Meir Yaari.

Mark was the closest I had professionally to a rebbe. But I have long outgrown a need for one; and had abandoned earlier ones in other spheres. Since this is the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the first that come to mind are leaders of the left Zionist youth movements. Let's take Meir Yaari of the Hashomer Hatzair.

Up to now I have used the spelling of the organization as Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair, following practice in the Yitzkhak Zuckerman book; e.g. in the April 20 posting last year on the march of our Czestochowa kibbutz at the outset of WW II; but shall now switch to the simpler form above following wider practice (the "H" prefix, with a vowel, usually "a", denotes the definite article in Hebrew. Most literally then, it translates to "The Guardian The Young").

Everyone was supposed to be equal. At the same time, it was understood that Meir Yaari was the most equal. There are all sorts of things that could be said in a way to make him and / or the movement sound funny, and maybe there'll be some of that here. If so, they cannot outweigh the very real greatness of which those may often have been the reverse of the coin. As to the equality achieved, including that between the genders, there may not have been a society with greater equality in human history than within kibbutz society; to which nobody contributed more. Personally, he did not have more material advantages than others in his kibbutz(im) , just unusual prestige, thus "power"; along with Yaakov kHazzan, #2.

To the extent then that he was responsible for the formation and growth of the Hashomer Hatzair, including that in Poland when it was invaded, and nobody would deny the primacy of his role, he deserves major credit for the exemplary role of the movement in the Jewish resistance to the Nazi murder machine; including that of Mordekhai Anielewicz, the first commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising 63 years ago.

Meir Yaari later recalled the founding of the Hashomer Hatzair in Vienna during WWI from two existing youth organizations, one a back to nature outfit tied to the scout movement, the other ideologically committed to Zionist "hagshamah", i.e. actually to go to Zion to rebuild it. They remained committed not only to that but also continued in the international scouting organization, its only component with boys and girls together. Added to that later was a commitment to Marxist socialism (almost Leninist); although there had been a less ideological thread of socialism, or social justice, from the outset.

Not only because of the latter, with its rejection of religion (as opiate for the masses), but also because of the role of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) trend in secular Zionism, he could not have liked being referred to as a rebbe (i.e. head of a kHassidic, thus religious, sect), but it evidently happened. What follows here is copied from part of a book page I reproduced in the 1980s in my Last Emanations without noting title or author.

"Despite his retirement at the end of 1973, Meir Ya'ari remains the father image of Mapam. He led his party for a longer period than any other political figure in the Western world, trying to merge the principles of Zionism with the dogmas of Leninism. It is said of his ideological orthodoxy that it is a virtual extension of the hassidic spirit in which he grew up in his parents' home in Galicia. His opponents refer to him as the 'Mapam rebbe'.
Ya'ari, born in 1897, was a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, which was inspired by such back-to-nature protagonists as the Russian Lev Tolstoy and the Zionist dreamer Aharon David Gordon......Ya'ari himself studied in Vienna with the founder of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud, and was an officer in the Austrian army during World War I....."
(looks reasonable for a brief sketch. Mapam [M.P.M., Hebrew initials for United Workers Party] had only been founded in 1947-8, so that part can make sense only if you add his leadership of the Hashomer Hatzair and its Kibbutzim federation, "Kibbutz Artzi").

While I had been aware of his having been an officer in the WW I Austrian army, his having studied with Freud was news to me. It does make sense. Psychoanalese was all over conversations at the kibbutz. The Bittania period of the early 20s, where Meir Yaari apparently had presided over a life of gruelling group therapy of a small commune lends support to it. Some details became known later on Bittania, on the web I found, e.g. a long, very positive, and a brief, somewhat critical, one. The sect or cult- like aspect continued in the movement later, and I have been quite aware of having internalized it at the time.

It was only in the process of writing this that the odd similarities between Yaari and Mark, my two last guru like influences, came to the fore. While never a student of Freud's, Mark got to know him as a friend of his father's since their days in medical school and as dinner guest at the Mark home . Both Mark and Yaari joined the same army prematurely and became officers in the same war. Yaari was just two years younger. I doubt that they met. There were differences, too. Mark was not a Jew (his father had been until he married). To him it probably made little difference; but in Nazi Germany he would have been a Halbjude ("half Jew") by "racial" criteria, in Israel a non Jew (in most countries now, government does not make such decisions. Mark was a friend of Weizman's, Israel's first president, and played a major role in setting up the Weizman Institute of Science).

The last professional paper I wrote, really a preprint for a talk I then presented to the Institute of Environmental Sciences, was about the work we had done in our USDA laboratory on methods by which agricultural communities could harvest concentrated solar energy for their electricity and other energy needs, as well as supply some electricicity to the power grid (at the time of the first "oil shock", 1974-5). When my boss told me that a short biography of the senior author was needed (I had initiated the project), I wrote something for him to pick from, but he submitted it "as is", and it was thus printed in the "Proceedings". It was the only paper of mine requiring such a bio. I mentioned that I had got my Ph.D. under Herman Mark (in parenthesis), since he really had credit coming for what I still regard as the most important of my ~20 published papers; and that may be standard practice. What clearly must be unusual is that in this very brief sketch I mentioned my approx. two years in Hazorea, then a kibbutz of the Hashomer Hatzair. That had played a significant role in my contribution to that design of a novel rural community; which we had termed sun villages.