The kibbutz was Israel’s boldest experiment. When the first kibbutz, Degania, was established in 1909 near the Sea of Galilee, it introduced a revolutionary model that rejected conventional society. These collectives deliberately upended normal social order by eliminating private property, instituting equal wages, and dismantling traditional family structures. Children lived apart from parents in dedicated children’s houses. Members ate together in communal dining halls. All significant decisions required democratic approval from the entire community. Though tiny in numbers—never more than three percent of Israelis lived this way—the kibbutzim produced a disproportionate share of the nation’s military heroes, political leaders, and cultural icons. Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Meir—all emerged from this radical socialist movement that sought to forge the “new Jew” who would build the Jewish state through agricultural labor and collective living.
Yet walk through most of Israel’s 250 kibbutzim today and you’ll find a strikingly different reality. Private homes have replaced communal housing. Differential salaries have supplanted equal pay. Children live with their parents, not in children’s houses. The once-revolutionary socialist experiment has largely surrendered to capitalism’s pull. The movement that helped birth Israel now struggles for relevance in the very nation it helped create.
Why did Israel’s pioneers create kibbutzim? And why have they ultimately failed?
God appeared to Abraham with a command that would transform world history:
Read these words carefully, and you’ll notice that God does not say that Abraham will establish a religion. Instead, He promises Abraham that he will be the father of a “great nation.” But why did God choose to shape the world through a nation instead of a religion?
The answer lies in Israel’s unique mission. God desired to create not just holy individuals but a holy society—proving that divine ideals could transform not just isolated monastery-dwellers but everyday people engaged in farming, governing, trading, and all aspects of normal life.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook explains that God wanted to demonstrate ” that not only exceptional individuals—the wise, pious, monks, and holy people—can live by the divine ideal, but entire nations as well, down to the lowest levels of society.” While religion could elevate individuals, only a righteous nation could show the world that society itself could be redeemed.
Creating a righteous nation, however, proved extraordinarily difficult. The people of Israel tried and failed during both the First and Second Temple periods. Despite moments of greatness under kings like David and Solomon, the nation repeatedly fell into idolatry, injustice, and moral decay. The prophets constantly rebuked the people for their failure to create the just society God demanded.
This national experiment was violently interrupted when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and crushed the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE. The Jews were scattered worldwide, reduced from a nation to isolated communities. The political dimension of Judaism was pushed to the messianic future, a dream deferred until the end of days.
For over 1,500 years, Jews lived this way—focused on religious practice and moral teachings while abstaining from politics. Over time, the corruption and brutality of the governments ruling their host nations convinced many Jews living in exile that Jewish statehood was a messianic dream. Why build a Jewish state if it would become just as barbaric as the other nations of the world? Better to remain stateless than to join the “barbarism of nations.”
Then something shifted. The American and French Revolutions introduced the radical notion that societies could be founded on moral values. Enlightenment ideas rekindled Jewish national aspirations. If nations could be built on justice and equality, perhaps the time had come to establish the “light unto the nations” that Israel was meant to be.
This was the backdrop against which the kibbutz movement emerged. The early Zionist pioneers, many no longer observant of traditional Jewish law, nonetheless carried within them the ancient Jewish yearning for a just society. The kibbutz wasn’t merely a pragmatic settlement model—it was an attempt to create the ideal community that would eventually transform into the model nation that God had commanded Abraham to establish.
The founders of the kibbutzim believed socialism would create the just society that traditional Judaism had failed to establish. The Torah’s laws of the sabbatical year, gleaning, and the jubilee seemed to point toward economic equality. The prophets’ relentless demands for justice seemed to align with socialist ideals. And so these pioneers, rejecting religious practice but embracing what they saw as Judaism’s moral core, built communities based on absolute equality.
What happened? Why did this bold experiment fail?
The answer is simple: man-made utopias always fail. The Left’s vision of a perfect society engineered by human wisdom inevitably crashes against the reality of human nature. The kibbutz experiment, noble as it was, represented human beings attempting to create heaven on earth through their own understanding.
The true path to Israel’s destiny isn’t found in socialism, communism, or any other human ideology. It’s found in the Torah. The Bible never commands communal ownership or abolition of the family unit. Instead, it creates a balanced system: private property tempered by sabbatical years, tithing, and gleaning laws; strong families governed by moral law; tribes living distinctly yet united under divine covenant.
God doesn’t want human beings to invent new systems. He’s already given us the blueprint in His Word.
Today, Israel stands at a crossroads. The secular, socialist vision that dominated its founding generation is fading. In its place, a new generation is rising—warriors who defend the land while increasingly returning to the faith of their ancestors. These young heroes understand what the kibbutz pioneers missed: Israel will fulfill its destiny not by reinventing society but by returning to the divine instructions given at Sinai.
We are witnessing the steady transformation of Israel back into the “great nation that is a wise and understanding people”
that God always intended.
Not through man-made utopias but through divine covenant. Not through socialist experiments but through biblical wisdom. This is the true revolution—and this time, it will succeed.
