Figure 11.1 The children of Kibbutz Gilgal, shown with their caretakers. From a picture postcard, used with permission of the secretary of Kibbutz Gilgal, a settlement in the Jordan Valley.
The Significance of Unforeseen Death in a Community on the Brink
In the spring of 1994, some 6 months after the “Declaration of Principles” regarding peace between Israel and the Palestinians had been signed (and before an agreement had been reached with Jordan), I was approached by two members of Kibbutz Gilgal, a settlement in the Jordan Valley. As they talked to me that day at the university, a proposal began to take shape to document events in the region from a personal and community perspective by interviewing members of the kibbutz about their lives and their prognoses for the future. After a number of discussions, I received permission to conduct my study about a kibbutz’s experience of the transition from a state of war to one of peace, or, as it came to be referred to in many of our preliminary meetings, “the price paid for peace” in the lives of the kibbutz members. During the following year, I conducted and taped individual meetings with any members willing to talk to me, using models developed in some of my previous research (Lieblich, 1978, 1981, 1989, 1993, 1994).
Gilgal, an Israeli kibbutz, is situated in the Jordan Valley, 15 kilometers north of Jericho and 6 kilometers north of the present autonomy lines. (These facts are valid as of September 1995.) The kibbutz was founded in 1973 as part of a governmental policy for settling the eastern boundary of the state. Its first residents were young second-generation members of other established kibbutzim. They were joined on the kibbutz by members of Nahal1 units who had served on Gilgal and had settled there after their term of military service was completed. Presently, Gilgal is the only kibbutz among 16 moshavim2 in the northern part of the Jordan Valley. It includes 65 adult members and a similar number of children. The economy is based primarily on agriculture: the production of sod and ornamental trees, milk, chicken-farming, dates, and a vineyard.
The Jordan Valley was captured by the Israelis from Jordan in June 1967 during the Six Day War. Its continued status as Israeli territory has been uncertain since the inception of the political process towards peace in the Middle East. Arab settlement in the Jordan Valley, with the exception of an urban center in Jericho, is extremely limited. Many view the Jordan river and the Jordan Valley highway, running to the east of Gilgal, as a necessary security zone for the state. The politicians, however, have made few pronouncements on the future plans for the area, and speculations are rampant. Residents of the area, therefore, remain in a state of particularly difficult psychological uncertainty.
I began to visit Gilgal weekly in the fall of 1994. By the summer of 1995, I had spoken once or twice with most of the permanent adult members of the kibbutz, which had 56 members: 26 women and 30 men. The interviews followed a chronological format and attempted to elicit the speakers’ perceptions of their past, present, and future lives in the place.
Throughout the interviews, several events or key periods in the history of the kibbutz seemed to acquire particular significance, serving as touchstones for the more individual and personal recollections. The initial period—bachelorhood, intensive agricultural labor, and the creation of a communality and friendship among the young pioneers—was painted in nostalgic colors by the more long-standing members of the kibbutz. Many referred to the 10th anniversary of the kibbutz, in 1983, and the preparations for its celebration as a high point. The kibbutz had then numbered almost 100 adults.
Internal power struggles began to unsettle the community in the 2 years that followed, particularly in 1985 when almost half of the members left the kibbutz. The following years were marked by slow but certain recovery, as well as increasing isolation in the wake of the Intifada.3 This continued until the recent dramatic events which featured so prominently in the stories of the members: the sudden death of a young adult member of the kibbutz in 1993 and then, 3 months later, the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestinians along with the declaration of autonomy specified by the Jericho-Gaza accords.
Mali, a member of the kibbutz since 1980, had worked primarily in education and the dairy. She was married to Uri Yaacobi, manager of the sod production industry on the kibbutz (and, at the time of her death, the secretary of the kibbutz) and had two small children, Guy and Adi. One summer afternoon, about a year and a half before the beginning of this research project, Mali died in her sleep at the age of 30. She had been napping and was found in bed by her husband on his return from work that day. Although Mali had fainted several times in the year before her death, there were no indications that she suffered from any particular illness; the reasons for her heart failure are unclear. She was buried in Herzliya (north of Tel-Aviv) next to the grave of her father. All the members of the kibbutz participated in the shiva,4 the month of mourning, and the 1-year memorial service; these events were portrayed vividly and emotionally in many of the stories offered to me by the kibbuzniks.
Accidental and terrorist deaths are, unfortunately, part of the fabric of Israeli reality. They are never anticipated but never completely a surprise. Mali’s quiet death at such a young age, however, was totally unforeseen and a shock to the community of the kibbutz.
This chapter concentrates on Mali’s death as a key to understanding the plight of Gilgal and its inhabitants as they confronted the confusion and uncertainty of their existence. One of the principal questions is why Mali’s death assumed such a large proportion in the stories of members who had never been either her close friends or her admirers. The significance of her death to the members of the kibbutz appears to go beyond her and her husband’s personal and social contributions to the community. In their grief over Mali and in their construction of their stories of bereavement and pain a year and a half after her death, the members of the kibbutz coped with and internalized their experiences of impermanence and mortality in both the personal and communal spheres. Through their reconstructions of this unforeseen tragedy, the narrators anticipate the pain of separating and mourning of a kibbutz whose future is shrouded in mystery and whose days (many of them believe) are numbered.
THE BODY, THE SUSTENANCE, AND THE HOME: CENTRAL DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESSES
As one sifts through the stories of the members of Kibbutz Gilgal, the simultaneous occurrence of three developmental processes emerges in the accounts of their lives. These are: the approach of middle-age, the dissolution of the collective fabric of the kibbutz, and coming to terms with the threat of evacuation from the area as a consequence of the ongoing political process. Mali’s death sharpened the kibbutz members’ awareness of these processes on the one hand, while, on the other, the very natural, social, and historical essence of these processes heightened and deepened their experience of the tragedy of her death. The analysis of the experience of Mali’s death in the lives of Gilgal members follows a description of these three developmental processes.
