The Price of Paradise

...The impression given was of extreme puritanism, a severe inhibition of sexual and affective spontaneity...

...For the good of group camaraderie, for the sake of community spirit, a massive repression, sexual and otherwise, has taken place...

...On top of Mt...

...Masada is the site of the last Jewish guerrilla outpost beseiged by the Romans, now excavated as a monument to antiquity...

...He is perceptive to the finest detail, recognizes the most subtle nuance...

...he far prefers the company of his age-mates to that of his parents...

...Traumatized by all of this, he grew up a haphazard, scarred product of a particular mother and father to whom he was forever obligated...

...Indeed, he savs he has never seen two generations more different in outlook...

...Yet both the new self-respecting Jew and the new Jewish way of life have been realized at a price...

...Furthermore, he tempers his findings by noting that the data necessary for a complete study will not be available until the third generation of kibbutznik-born children has grown up...

...sex would be free and natural...

...Had he pitted America's older generation and its supposed incorruptibility against the kibbutz founders' actual incorruptibility, and compared the realities of one with the other, I think he would have had a strong starting point for a cross-cultural comparison...

...This is their deepest most abiding attachment, and the focus of powerful feelings about emotional events they have shared with their group...

...The consequence of all of this for the personality development of young kibbutzniks is a definite impoverishment of the inner life...

...That I can fight, that I can struggle, that I can suffer as much as any boy...

...On a train from Jerusalem to Haifa a few months ago, I met an attractive, bright Israeli girl in uniform who had been raised on a kibbutz...

...emotional commitment, responsibility, and obligation are to the commune and his peers—the most important people in his life...

...The "kibbutz ethos" was originally conceived largely in reaction to the concept of the ghetto Jew as a man tied to family, private property, individual achievement, and material acquisition generally...

...and the child's obligation would be to the good of the community, not to individual family members...

...So strong is this commitment that in the early days of the kibbutz movement, married couples would make a pointed effort not to sit with each other in the dining hall, indicating their acceptance of communal dominance over individual relationships...

...My task," he writes, "is not to judge the kibbutz, nor even kibbutz education, but to try to understand it...

...And whenever the two philosophical positions conflicted—the one stating what is good for the individual, the other what is good for society—the collective won out...

...Bettelheim, however, did not set out to solve America's failures...

...He was to have pride in communal rather than individual accomplishment, and allegiance not to the family but to the commune...

...Perhaps equally valuable, all this is set down in a descriptive style that permits the reader to follow his thought processes from sharp observation to lucid interpretation...

...Bettelheim finds that "all the satisfactions that in the ghetto had come from the family, and many more, [now come] to kibbutzniks from their peers...

...This he has accomplished...

...They are emotionally "flattened," socially superficial, intellectually unimaginative...

...Travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and you see an old wrecked jeep bearing the inscription "On the way to Jerusalem," dedicated to those who fell in the 1948 War of Independence...

...Yet being a child psychologist with decades of experience, a Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz, he brings to his study a special sensitivity for that cultural background which, in a negative sense, gave root to the formation of the kibbutz...

...In adolescence, the collective conscience, a group superego, molds his outlook...

...No less important, Bettelheim astutely perceives that the successes of the kibbutz rest upon the first generation's moral vision, convictions and values...

...A bit farther on stands a tree-covered mountain commemorating the Jewish children slaughtered in Nazi concentration camps...

...property would be shared...

...Kibbutz in Hebrew means "group," and the overriding importance of the group is the outstanding characteristic of Israeli communal life...

...True, they are well identified: They are committed and highly responsible, living in complete harmony with their social surroundings...

...Then he links this to a rejection of their own ghetto mothers and to eliminating the unwanted responsibility of motherhood...

...Like most Israelis they are ready to die for Israel if necessary...

...They lack emotional depth and appear to be incapable of intimacy...

...Thus Bettelheim notes at the outset: "The kibbutz ethos . . . stands for utter devotion to the idea that once again Jews in Israel must not only create a new model of the good and just life, but actually live it—when need be at the cost of great personal hardship—or die for it if they must...

...In the process, he has also provided us with a check against the inclination to take our own system of child-rearing for granted, and with a well-measured antidote to social utopian-ism...

...In latency, the child's world revolves around his collective peer group...

...His reduction of contemporary American failures to the stereotyped "generation gap" is particularly unsatisfactory in view of his recognition that an extraordinary distance exists between kibbutz children and their parents...

...I like the Army," she said...

...The book only fails when he does not live up to that scientific ideal...

