language, and you must struggle for cultural self-development against tiredness, against a tendency to let things slide. And sometimes you must struggle to convince yourself that you have not yet lost the ideal, and sometimes you have to struggle inside the kibbutz to retain the ideal. For, in the struggle for the immediate economic end, the ideal, in its fullness, appears to recede. The kibbutz struggles for settlement on the land, but this struggle takes the form not of a glorious frontal attack, but of a discussion on how to get so much work in order to be able to save so much in order to be able to borrow so much more in order to buy a tractor. Now, when a question is put in that way, it looks more like a matter of business than a matter of the realization of an ideal; and, because of that, it may tend to be treated as a matter to be dealt with along business lines rather than along ideological lines.

Now the first reaction to this situation is usually disillusion. Day after day of hard work with poor food and tiring conditions, and the ideal gets covered up a bit; and then starts the period of matzav ruach (depression). Matzav ruach is a phase which many newcomers to Israel pass through; the stage when one is bitterly critical, when every little knock on one's preconceived expectations comes as a crushing blow. The danger is that, from this stage, one comes to the stage of acceptance, to the attitude which says: "This is how it is; you can't do anything about it." When that stage is reached, one ceases to be a creative factor striving for the realization of a new idea.

Our whole educational work has to be modeled along somewhat new lines if such a reaction is to be prevented:
1. Everyone must learn that he has no right to expect that others will be without human failings and shortcomings which he himself possesses. The living of an ideal requires a personal struggle against one's own failings.
2. He must understand that collective life tends to emphasize human shortcomings rather than to minimize them. The morality of the crowd is always lower than that of the individual. Political morality is always below the standard of the individual. A man will cheat for others when he would not be prepared to cheat for himself; the man who is horrified at the very thought of drowning an unwanted kitten becomes transformed when he wears a uniform and is called a soldier. An ideal collective society, therefore, implies a constant struggle for imposing on the collective the standards of morality by which the individual is trying to live.
3. He must understand the power of objective conditions to weaken the force of the idea. In particular, he must recognize the degenerative influence of adverse economic circumstances. We must build up the quality of resistance to this influence; we dare not educate people in ignorance of its existence.
4. We must propagate the ideal, not in terms of a romantic vision, much less in terms of a romantic fact, but in terms of a program of action and of struggle. We must be aware of the attitude of automatism, of the slick and easy attitude which says: "Do this and you will get that," of the mechanical approach which says; "Have this and this constitution and you have a kibbutz) and that kibbutz or that settlement will be the ideal incarnate." We must put forward the ideal as something which can be won only by a struggle; by a struggle which does not allow the ever-present sense of the final purpose to be dulled by preoccupation with the immediate present task; by a struggle which is calculated and intense, undertaken in a full understanding of the realities and conceived of as a determination to change them, until the reality approximates the ideal.

AVRAHAM