The last morning at Kfar Blum we had the opportunity to get a short tour from one of the founders of the kibbutz. What I learned from this man cannot be put very well into words. He is very old, his skin dark and spotted from decades of work in the desert sun, but he is still very well taken care of and healthy. Members of the Kibbutz get free health care. He talked about draining the swamps, about building their own houses, each with a special strong room that could withstand everything but a direct artillery hit. Every house had one. We walked around, he showed us the schools they built, explaining how all the nearby Kibbutzim sent their kids to Kfar Blum, about the special music school they built, about their Olympic swimming pool that Israeli Olympic swimmer used to train, that he gets to visit every day for free because he is a member, about the theater they built that features classical and Jazz concerts weekly, how he does have to pay for those like everyone else but gets to listen to them practice for free because he is a member. The problem, apparently, is that their children do not want to become members of the Kibbutz, because all of the money they make goes to the collective. In exchange for this, however, members get everything taken care of, from laundry to dentistry to meals. This was one thing in an agricultural economy, but things change now that an engineer goes out and makes x thousand dollars, but still lives the same life and gets the same housing as the farmer. One last thing, I have never met a man so proud of his life's work. He looked around and saw the way it was when he showed up illegally in the early forties, saw the buildings he helped build, foundations he helped to lay. I looked around once, just before we left, and saw it almost the way he did, and realized that this lush, green, well organized and beautiful place was this man's personal Eden, this paradise he built for himself. I have never seen anything like it, before or since.
|