The Body. Midlife Crisis: Maturation of the Individual
The adult members of Gilgal are a fairly homogeneous group, all of them between the ages of 30 and 40, and they are experiencing the processes of growing older as a group. The population has recently been quite stable. Integration of new members ceased almost completely during the last 5 years and, since the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinians, has acquired the status of firm policy. Most of the children on the kibbutz are under the age of 12, and, as there are almost no adolescents or young adults, the age gap between parents and children is felt keenly. Likewise, there is a noticeable absence of older adults or senior citizens in the community, or even of transient residents such as parents of members.
The adult group shares a number of characteristic life-cycle traits. They describe thoughts and feelings generally found in individuals approaching midlife in a manner particularly typical of the autonomous and isolated kibbutz community, which is colored, too, by the looming threats to their future. They are busy balancing accounts, evaluating the gains and losses of their personal and collective lives and their choices of living in a kibbutz in this particular region.
Their words prominently feature an awareness of advancing age. Of particular concern is a diminished capacity to labor intensively in the fields under the desert sun, on the one hand, and anxiety about starting another kind of lifestyle on the other. Alongside the physical exhaustion, several of the interviewees describe a sense of social and organizational burnout. The more talented of the members have, for many years, assumed public roles which require organizational and leadership skills, exchanging among themselves over and over the jobs of kibbutz secretary, treasurer, kibbutz coordinator, and directors of the various branches of the kibbutz. Their sense of exhaustion and burnout are related to the absence of “a new generation” who could take on some of the burden, gradually assume responsibility for the kibbutz and its social structure, and, one day, when they are old, care for them. Their descriptions of the kibbutz as a dying community failing to renew are particularly powerful:
We’re very small, there is no new generation … and people aren’t getting any younger. It’s as if there is no future. This kibbutz could really die. There’s no new blood in the Jordan Valley. (Gad)
The impression given by the narrators’ descriptions of themselves are of a population much older than their actual chronological age suggests, and at times they seem to be aware of this in describing themselves:
I’m 38, an age at which I see people [outside the kibbutz] at a peak of renewal and activity … and I will have to experience the feeling of a person who has exhausted themselves, and it’s all over. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve come to the end of the road in a sense. (Dalia)
The words they use most often to describe their lives, notwithstanding their relative youth (under the age of 40!), reflect processes of decline: tiredness, exhaustion, missing out on opportunities, waste, paralysis, entrapment, concessions, aging, last boat, loss of blood, extinction, and death. Expressions of life, growth, and development are few.
Thus, although most of them are currently studying to acquire new professional skills (as a consequence of the political situation) and are parents of young children, they sound as if their lives are behind them. It may be that, given the effort, challenge, and pride associated with their past—with their establishment of the kibbutz, rejuvenation of the community after the crisis, acceptance from a young age of the extensive responsibilities associated with key positions on the kibbutz, intense physical labor, and lonely confrontation with the elements—the members of Gilgal have reached the fourth decade of their lives with a sense of age beyond their years. Also it may be that the uncertainty of the future prevents them from looking forward optimistically. Many of them seemed to be trying to evaluate whether, in the event of evacuation, they will be able to summon the necessary strength to uproot and resettle in a different place, with different people and different work.
Thus it seems that Mali’s death simultaneously symbolized and accelerated the experience of getting older among the members of Kibbutz Gilgal. In terms of the dimension of personal maturation, her premature, sudden, and unexplainable heart failure served as a reminder that life is all too short. For many, her death symbolized their own acknowledged mortality. For others, perhaps, it served as an injunction to do everything in their power to make the most of whatever time is left to them.
Sustenance. The Ideological Crisis on the Kibbutz
Over the last decade, there have been extreme changes in the social structure of the Israeli kibbutz. The process has culminated in the decollectivization of several of the kibbutzim (Harel, 1993). One by one the principles of equality, communality, and mutual responsibility (Bettelheim, 1969; Blasi, 1980; Lieblich, 1981) have come under question. Kibbutzim are experiencing economic and social crises. On the one hand, they face multiple debts and financial deficit. On the other, membership rates are diminishing and the quality of communal life is deteriorating. Many members of the kibbutz movement are suffering from severe conflicts over the validity of their choice of kibbutz life, guilt over missed opportunities and past mistakes, and doubts about the continued existence of their life’s work. In sum, it seems that kibbutz members presently experience the death of their dream.
As a kibbutz, Gilgal is also experiencing important changes, which featured centrally in the stories of the members. The most pronounced effects are felt in the economic sphere, particularly in the transformation of the kibbutz member from a “social person” to an “economic person.” This is reflected in, among other things, the allocation of more responsibility to individuals for their own lives (e.g., privatization of various expenses) and greater autonomy to the economic branches of the kibbutz society. During the year of my interviews, members were requested, for the first time, to pay their own electricity bills as assessed by meters installed in their homes. Food distribution was also privatized, collective food budgets were transferred to the private accounts of members or families, and the community dining room and free mini-market were closed. Community meals were served only at lunch time and two evenings a week. These had to be paid for in vouchers. Members must now buy food at the kibbutz supermarket and prepare meals by themselves.
At Gilgal, as in other kibbutzim around the country, free food and the community dining room—symbols of the collective life—seem to be gone forever. The significance of this change far exceeds the importance it assumes in the daily lives of the members of the community. Some feel threatened by the prospect of hunger or lack of food. For many others, the new regulations reawaken memories of an earlier step in decollectivization, when, 12 years ago, a decision was made to close the children’s houses5 at night and bring the children home to sleep. Then, too, an essential element, indeed a central symbol of the kibbutz during its founding years, met its demise. As a result, young parents were no longer free to leave their homes in order to participate in public social activities, leading to their withdrawal into the more intimate circle of family and close friends.
This process of drawing inward has intensified in recent years. This is so much the case that, in some of the life stories, a sense of a community with a shared social fabric was hardly discernible. One of the interviewees referred to this as a process of internal leave taking: “The members of Gilgal are on the kibbutz in body but, in the lives they have adopted, their minds and hearts are absent from the kibbutz community.”
