Those were indeed the days my friend, and we truly thought they’d never end. We thought the nights would be for dancing and for stars, and the days — the days for making real the dreams, dreams learned from Isaiah and Amos and Walt Whitman and Camus. We loved being precocious and parading our precocity, Jewish and secular, and we knew our destiny was to “arise and build,” to go up to the land, the new State of Israel, there to plow and teach and share and show the world how to be — yes, the kibbutz.
On the evening of November 14, in New York, some 300 current and former members of Habonim, young and aging alike, gathered in a New York restaurant to celebrate 75 years of Habonim in North America and to honor three people representing three generations of the Labor Zionist youth movement that was once our home and has remained, for many of us, our abiding inspiration.
Our inspiration, though the kibbutz has become in some ways a curiosity. Our inspiration, though the kibbutz hardly any longer seems the wave or even the wavelet of the future, at most a ripple. Our inspiration, though the part about the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks has for decades now been on hold, tossed into an attic crowded with anachronisms. Our inspiration, even though, ever so reluctantly, we’ve learned that our people has its full share of charlatans and mediocrities, of whore houses and pimps and trafficked women and exploited foreign workers, its exploiters of every kind, all these alongside generosity and thoughtfulness and its immense achievements in the sciences, the humanities, the arts.
Those were the days we thought ourselves the vanguard of the Jewish people. We were never even nearly the size of Young Judaea or BBYO, but we — the more so if you counted Hashomer Hatzair and Bnei Akiva — were not a club or an organization, we were a movement, a movement that meant to write a new chapter in Jewish history.
Six decades and more have now passed. There was energy in the restaurant the other night, but it was the energy of reunion more than renewal, an evening’s suspension of disbelief so that we could immerse ourselves in nostalgia’s buoyant waters. It was too crowded and noisy to be sure, but I am confident that there were many times more sentences like, “Do you remember the hike in the pine forest when Rivkeh got lost?” than there were sentences such as “Can you believe how the Orthodox have hijacked Judaism?”
A characteristic vignette evoked by the evening’s atmosphere: Back in the ’50s, Habonim used clunky addressograph machines to prepare its mailings. (The mailings themselves were prepared with stencils and mimeograph machines, a whole other arena for tedious misadventure.) Each member of the movement had a plate with his or her name and address and a code, indicating her or his position in the hierarchy of this determinedly non-hierarchical movement. I remember the thrill I felt when my mail started to arrive with the ego-boosting code “KP” right there on the envelope, so that even the postman would know that Habonim regarded me as a “key person.”
Yet for all the individual flashes of memory and feeling, it is safe to say that here were gathered exemplars of that allegedly dwindling breed, people of the left who were and are Zionists. That is no small thing these days, and says something important about how deeply the movement’s values shaped us. Sure, the words “left” and “Zionist” are a good deal less precise than we once supposed. But there’s still enough to work with: “Left” means, at least, more equitable, and “Zionist” means in support of a Jewish state. (And yes, I know that “a Jewish state” is itself imprecise, saying nothing about the role of the rabbinate and nothing about the place of the non-Jewish citizens of the state.)
But precision was not our long suit back then, either. What we shared and, so far as I can tell, still share, is a sensibility, a continuing capacity for hope as also for indignation, for the specific hope and indignation that seeks the very best in Jewish values and ethics and aspirations and rejects the hype, the sham, the planting and reaping of fear that informs so much of our communal life.
I was one of the three honorees, which entitled me to four minutes of response. Three-and-a-half minutes for thanks and reminiscence, and 30 last seconds — how could I not? — to relight the fire: “This is an evening of delightful nostalgia, and it is exceedingly pleasant to immerse ourselves in nostalgia’s gentle waters, perhaps even to pretend that mah yafim haleilot b’chna’an, how beautiful are the nights in Canaan, is all there is to know. I do not want to spoil the fun, and I am fully prepared to sing as many verses of ‘those were the days, my friend’ as we can come up with — so long as all of us know that the song we must resume singing when this evening’s over is ‘these are the days, my friend’ — for they surely are, and there is much work to be done.”
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Copyright © 2013, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Claims Conference Chief Knew of $57M Holocaust Fraud Probe Earlier 
Top Dog: Who Makes the Best Kosher Hot Dog in America?
