A religious pioneering community in the Negev

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This week the blog has been showing you some of the three different types of intentional communities that our group visited last Friday.
They all belong to the Ramat Negev Regional Council in southern Israel.

Here is the Council's "city hall" in the desert.

Our next stop was Kfar Retamim, a religious community/ yeshuv kehilati.
They started small in 2006 and today they are 180 adults and 280 children. 

A member (with his first-born holding his hand) explained to our group how it works.
But why not hear it from this 6-minute video. Enjoy the young woman's enthusiasm!

And more info and a map are here.

I'll be showing you two surprising things at Retamim in the coming posts.
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Happy Thanksgiving to the friends in America.
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UPDATE: Online info about Retamim.
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15 young families living together in the desert

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As I was saying (in the cat selfie post), on Friday my Shishi Zioni group went down south of Beer Sheva to visit and learn about three different ways of living together in the Negev desert:
 1. a kibbutz mitchadesh, 2. a religious yeshuv kehilati (community settlement/planned community), and 3. a mixed religious + secular yeshuv kehilati.

Our bus slowly went up the dirt road to Sheizaf.
Half in jest our guide said not to fear the guard dogs because they were tired from having barked all night.

Our busload of older Israelis numbered just about the same as the current population of Sheizaf which is 15  young couples with 20 little kids.

Each family lives in a caravan, the portable pre-fab houses that were set on the ground in 2012.
Or maybe they are big enough to be considered caravillot.
(The Hebrew word caravilla is a portmanteau of the words caravan and villa.)

  Itai, who was a driving force in creating this yeshuv kehilati/community settlement, spoke with pride about the young people who were attracted from all over the country to come and establish a new place in the sparsely-populated Negev desert.
BTW, recruitment was done via e-mail and Internet. 

Our guide for the morning was Ofir, head of hityashvut/settlement for the Ramat Negev Local Council.
In addition to his help, Sheizaf got backing from Ayalim Association, a 21st century organization whose slogan is "Bringing young adults to live and volunteer in the toughest places in Israel to serve as its newest Pioneers."
This means the Negev and the Galilee. *

See a short video explaining Ayalim's altruistic aims.

Sheizaf is not enclosed within a fence.
At their website you can enjoy a slideshow of the houses and people of the community.

One of the fathers brought up his little son, to the delight of all the grandparents of our group.

Sheizaf is a rare example of a social experiment  deliberately mixing observant and non-observant Jews.
There vision is to grow to 250-400 families and when the kids are ready for school to have a mixed religious + secular education for them.
(The practice in Israel today is for a child to attend either religious school or secular school.)
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Good luck to these brave and idealistic young people who chose a far-from-easy life!
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*UPDATE: I see Ayalim does good work in central Israel as well.  This article and little video about their new project in Lod just appeared today.  A shipping container village is going up to house the enthusiastic students!

Livnot ulehibanot

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This was the action in our little village yesterday. The old public building, long abandoned and roof caving in, has been fixed up in order to become a home for handicapped people.
I stopped to greet the gardeners and thank them for making the place beautiful and to ask permission for a photo. (Of course they found this rather strange.) This is where my little bit of Arabic comes in handy.

Yes, it is the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs and the foreign Gastarbeiter who build the State these days. They build our houses, operate the earthmoving bulldozers, landscape the gardens, dig in archaeological excavations, plant and pick our crops, shepherd our sheep and goats, etc. etc. etc.

I walked on, thinking how sad it is that so many Israeli Jews no longer know the joy of physical labor, of getting the hands dirty, of sweating.

A.D. Gordon, who died in 1922 in Kibbutz Degania, must be turning over in his grave at the situation today. He was a Zionist ideologue who believed that physical effort on the land would bring about the redemption of the Jewish people. He attributed pioneer work a semi-religious status, arguing that it created an organic interrelationship between man, the land and culture.

A. D. Gordon: "Tolstoy in Palestine" - Poem - by Steven P. Schneider . .

Like Tolstoy, you longed to connect your life
to the soil.
You turned your back
on property, family, the high culture of Russia-
to live with peasants,
to work the vineyards and orange groves of Rishon Le-Zion.
Your stamina stunned the younger men
and women who worked beside you.
Your labor connected you to the land of your people.
It made you free.
Turning your back on the occupations of the Pale--
Talmudic scholar, money lender,
peddler, victim of pogroms--
You wanted to remake the Jew into a farmer.
Your weapon against history was the hoe--
Your work in the fields a new kind of worship.
With each digging of the hoe--
you discovered a new rung upon which to climb to heaven.
The sweat bathed your white beard.
Your eyes burned with the fire of holiness.
Tolstoy in Palestine,
you scribbled "Some Observations"
by candlelight in the predawn hours--
"our people," you wrote, "can be rejuvenated
through labor and a life close to nature."
At night, under the moon of Zion,
beside the campfire,
you preached your religion of labor
to all who would listen.
And when the dreamers of Israel
sang and danced,
you joined them
in the hora of the body reborn.