In stark contrast to these dark descriptions are the reminiscences of the longer-standing members of Gilgal, full of nostalgic descriptions of the wonderful times back then, when the “togetherness” was so strong and there was complete sharing and equality among members. Agricultural work was always done together. Everyone worked long hours, 7 days a week, and there was an almost mystical collective experience. After work, they would spend hours on the grass, talking and eating together or joyously celebrating various events on the kibbutz. Such memories went hand in hand with comparisons to the present and were filled with a sense of loss for what had been but was no longer.
The members’ stories, moreover, were rife with references to the end of the kibbutz age. While some, however, felt pained by the loss, others saw it as a positive turning point. For example:
I feel like pioneering is dying out … and soon there will be no more kibbutz. (Orit)
I think that the kibbutz is finished. Today, the kibbutz, the cooperative community, has exhausted it’s utility. It’s dead. (Asaf)
While the following demonstrates a positive attitude:
I think this is a good beginning. … It is a process, and people will get used to the new state of affairs. … It’s the way of progress. (Itamar)
The current evolution of the kibbutz idea is, then, a second issue in the development of the kibbutz and assumes a central place in the minds of kibbutz members today. For, congruent to the maturation and evolution of the concept of kibbutz is a sense of pain and loss no weaker and, perhaps, far stronger than the hope for rebirth as a different kind of community. In this context, the death of Mali also acquires multiple significances. Many members described the funeral and the shiva as a peak moment in the life of the community. The fact that the rituals of mourning took place and were experienced in a manner so particular to the kibbutz renewed, if only temporarily, the sense of extended family and community on Gilgal. At the level of the kibbutz, then, Mali’s death symbolizes the victory of the kibbutz over mortality. This was a victory won by virtue of the spirit of the kibbutz community, notwithstanding the major changes that are infiltrating its life at every level.
The Home. Implications of the Peace Process.
The third change to affect the members of Gilgal is occurring at the national level. It hinges on the question of the borders that will be established in the region, among Israel and her future neighbors, in the wake of negotiations among Israel, the Palestinians, and perhaps the State of Jordan.
The members of Gilgal are fairly heterogeneous in their political views and attitudes towards the peace process. While the kibbutz movement is affiliated with the Labor Party, there exists a small, but not inadmissible minority whose members, with varying intensity, claim allegiance to the nationalist right-wing camp and express reservations about the peace process. There are even wide attitudinal gaps within some of the families. Most of the members of Gilgal, however, support the peace process, notwithstanding its high cost to themselves. In response to explicit questioning, almost all the interviewees said that, if the government decides to evacuate the place, they have no intention of repeating the physical resistance demonstrated in the evacuation of Yamit.6
At this point, the political process has had a dual effect on the residents of Gilgal, both shaking their sense of security and motivating them to reorganize their lives towards a different direction in the future. There are many unanswered questions haunting the residents of Gilgal: Will the Jordan Valley be handed over to the Palestinians? Will the government implement evacuation in an organized manner, with requisite compensation? Is the Jordan Valley going to become an Israeli enclave in a Palestinian corridor, and if so, what kind of access will Israelis have to it? Will the Israeli government continue to invest in the Jordan Valley, or will it, rather, cut its losses and simply let the valley dry up and die? These questions have become a looming threat in the lives of the residents and fill them with uncertainty. Indeed the lack of certainty was the subject raised most often in discussions of their present lives. While some claim to have learned to live with uncertainty and even to ignore it, only a very few see it as a blessing, an opening for new alternatives in life.
Currently, then, the members of Gilgal are striving to deal with the possibility of a future reality that differs from the one they now know. This is reflected in the choice, by many, to study towards a higher degree or professional diploma. When news of the peace agreement first aired, Uri, secretary of the kibbutz, formulated a circular in which he urged Gilgal members to take up studies which would give them the training and credentials to be able to compete in the work market outside the kibbutz. His letter fell on fertile ground, and, in 1994/1995, there were 24 students in Gilgal, some 40% of its permanent residents.
Other consequences are, of course, the mental, emotional, and intrapersonal processes that are related to the situation of stress and uncertainty. Everyone spoke about separating from Gilgal, wondering what would happen to the kibbutz without them and to them without the kibbutz. They spoke feelingly about their deep ties to Gilgal: to the place, to the community, the people, the scenery, the vegetation, the agricultural branches. Each speaker had his or her own personal link to Gilgal. It seemed as if these reflections not only referred to the past but also represented a kind of preparation for the future, a rehearsal of anticipated separation and grief. There are references to separation in all the interviews, and most were communicated in tones of sadness and pain. A striking example is the following:
When I imagine myself being evacuated, and I ask myself what I will leave for them, then there is only one thing I want to take, and that is the trees. Because I know how important a tree is for an Arab (silence). For me too. So I’ll leave them all the houses. What’s a wall, what is a house after all? A house is important when you are in it. You are what’s important, not the wall. But a tree is something else … you uproot it and take it with you. That is what I’ll try to do. I’m serious. I’ll take all the date trees. If I have a say in how to leave the settlement, I want to leave Gilgal without trees. A tree has roots. A tree is a statement. The trees change everything. … The people and the trees. (Uri)
It is tempting to speculate that Uri, still in the process of coming to terms with his wife’s loss, makes a keen differentiation between living and inanimate objects in talking about his separation from Gilgal. But, for all members of Gilgal as well, there is a close association between the looming threat of evacuation and the death of Mali.
COMING TO TERMS WITH TRAUMA: MALI’S DEATH AT GILGAL
Mali’s death, as reflected on by Gilgal members, acquires special significance in the context of the personal, communal, and national processes described above. On one hand, her death both represents and legitimizes the workings of those processes; on the other, the processes themselves influence the kibbutz members’ perception of her death and help clarify why they were so deeply shaken by it. It was in the context of the national issues discussed above that the following question arose:
Where Should Mali Be Buried?
