Different Changing Languages which Organized the Kibbutz Agenda, Along a Time-Continuum

This paper is aimed at indicating the processes of change which the kibbutz movement underwent, and continues to undergo, along the time continuum, by examining the organizing language of the kibbutz agenda.

I attempt to show how an ‘ideological language’ was the dominant organizing language until the mid-1960s. From that stage onwards, we see a gradual transition from ideological language towards a ‘psychological language’. The economic crisis that erupted in the mid-1980s generated a ‘managerial language’ which became the organizing language of public discourse in the kibbutz, while since the early twenty-first century, ‘legal language’ became the pivotal language which shaped the kibbutz agenda.

In the beginning, kibbutz members were illuminated by an ideological pillar of fire. That fire’s fading created a desire to shape individual and communal life in the light of a psychological pillar of fire. A total economic crisis led to a ‘religion of organizational consulting’, later followed by change processes that occurred in the kibbutz, and then legalization processes world-wide and in Israel– creating a legal pillar of fire.