“Song of the Valley”

The lower Galilee and Jezreel Valley are the heartland of Zionist mythmaking. The first kibbutzim were founded here, where Socialist idealists from Eastern Europe came in the early part of the 20th century to drain the swamps by day and dance the hora by night, or so the story goes. They certainly did break with Jewish tradition and social conventions to create a new society, based on collective ownership of property and communal living. Today, most kibbutzim are radically different places than their founders imagined them to be. Few if any, rely on agriculture as their main source of income. Most have gone through at least some form of privatization where people choose their own professions, earn their own salaries and pay bills according to their patterns of consumption, just like us city-dwellers. Many kibbutzim have gone into the tourism business and provide guest houses and resort facilities. Many also have gone into the housing development business, turning some of their agricultural land into sub-divisions for people who want to live in a rural community but have no interest at all in being a member of a collective, no matter how loosely configured.

Even in the early days before Israel became a state, there were many who realized that this kind of intense communal living wasn't for them. The moshav emerged out of this impulse, as a kind of hybrid between complete sharing of resources and preserving personal autonomy. Nahalal, the first moshav, was founded in 1921, in the Jezreel Valley of course. Moshe Dayan's father was one of the original members. Nahalal features in one of my favorite songs "The Song of the Valley" of that period. It's a lyric paean to nature, to the pioneers, to the up-building of the land - all part of the grand myth that shaped Israeli identity for 3 generations or more:

"Rest has come to the weary and calm for the worker...Dew below and moon above, from Beit Alpha to Nahalal...Sleep, oh valley, glorious land. We shall watch over you." (It sounds much better in Hebrew...)

The land really is glorious, especially on a spring day when the hills are still green from the winter rains and blanketed with wild flowers. Quite a lot has changed since those first pioneers came with their vision, their dreams and their commitment to physical labor and nation-building. Their old dreams may no longer fit with the times, but it still does seem to be a place where new ideas incubate and begin to flourish.

Last Shabbat I went to Nahalal where I attended services at Niggun Ha'lev (song of the heart) This community is one of the first of what is now a growing phenomenon of secular Israeli worship communities. It grew out of the work of several educators from HaMidrasha, a program of Jewish studies for secular Israelis at Oranim College, just a few kilometers down the road from Nahalal. One of these educators recently became a rabbi ordained by HUC in Jerusalem. But Niggun Ha'lev is deliberately not affiliated with any particular movement, intent on charting its own path. It's a multi-generational group with lots of kids, young and old. Many of the 60 or so members are former kibbutzniks but there's an assortment of former urban dwellers and even a few Americans in the mix. These are people who grew up with a distrust, if not antipathy towards religious practice. Yet, the more they studied Judaism, the more they began to think and ultimately act on how to make Jewish expression a part of their lives.

The service at Niggun Ha'lev was filled with joyful music and heartfelt. They have created their own kind of worship experience - classical liturgy interwoven with modern Hebrew poetry; a bit of Carlebach mixed with Israeli tunes; guitar and Torah study; a closing circle of community announcements instead of the traditional Friday night Amidah. It was a familiar and strange assortment that somehow came together into a warm and authentic whole.

The service takes place in the moshav's clubhouse whose walls are adorned with a ring of photographs from the founding days of the community. Indeed, I wondered how those founding fathers and mothers would look on at this new initiative. Though they themselves rejected the religion of their fathers for their own "religion" of Zionism, I'd like to think that they would approve of the creative and sincere efforts of this group to define a home for themselves within Jewish tradition - not as Orthodox returnees, but as Israeli Jews looking to build a new kind of community that makes room for Judaism in a way their ancestors could never have imagined.