Mali died 3 months before the national agreement. Confronted with the question of where to bury his wife, Uri rejected the obvious option of the kibbutz cemetery which then, as now, consisted of the single grave of P., a member who had been accidentally electrocuted on the kibbutz many years ago. The family of the deceased had long left the kibbutz, and Gilgal members have little to say about this death, which occurred when they were young or before they had joined the kibbutz. Gideon, one of the old-timers, is an exception. He says the following about the first death, the construction of the cemetery, and his sense of its importance for Gilgal:7
As I see it, P.’s death was more important because then we had to build a graveyard. … I see a graveyard as something very important. To me it signifies that people live here all their lives, until they die. It’s not a temporary place. It’s a place for living in for many generations. It’s a shame that it’s so run down. I remember once making the comparison between homes that you build with 12 meter foundations that can be torn down and forgotten (like in Yamit). But a grave for a kibbutz member next to your home is forever, an everlasting emotional link, and it really ties us to this place. It really completes the picture [of life and death in one place]. (Gideon)
With regard to the place of the graveyard in the life of the community, a less senior member comments:
In older kibbutzim the cemetery is the history of the place, a calm place that makes you feel that this is it, this is the place. Here we don’t have that and that says a lot. Someone once said that Gilgal is like a train station. A lot of people were here and left. (Naomi)
Uri and Mali’s mother decided to bury her beside her father in Herzliya. Most of the members either justify this decision or see it as a private matter on which their own feelings are not relevant. Those who justify the decision point out the uncertainty and impermanence of the kibbutz and claim that Uri was right not to bury his wife in a site whose future is unclear. When asked how he could have thought about this before the agreement was signed, their responses seemed to me a backwards reconstruction of events in which private sentiments about abandonment and withdrawal, locked in their hearts throughout that whole period, have seeped into their understanding of the earlier events.
I think it’s easier for Uri that she isn’t buried in Gilgal … this way it’s most honorable if I think ahead a few years. (Itamar)
When I heard where she was going to be buried I was really happy. I thought to myself, “good.” So we needn’t move her later on. I think that says a lot. (Naomi)
It would have made me crazy if we had to leave her here with the Arabs. It would have been a crime. (Orit)
The following passage reflects the combination of grief and understanding which underlies another member’s painful thoughts about where he himself would wish to be buried:
I had mixed feelings about the burial. There was the enlightened, the modern acceptance that this is what the family wanted, and this is what was done. But I think there was also some sorrow. … I imagine my own self lying there under the date trees in Gilgal’s cemetery, and nowhere else. (Rafi)
It is hardly coincidental that the one person to grieve about Uri’s decision is Gideon, the only remaining member of the original settlers of Gilgal. Gideon felt a particular kinship with the lands of Gilgal and vehemently resisted the prospect of withdrawal. He said:
I was very unhappy that they decided not to bury her at Gilgal. Maybe it was out of fear that one day we might not be here, that we might have to perform memorial services on Palestinian territory. (Gideon)
It is clear, therefore, that the fact that Mali, a prominent kibbutz member, was buried in the “heart of the country,” rather than its periphery, reflects the temporariness of life at Gilgal. Indeed, the location of her grave emphasizes just how intertwined are responses to the death and to the political events, with the increasingly insistent doubts of the kibbutzniks about the future of the region.
Family Communality and a Sense of Finality: The Kibbutz Members’ Narratives of Grief
Mentioning Mali’s death (whether the subject was raised in response to questions or by the speakers themselves) seemed to elicit, in most of the narrators, participation in a communal discourse, a shared recitation of a well-rehearsed chapter in the collective narrative of Gilgal. This is history that requires no reconstruction, a memory that has not yet gone dim. In interviews that took place a year and a half after the death, many of the members say they haven’t yet recovered. These are some of the voices of the collective experience:
It was summertime. The heat was oppressive and all this was going on. … It was like a whole year of grief at Gilgal. I think we were more preoccupied with all that than with the peace process. I don’t know how to explain it. (Hagai)
Mali’s death at the height of the day staggered Gilgal.
It was so sudden. The unexpectedness made it even more of a shock. That it should happen just like that in the middle of the day, not an accident, not an illness. A woman goes to sleep and suddenly she’s gone. You can’t be prepared for something like that. People were at home, the kids were starting to come home from the children’s houses … and suddenly there was silence, an incredible trauma. (Miriam)
Everyone was stunned. No one slept that night. There was total hysteria. (Tami)
The unexpectedness of the death is brought to bear on the community’s solidity in the face of the tragedy:
This sudden death raised difficult questions. We’re still young. We’re supposed to be busy with weddings and births, and suddenly there we all were in a cemetery … with children. … We didn’t expect this to happen for a long time. The death hit us much too soon and strengthened the ties among us. We literally reunited. (Hagit)
In these recollections, the shock is more pronounced than the grief, perhaps because the grief is assumed to be obvious and yet difficult to describe in words. Or perhaps the element of surprise was, at first, stronger than the pain, which took much longer to register. The few that expressed their sorrow and longing directly said, for example:
For me it was terrible. I am aware of her absence in everything I do. I miss her constantly. As if she had been my sister. It was much worse than when my mother died (Orit).
