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Noam Spancer grew up on a kibbutz in Israel where he was raised by night guards and 'care-givers' as part of an effort to demolish the nuclear family. Did it work?
A childhood memory: woken in the middle of the night with a piercing toothache, I stumble out of my room in a daze into the darkened corridor. I stand in front of the intercom that hangs on the wall above me and I call for help: "Night guard, night guard, please come over."
If this sounds like the memory of a child in an institution, it is in a way. I was a kibbutz child.
The Israeli kibbutz movement, born of an exuberant meshing of Marxist and Zionist passions in early 20th-century Europe, never involved more than 4% of Israelis, but its economic, political and cultural influence far exceeded its size. Economically, kibbutz agriculture became a powerful, technologically advanced enterprise. Politically, the kibbutzim helped secure – and in turn benefited from – the long reign of Labour governments in Israel. Culturally, kibbutz members came to embody the Zionist ideal – Jews who were strong and earthy, capable farmers and courageous soldiers, free of diaspora dread and malaise.
From the beginning, however, the pioneers' attempts to translate their revolutionary ideals of social equality and shared ownership into the language of daily life resulted in some outlandish adaptations. Most notoriously, children in many kibbutzim were raised from six months in communal "children's houses", monitored at night by rotating shifts of night watchmen (and women), who, with the aid of an intercom system, were supposed to locate and respond to children's night-time needs.
While many cultures around the world practice some form of communal child-rearing, the kibbutz is the only known society in history to attempt communal sleeping. Early kibbutzim gravitated toward that system for several reasons. Ideologically, kibbutz members wanted to break away from old Jewish-European traditions. They wanted to demolish the nuclear family structure in favour of the group. They wanted their children to grow up in a microcosm of the kibbutz system, to train for their future lives. Economically, raising children collectively made sense during the tough early days – food was rationed and members sometimes lived in small tents. There was also a feminist motive, as communal sleeping was supposed to free women to participate equally in community life.
As children, we spent most of our time in the children's house with our peers. We ate, played, studied and slept there. We would visit our parents every afternoon between 4pm and 8pm, then they would return us to the children's house to sleep. Our Jewish mothers never cooked us a meal, never washed our clothes or sang us a lullaby. The kibbutz system sought to limit private intimacies in case they diverted members' energy from the communal project.