...He has a beautiful feel for children, for the crises they encounter, for the means they use to deal with them...

...I like to know that I can do whatever a boy can do...

...Consequently, he would be responsible to all and expected to live up to the standards of the community, not to those of a particular family unit...

...Instead of this "old Jew," the founders of the kibbutz movement dreamed of creating a "new Jew"?a man dedicated not to personal material and intellectual pursuits but to the total Jewish community...

...But among the second and third generations this does not compare with their willingness to give their lives for their peer group, the boys and girls they grew up with...

...Unfortunately, Bettelheim's stay in Israel lasted only seven weeks, confining him for the most part to one kibbutz...

...Why shouldn't I?" This striving for sexual equality in the sense of assuming the same work role as men, this longing for male comradeship and a concomitant distaste for anything feminine, appears to be a regrettable personality trend among today's female kib-butzniks...

...Remembrances, dedications, memorials—the past is an important side of Israel and must be appreciated if one hopes to comprehend the other side: the future, the youth...

...The newborn baby would be a kibbutz baby, given up by the mother within a few days after birth for the collective to rear, and would belong to everyone...

...Brooklyn Downstate Medical Center Every country has its memorials, but perhaps none more so than Israel...

...Growing to maturity with a sense of self-respect, knowing that he is a very important part of that community, he would be a "living monument" to the kibbutz, a member of a moral elite carrying out the mission of the new Jew...

...These qualifications strengthen Bettelheim's successful study, whose occasional weaknesses are merely peripheral...

...Even today, twosomes, intimacies between individuals, and display of personal feelings are discouraged...

...The reasoning is sound enough as far as it goes—but what about the present-day consequences of their obviously masculinized ideals for feminine identity...

...This is particularly true in the case of children raised on the kibbutzim, who are the subjects of his latest study, for the aspirations of those who founded these communal settlements provide the backdrop to the realities of the youngsters raised on them...

...For example, what happens when two males and two females of adolescent age all live together, sharing the same bedroom, taking showers together...

...In discussing the women who were among the founders of the kibbutz movement, for instance, he tells of their aspirations for sexual equality and their desire to escape the limitations of conventional womanhood...

...In addition, the fact that he knows no Hebrew somewhat limited his communication with the children...

...Thus Bettelheim reports: "There is one class of feelings the entire group strongly approves of: This is their feelings for the kibbutz and its struggles, and for the Jewish homeland...

...His objective was to understand the effects of communal childrearing, the impact of early separation of child from mother, and the results of a social Utopian dream put into practice...

...As Bruno Bettelheim observes in this book, Israel's youth is both a product of and "a living monument" to the dreams of the past...

...Fortunately, this happens only rarely...

...Visit Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem and you find it a place where people recall the destruction of the Second Temple...

...The weakest part of the book is Bettelheim's attempt to compare kibbutz and American middle-class childrearing...

...This is Bettelheim's intent...

...In the ghetto, it was believed, the child was nurtured in an emotional hothouse, subjected to those intense family rivalries, hostilities and conflicts which cripple development...

...It is in this context of self-elected mission that the entire phenomenon of the kibbutz must be understood, and flowing from it, what the parents do or do not do in raising their children...

...Bettelheim explored such issues with some lively, freethinking kibbutz adolescents...

...Here men and women would be equal...

...Later, in a more pointed statement, he comments: "Despite an original libertarian thinking, despite the original desire to ensure instinctual freedom, it soon became apparent that to encourage this ran counter to community spirit...

...It is almost," says Bettelheim, "as if the high value placed on the collective emotional experience makes the deeply private one—the experience that belongs to oneself or a twosome—seem kind of indecent...

...The good of the kibbutz requires these personal sacrifices...

...In infancy, the collective is the true provider, offering basic security and determining early weaning...

...The "child of the dream," the kibbutznik born and raised on the collective, has now come of age, so that the dream and much of the reality can be analyzed...

...When he asked the girls what they feel when they observe their male comrades having an erection, when he asked the boys whether they did not want to reach over and touch one of the girls late at night?they immediately broke off the discussion...

...Adolescent acting out, drug addiction, homosexuality, severe emotional disturbances, deprivation, and so on, are totally alien to the kibbutz...

...On every level of child development, this group concern dominates...

...At Yad V Shem people weep for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis, and each of the small trees outside this museum is dedicated to a heroic Gentile who sacrificed his life to save some Jews in World War II...

...Throughout, Bettelheim is careful to avoid sweeping generalizations, recognizing that there are many exceptions to his conclusions...