The language of the speakers emphasizes the powerfulness of the experience: words about shock, trauma, disaster, drama, and tragedy. But what emerges most strongly is how the community rallied together, rising to the task of coping with this terrible period together. It is this that is clearly expressed in so many of their stories:
When Mali died it was the greatest trauma we had ever known. We had never tested ourselves, never encountered a tough period, a transition. And it turned out that there was so much strength here. They helped so much, they were so much together that it was just … it was good to know that you belong here, that if something happens, you aren’t alone. … How we got through the week of mourning, all that support, we were always together. We would stay up all night, the whole kibbutz. Uri didn’t really want to be alone and we were with him, all of his friends. And a lot of the time we were helping one another, and if someone wanted to cry, he could cry in front of everyone … it made it so much easier. When it was all over, when you thought about it you could say “now I know that I can—[die]. If I need someone, they’ll be there.” That’s a great thing. It’s easy to be a friend when everything is OK. What’s hard is being a friend when things are rough, when he needs you and you have to help. And it wasn’t just close friends … everyone was in this. Everyone, even the kids came and wanted to help. (Tami)
Actually I think it brought us closer. Suddenly it turned out that there was strength here in all of us together. Before we weren’t so sure. People came together. (Dalia)
We have no family here. No grandfathers and grandmothers, just members of the kibbutz. It goes beyond neighbors, it’s a real family. We couldn’t just turn off at night. We would put the kids to bed quickly and sit together outside for 3–4 hours, talking, remembering, telling stories, looking at photos. The kids thought Guy was having one long party. They wanted to go there too. (Dafna)
It was like a carnival. I was there all the time of course. Everyone was in it together, taking turns at the dishes, baking cakes. … In times like these, the whole kibbutz rallies. We are very united during disasters. You see it too when people’s parents die. People come in droves, visiting, bringing things, worrying, calling, taking part. Everyone, not just close friends. (Gila)
Not all the members are surprised by the solidarity or see it as worthy of mention:
I don’t see it as a test. There are no alternatives in such situations. Just like the country unites during war-time. I think it happens out of instinct, it’s automatic. It has nothing to do with the individual. A group of monkeys would also need to be together during a period of distress. (Itamar)
I don’t think the community’s reactions were surprising. Everyone was involved, everyone was shocked, everyone tried to do their utmost for the family. That is one of the advantages of being on a kibbutz, especially one so small. (Yoram)
The extent of the solidarity was demonstrated in the responses of Naomi, who had been angry with Uri at the time. It was as if the community could not withstand disharmony at such a time and forced her to participate in the shared sorrow.
I wasn’t a friend of hers, and I’d just argued with Uri, who was secretary of the kibbutz, about a number of things. When the panic started outside, Rafi insisted I come out and join Uri and everyone. There were nights that no one slept, and when we finally dozed off, we dreamed of her. It was a dreadful summer. (Naomi)
It seems strange to speak of collective sleeplessness and common dreams. Yet, many of the women recounted detailed dreams which had clearly been shared and discussed together before. And, of course, there were others, close friends of Uri and his family, who spoke of a link that had remained strong up until the time of the interviews:
The truth is I felt I had to take some of the burden off of Uri and the kids. That’s what we did all year long, taking on a lot of the physical and emotional tasks. We just stayed with him, made sure he was never alone. … And anything with the kids, if they were sick, their cupboards had to be straightened. It became my second home. (Tamar)
Her kids still come here, mine go there, as always. This is like their second home. I hear them through the wall, in the shower, and I wonder: “For how long can we go on without her. How could she do it?” I feel longing and anger all at once. (Dafna)
Some of the members referred to the solidarity as transient, a phenomenon which perhaps threw into relief the general tendency to withdraw into oneself.
It influenced the community very powerfully. Everyone had been through the death of a family member, of a friend, but this event, in terms of the community was enormous. It brought us together, at least for a time. At first we felt like a family. But life goes on, and other things came up. And then we felt even more isolated. Eventually people withdrew even more, and this damaged the sense of togetherness here. (Eli)
Out of a sense of shame, the closeness had dissipated:
I feel a little uncomfortable with Uri, with the whole situation. We stayed with him through entire nights, and, little by little, it’s winding down. That’s natural, but there’s an uneasy feeling that we aren’t doing enough. (Yoram)
The extent to which the sense of solidarity on the kibbutz was linked to Mali’s death and allowed the community to come to terms with the tragedy is evident in the responses of members who were not on the kibbutz just after she died:
I wasn’t here at all [when Mali died]. They decided to keep me in the hospital until I gave birth … and for me it’s like she’s still here, like I just can’t accept that she’s died, that she’s gone. Because I wasn’t here, I wasn’t at the funeral; I didn’t participate in the mourning. I didn’t share the experience that everyone else shared here together. For me it’s like she went away and is coming back soon. When we sit shiva all that stuff about “God made the world in seven days,” it’s to let you get used to a new world without that person in it … and I wasn’t at that part, and it’s as if I’m not in that new world without her. (Yasmin)
The deep sense of participation is a central element of the members’ mechanisms for coping with the sudden death. Such an experience is typical, said some of the kibbutz members, of the communal structure of a kibbutz society and is quite different from the pattern of events which follow a death in the city. The kibbutz community is very close and many aspects of the lives of the individuals within it are shared: their social lives, employment, place of residence, schools attended by the children, etc. Thus, members of the kibbutz are in many sense dependent on one another. Such a community, like an extended family, can give maximal support to a bereaved family. The flip side of the coin, however, is the inescapability of the tragedy in such a close-knit environment. (See also an account of war widows, in Lieblich, 1981, pp. 221–230.) The constant visibility of the members of the bereaved family in a community made up of young families serves as a continuous reminder of death and of Mali’s absence from the community. This is evident in fears of death that have since sprung up in the kibbutz. The speakers reflect on the transience of life:
It shakes your confidence. Because if, at the age of 30, someone doesn’t wake up … you never believe that such a thing can happen to you! Suddenly it happens. People can’t cope. Death is difficult to deal with and especially so at such an age, and in such circumstances. (Tami)
Suddenly I was afraid to sleep alone at night, and Amir was in the reserves—these are things I’d never felt before. It’s not as if I were a child. (Naomi)
The adults told of even greater fears among the children. In such a kibbutz community, where children are all neighbors, where they all play, study, and spend their free time together, it’s impossible to evade reality by telling stories. The children’s presence and their questions threw the adults, themselves victims of fear, into the role of the soothers:
The children started with all kinds of questions: Mummy, do all mothers die when they are 30? Are you going to go to sleep and never wake up? Am I going to die in my sleep? It was one big uncomfortable mess. (Dafna)
And what do you do about the children? You have to explain to them. … Disaster also strengthens you. It’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s part of life. (Tami)
It raises questions about everything, all those questions and doubts, because after all how could such a thing happen. … And because of the kids, we had to get on with our lives. (Itamar)
And from the school-counselor’s point of view:
The kids, too, were thunderstruck. We did a lot of work with the metaplot8 and the parents so they would know how to work with the kids. Although the medical diagnosis was unclear, we decided to explain it in terms of Mali’s strange tendency to faint at loud noises and to say it was a kind of illness. That was the story for the kids, anyway. It may not be the whole truth, but we had to do it because there were children waking up at night to check if their mothers were breathing. (Alona)
Of course, a major issue was the bereaved children. The intimacy of the kibbutz community is once again in evidence: the woman who looks after the children in the children’s house is your neighbor; your teacher is also your mother’s friend; and everyone sees each other at meals or, on the grass, everyone sees everything. The social worker took it upon herself as a professional obligation to advise the father about his children, but several women on the kibbutz more or less consciously played the role of mother substitutes. It seems that the children, especially the little girl, Adi, remind the members of Mali’s absence and are a source of collective anxiety.