Why Do Jews Intermarry at a Much Higher Rate Than Others?
End Orthodox Monopoly on Jewish Marriage in Israel
Boston Bombers Pal Slain in Florida Eyed in 'Jewish' Triple Murder
You've successfully signed up!
The most impressive statement in Mr Fein's wonderful nostalgics is his description of Ha-Bonim (with Hashomer Hatzair and Bnei Akiva) as "a movement that meant to write a new chapter in Jewish history". In short, he understood then the very essence of Zionism. It was about the dedication of one's life in the realization of goals. It wasn't merely discussion, or feelings, or philosophy. It was "hagshamah" - a personal fulfillment through "aliya" that would revolutionize the Jewish world. Today, according to Mr Fein's new definition, Zionist means "in support of a Jewish state" (a philosophical position which does not obligate any particular action).
Besides, "hagshamah", there is indeed a philosophy behind the Zionist ideal. Zionism defines the Jews as a people, a nation. That is why the Hebrew language was such an important aspect of the ideology. A people shares a common language, and Hebrew is that historic language of Jewish creativity. The Zionist definition of peoplehood explains why the Land of Israel was so centrally important. A people shares its sense of belonging to a particular territory, whether as dwellers of that land or in exile from it. This Zionist philosophical thinking is foreign to Mr Fein's stated positions here in the Forward (Aug 14, 2008): "It would be strange, indeed, if we sat in Los Angeles or Chicago or Teaneck and pined for Jerusalem... It is America’s mountains and America’s rivers and America’s cities that frame our sense of place, and America’s politics... that command our attention". He also declared in a comment to that very article ("We Are All Implicated in the World’s Repair") that "calling for a dramatic change in Hebrew achievement in America is, sadly, a waste of breath".
So, we don't share the same definitions. Those of us who have made aliya (whose lives are "hagshamah", who create in the Hebrew language, and whose sense of home is in the Judean Hills) have a totally different definition of Zionism. Support of Jewish statehood by a person whose sense of peoplehood and belonging is the American experience is some another "ism". The question that I raise is why one insists on calling it Zionism. It's so different that it deserves a new term.
Move to the workers paradise of Birobidjan. It is probably the only place in the world where you could have a positive impact
Mr. Fein wrote of the realization that mediocrity and worse were just as Jewish as the more sublime traits he and his colleagues were so proud of. Mr. Tal has, with convincing vulgarity and lack of sympathy (as well as his obliviousness at his own spiritual ugliness) proved it.
According to google, Mr Birnbaum's accomplishments include an ode to 9/11 apologist Susan Sonntag and a yet unfinished memoir. Hurry up on the memoir-crowds are waiting outside Barnes and Nobel in Birobidjan awaiting your book tour
Dear Leonard, The struggle for peace, social justice and equality for Israel, the Jewish people and humanity must be (and for many of us still is) passionate, not tired and nostalgic! The kibbutz as an inspiring, radical, Jewish contribution to the development of a better form of society is making a significant comeback in the form of Urban Kibbutz. Freedom and equality are eternal values for Jews and for humanity which must be combined in community and which do not have to be simplistically prioritized over one another. Alienation and apathy must be replaced by love, vision and constructivism. There are young new chalutzim [pioneers] building new activist communities all over Israel today - see http://radjew.wordpress.com - so put your nostalgia where it belongs: behind us as a renewable energy source for dreaming, arising, and building! Al Tikra Banayich - Ela Bonayich! Don't call us your children - rather, your builders! James.
"All there is to know" now includes Zeev Sternhell's sobering study: The Founding Myths of Israel / Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State [translated by David Maisel, Princeton, 1998]. Sternhall, former head of the Department of Political Science at Hebrew University, examines in detail both the theory and practice of the labor movement in the establishment of a Jewish state, and concludes, as briefly summarized by the publisher, that "The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society. However [. . .] socialism served the leaders of the influential labor movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society." And, in specific reference to the indigenous Palestinians: ". . . Zionism, apart from a few numerically insignificant groups, rejected from the beginning the universalistic aspects of socialism and liberalism. . . . [It] never considered its vocation to defend the rights of people or to establish equality among nations." There is indeed much work to be done. One might turn to the words from the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel: "[Israel] will insure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex . . . ."