The Religious Zionist You Didn't Know

by Yehudah Mirsky
Jun 15, 2012 2:15 PM EDT

There's a certain kind of educator one finds in Israel, especially, and especially in the past, on the kibbutzim. While learned, their moral authority derives less from formal credentials, if they have any, than from their life in their communities. Their ideas emerge from daily engagement and from lifelong learning, in a classically Zionist dialectic of individual self-realization and commitment to the whole. At their best they live and teach a riveting mix of moral passion and political moderation, synthesizing ideological conviction with rich humanism. One of the greatest of these educators, the last major thinker of the religious kibbutz movement, and maybe of moderate religious Zionism, died last week, leaving many of us are asking, is it all over?

Yosef Achituv, known to one and all as Yoske, was a slight man, whose unfailingly gentle soft-spokenness, vaguely luftmenschlich air and easy benevolence were almost comically at odds with the power of his intellect and moral clarity, and the depth of his passions. Born in Germany in 1933 he came as an infant with his family, studied in a Haredi yeshiva and religious Zionist high school, and, in the course of his army service in the early 1950s joined Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, in the south near Ashkelon, where he lived, worked and taught for the rest of his life.

Almost all the religious kibbutzim are inside the Green Line, and are regularly been lonely redoubts of moderation in the religious Zionist camp.

The religious kibbutz movement as a whole, Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Dati, is an insufficiently-known side of the Zionist story, one very much worth telling, even, or especially, now that Yoske is gone.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/15/the-religious-zionist-you-didn-t-know.html