I was Adi’s metapelet in the children’s house at the time. When it happened, I thought more about Adi than Mali. I wondered how not to make her seem pitiful, not to treat her differently then the others. … When she cried and only wanted her mother, I had to tell her she had no mother, and it was so hard. … And Uri said to me “you’ve also lost your mother, maybe it’s harder for you to look after Adi now.” (Smadar)
Everybody wanted to help Adi, and they didn’t know how. They spoiled her. … The kibbutz didn’t know what to do. Now things have straightened out a little. (Adi)
It’s hard for the kids, and you see them all the time. The little girl looks just like Mali. (Miriam)
It used to break my heart … it still does … to see Adi … well maybe not as much. We’d be on the grass, some mothers and children, and I’d say, “How are you Adi?” And she’d say, “My mother’s in the cemetery and she’s not coming back.” (Jasmine)
One of the women who was particularly close to the children and was herself an orphan from a young age says:
I try to make sure that Mali remains part of their lives, of our lives … to talk about her, to wear a sweater that she knit, and to say “it’s the sweater that Mummy knit.” Mali as I knew her with her kids was a full-blooded person. She could be funny or irritating, good or bad. She was many things. She was your mother, and it’s natural to talk about her. … It’s very natural to say to Adi, “You’re a little Mali, you act just like your mother did… .” In that way, she is still with us. For the kids it mustn’t be something frightening or terrible or taboo, that they have no mother. (Hagit)
Some introspective members realized how their responses to the tragedy had assumed certain patterns. Some noted a growing sense of attachment to the community (as will be seen with regard to the friendship between Rafi and Uri). Others expressed a need for personal fulfillment, given the brevity of life. Many of them grew philosophical about questions of life and death.
Mali’s death made us more mature. It’s a part of life. Death is part of life. (Gideon)
Mali’s death made us more aware that we are mortals and have to use the time that’s at our disposal. Of course that is always true, but something very strong and unique happened here. It seems like since then no one has any patience: I want to get my degree now. I want it all now. I don’t want to wait. Life is short, and I want to have time for everything. Her death really crystallized those feelings. (Eli)
It did a lot. Since then things have certainly begun to change. Life is short and you’ve got to make the most of it, drink it up to the last drop. (Naomi)
Mali’s death—it seems to be one of the things that ties me to this place. (Orit)
Since her death, people are much more altruistic on the kibbutz, more of a collective concern for one another, that has continued to this day … when anyone goes away, or doesn’t feel well. … It suddenly felt as if everyone was looking after everyone else, not just their close friends. There are more heart to heart talks. (Dafna)
A more complex response follows:
It’s somehow settled me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. … Maybe it brought me closer to my home, to my work, made me fight less, act less crazy, push myself less. I tell you, it settled me … stopped me short. You say to yourself, “what am I going to fight if one day something like this happens?” It minimizes things. I think altogether I am more lenient because of it in my relations with people, not just with her family. It’s sapped me of my strength, my will, my ability to stand and fight. (Merav)
Within the tapestry of responses to Mali’s death, Rafi and Uri’s interpretations of events stand out in particular. Rafi and Uri are key characters at Gilgal, central symbols of the kibbutz. Like two focal points in an ellipse, they are figures of authority and inspiration. Rafi represents the spirit and the community, and Uri, the land of the kibbutz, the economic dimension. They both claim that the friendship between them developed only after Mali’s death. As Uri sees it, Rafi’s loyalty and intelligence (wanting to help and doing so wisely) reflects the position of the community as a whole towards him and his family in their moment of tragedy. For Rafi, the increasing closeness to Uri is inseparable from his renewed and refortified connection to the kibbutz as a whole. Their narrative of loss and of the powerful friendship that sprung up in its wake reflects the blurring of boundaries between self and collective in the consciousness of these two central figures of the kibbutz. At the same time, it reflects the firm belief at Gilgal that death and rebirth are inherent in life: a loved one dies and the link to her is severed; but, out of the ashes of the old union, a new relationship is born.
It must be explained that, in the years before the tragedy, Rafi had begun to distance himself from the kibbutz. He had spent much of his time studying in Jerusalem, looking for a fulfilling career that would allow him to escape the identity he had previously established for himself as a date-farmer at Gilgal. He had contemplated leaving the kibbutz with his wife and three children. Meanwhile, at the time of his wife’s death, Uri was serving as kibbutz secretary, having assumed the obligation of seeing the kibbutz through the changes involved in privatizing the kibbutz economy, while simultaneously studying business administration in college. When Rafi heard of Mali’s death, he took it upon himself to help fill Uri’s position as kibbutz secretary, assuming those duties related to the internal social functioning of the kibbutz community (and resigning from this role, approximately 12 months later, as the official year of mourning for Mali was coming to a close).
In my 4 hours of conversations with Uri about his wife’s death, he shared the following:
Rafi is my friend. … When Mali died, I think that his presence here and the fact that he took upon himself the role of kibbutz secretary meant so much. … I wonder, if he or someone like him hadn’t been here, whether we wouldn’t have fallen apart altogether. After her death the kibbutz would have gone to pieces. No one ever dreamed we would have to absorb such a blow. You can imagine someone having a road accident. But you never dream that someone will go to sleep in the afternoon and never get up again. A young girl. A woman. A prominent family in the kibbutz. It was a difficult blow for everyone. Of course, for us most of all, that’s natural. People were completely crushed. No one could function. No one could work. They didn’t know how to be with me, how to look at me. They were careful of how they talked to me.
And suddenly there was Rafi … for years he’d been thought of as someone with no … only studying, doing nothing on the kibbutz, and he just said “I’ll be your secretary. Come to me, with your problems, I’ll take care of them.” And he started to move things.
There were people here for me: Tami, Eli, Dina, Merav, and others who were close to me. That was my closest circle of friends. They surrounded me all the time. I felt it just when Mali died, how close we were. Rafi and Tamar became friends only after Mali died. In fact they only “returned” to Gilgal after she died. When something like this happens on a large scale, in a kibbutz, it’s easier. One of the things that happened immediately, and that is what is so special, is that everyone who had ever felt close to me gathered round. … You know then that there are people who will be your friends forever. They all care about you.
The shiva was a very special time here. … This is the real Gilgal, the real spirit of the place came out. … As if in honor of Mali, we stopped everything for a week. Ironically, there was a period of blossoming on Gilgal after her death.
At first, the kibbutz offices just stopped functioning. Afterwards we started to hold meetings so that things would get back on track, so that people would see that, little by little, you pretend that life is going back to normal. It helped us cope … and somewhere along the line Gilgal calmed down. … Today, socially, Gilgal has gone back to how it was before Mali died. We’ve come full circle.
What stands out in these reflections is the multiplicity of associations to loss and renewal: the references to the period of mourning as a time of ascent for the kibbutz, as a period in which the community could reunite, Uri’s circle of friends could draw close, and Rafi and his family could be rewelcomed to the fold. Likewise, there is a pronounced blurring of boundaries between Uri and the kibbutz. Who is falling apart, who is going to pieces? Who is functioning and who is recovering? The narrative creates an almost total identification of hero and collective. Running throughout are the themes of friendship with and gratitude to Rafi.
From Rafi’s point of view,
Mali’s death was the only event in the recent history of Gilgal to take me backwards [to the togetherness that we had and was lost]. It also roused something basic in me. In the last few years I felt I had been trying to find myself on the outside. This event shook me deeply in that respect.
Rafi talked at length about how he heard of Mali’s death in a telephone call to his wife, Tamar, from a bus stop, while returning home from an interview for a job that would have allowed the family to leave Gilgal. He recalls how he burst into tears and refused to accept the terrible news.
[When I got to the kibbutz] what I remember most that there was a feeling even in the air. Even the air felt her death [sobbing]. I couldn’t accept that she’d died, not even until today. Then I felt as if life couldn’t go on. [I felt ] there is no reason to act now. Now we need to have a dialogue with someone, with God, with ourselves. … I felt as if I was interfering with the plans for the funeral, for the shiva, for all that with family members all arriving … and Uri was the kibbutz secretary!
Rafi described how, during the customary thrice-daily prayers that accompany the period of mourning according to Jewish law, he refused to open a prayer book, refused to acknowledge the God who had taken a young woman, and hurt his beloved Gilgal. And then this chain of events:
Two days later, Doris, I think it was, went off to give birth and came back with her newborn child during the shiva. And suddenly I saw the whole complicated mosaic: the same one who sends Mali to sleep at two in the afternoon, so that she doesn’t wake up at four, brings a new child to the kibbutz 2 days later. The whole thing woke up in me long dormant feelings about Gilgal, about the community here. I believe these were fine hours at Gilgal … there was a feeling of family, of real pain. No one who hasn’t experienced the family-community could understand. It was something that restored the togetherness of Gilgal and brought me back here. I don’t believe many kibbutzim have experienced such a thing.
I felt as if there were something that only I could do now for the kibbutz. I had to somehow take care of Uri, help him to go on, allow him to return to the community, while confronting his grief. I felt that it was my job to somehow preserve him whole. When I volunteered to join him as secretary of the kibbutz, I understood that only I had the key to allowing Uri to remain both inside and outside. … I could handle the daily drudgery and leave him to deal with the larger issues that had drawn him to the position of secretary … even though, given how I was constructing my life at that point, all this was a long way from how I’d pictured myself those days.
Rafi’s words also express the dissolution of boundaries between individuals in the face of the kibbutz tragedy. As he speaks of steps taken to care for Uri, it is clear that he includes, in these aspirations, the preservation of the entire community. And, even more than those of Uri, his words reflect a faith in a cycle of life which compensates death with rebirth.
This death represented, then, an at least temporary catalyst for solidarity and reunification on Gilgal at the same time that historical trends concerning the kibbutz and the peace process were driving the community apart. This temporary closeness allowed the kibbutz to shelter the bereaved and create a protective circle of close and distant friends around them. It permitted the community to ensure the survival of the family while reasserting, for itself, its own strength and value. Yet, in the context of the historical events that were occurring in the background, it is vital to view the narrative of the death (as opposed to the real events to which we have no access) from an interpretive viewpoint (e.g., Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Widdershoven, 1993). It is necessary, in other words, to place it in the context of the three processes of maturation and transition that are now occurring in Gilgal: the aging of its members, the structure of the kibbutz, and the peace process.
On Impermanence: Amplification of the Tale of Mali’s Death
At the end of that summer, when the Gaza-Jericho accord was signed, the members of Kibbutz Gilgal, still traumatized by Mali’s death, were forced, as they put it, “to absorb yet another blow.” In the collective narrative of the kibbutz, there is an almost mystical juxtaposition between the two sets of events, both of them related to grief and death in the community. Mali’s death seemed, after the fact, to grow in significance in the members’ structuring of their recent lives, while simultaneously accentuating the ephemeral quality of their existence, whether in terms of their mortality, their continuity as a kibbutz community at Gilgal, or their political situation in the Jordan valley.
The kibbutz members’ sense of the transitoriness of life and of the impermanence in their situation was expressed in varying contexts. Many recalled that in the early days of its establishment, Gilgal bore the air of a transit station. People were constantly either leaving the kibbutz or joining it, and good-bye parties were held on a weekly basis. Later, during the “crisis,” there was a great exodus of families, a “trauma,” in the words of the narrators, which further shook their trust in the continuity of relationships at Gilgal. Several years of respite followed, a period of calm and stabilization on the kibbutz. But then Mali’s death and the peace agreements brought home, with even more force, the fragility of their individual and collective existence. Examples of some of the spontaneous expressions of these sentiments follow:
Gilgal is so small and so changeable when it comes to people. I mean they come and go, or live or die. At the moment there is only one grave, but everyone is mortal here. And these hills, this wonderful scenery, they were here before us and will remain when we leave. (Itai)
The peace agreement is a catalyst, a sort of a slap in the face that rouses us from a kind of dream and says: Wake up, look around you, this is what life is really like. It’s a kind of alarm clock telling you if there is time, and it passes, and nothing is certain. … This is your life. It doesn’t feel so great when you are told the truth straight out. (Amir)
I don’t hear anyone dreaming about a future together … or saying “we’ll see what these girls are up to when they’re teenagers.” If you have any kind of dream for the future, somebody immediately comes and squashes it … because we don’t know what will become of us. All in all, we know we won’t be here forever. (Dafna)
Even before the peace agreement, I don’t remember anyone at Gilgal talking about forever. That’s the way Gilgal has always been. … I don’t remember anyone ever saying, we’ll get old here. … I don’t think anyone ever imagined Gilgal in another 20, another 50 years. The peace talks have sharpened that feeling, but really, Gilgal has always been that way. (Jasmine)
This peace process made us anxious, because there is a difference between living here and making the decision to leave in another 10 years, and someone else deciding you have to leave in 5 years. (Hagit)
The existential quality of their situation is best described by Rafi, who discusses the conflict between wanting to believe in an eternal claim to Gilgal and the necessity of confronting the possibility that tomorrow will bring evacuation. This is, however, but a paradigm for the all too human paradox of existence. One expects to die but is surprised when death hits at the unexpected age of 30. Yet one continues to hope and believe in an eternally peaceful existence.
We are being asked to do the impossible: to act as if this present situation will continue forever, on one hand, and, on the other, to act as if we expect it to end tomorrow. It’s impossible. It’s inhuman. (Rafi)
Perhaps it is not surprising to hear the uncertainty so deeply ingrained in these words. It was Rafi, cited above, who saw himself one day being buried under the date trees he had planted at Gilgal. Thus, it is he who reflects on the existential dilemma of living in full knowledge of one’s mortality.
It seems, therefore, that both Mali’s death and the autonomy agreements pushed awareness of the transitory quality of life on Gilgal to the foreground for these narrators, even before they had begun to speak of either of these events. Some members who have been living on Gilgal for over 15 years claim that they perceive it as a temporary way-station in their lives. They recall a decision to stay “for now,” which has dragged on into the present. Others admit, even today, plans to “go home,” meaning to the homes of their parents where they were raised.
Still others recall their lives throughout the period of conflict and describe several failed attempts to leave the kibbutz. Many of them, mostly women, say cynically that “Arafat will redeem them” because he will force their families to leave the kibbutz, which they had in any case hoped to do. Only a few responded affirmatively when asked if they could imagine themselves at a ripe old age with their children and grandchildren on Kibbutz Gilgal, in this part of the country. Many could not even imagine their child’s Bar Mitzvah on the lawns of the kibbutz. They emphasize that this uncertainty had been part of their lives before the recent events and that the peace agreements, like Mali’s death, gave them a pretext for thoughts they had always secretly harbored, even about the death of Gilgal.
It could be argued that, as humans, we all share knowledge of the transience of life, given our finality in the face of death. This sensibility was particularly salient at Gilgal, in the light of the circumstances described up to this point: the aging of the body, the loss of the security that the old kibbutz had granted as symbolized by the cessation of free food, and the threat of losing a home. Depictions of Mali’s death, her burial, and the grief that emerges in the narratives of the kibbutz members are symbols and represent a culmination of these three processes. No wonder that the strongest impressions from these narratives are of loss and grief, of descent from the heights to the depths. Only a small few view the chain of events as an opportunity for growth and renewal, in terms of greater responsibility of individuals for their own lives. The foregrounding of transience in the events described in this chapter culminates in the intense responses of the members to Mali’s sudden death. Life, then, wavers between the two poles: impermanence and permanence, the certainty of the end, and the illusion of eternity.
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The author wishes to thank the members of Kibbutz Gilgal for their confidence and sincerity, the Eshkol Institute and the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University for their financial support of the study, and Yael Oberman for her translation and editorial work.
1Refers to a branch of the army whose members complete part of their military service either on an already established kibbutz or in the establishment of new kibbutz settlements. Members of such units are referred to by a term meaning “kernel” in Hebrew, and their service on the kibbutz is in a group context.
2A moshav (moshavim is the plural) is a semicooperative settlement in which families support themselves individually; but various aspects of the village economy are cooperative.
3Meaning uprising; it refers to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, 1987–1994.
4Meaning seven, it refers to a traditional 7-day mourning period in which the bereaved sit at home while friends and relatives gather in the bereaved’s home to share their grief.
5Dormitories in which all kubbutz children used to sleep, separate from their parents.
6A Jewish town in Gaza Strip which was evacuated in 1982 as a result of the peace agreement with Egypt, leading to violent resistance among the residents (Cohen, 1987; Wolfsfeld, 1987).
7Since the remaining part of this chapter deals directly with the community experience of Mali’s death, quotations from the interviews will be frequently presented. These, as all other quotes from the interviews, are verbatim translations from Hebrew.
8Plural of metapelet, the title used to refer to a nonmaternal caregiver of children of all ages in the kibbutz who works in the children’s houses.