The Global Citizen is a joint project of New Voices and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Throughout the year, a group of former AJWS volunteers will offer their take on global justice, Judaism and international development. Opinions expressed by Global Citizen bloggers do not necessarily represent AJWS.
Throughout the world, friends, a revolution is taking place. Among the consciousness of young people like me (and maybe you), I see a renewed interest in the earth; in global justice; in living in harmony with nature and with other beings, including humans. Part of this shift in justice involves meeting human needs in a new way: the intentional community.
Jews used to live in tight community. The eruv (ritual boundary) where I live in St. Louis extends over ten miles, defining the locus of halakhically observant Jewish activity. Our communities used to be much smaller. We would meet all of our ritual, personal, and social needs within a small shtetl or ghetto. Now the standard Jewish American formula has shifted to dispersion in large cities. Israel offers kibbutzim, but their focus has changed since the inception of the kibbutz movement – many kibbutzim contain factories or manufacturing of some sort. So what’s taking the lead? In America, we see the renewal of a deeper environmental connection, with the growth of Jewish farming centers and camps: the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center, Camp Eden Village, the Jewish Farm School, and other places. 
From a perspective of social justice around the globe, what’s important about intentional communities? For one, intentional communities are a model already practiced by many areas around the globe, but one that Western imperialism has disdained and upset. I need to be aware of the history of my country – America, along with Western Europe, decimated much of the wisdom of native cultures in Africa and the East, and amongst that wisdom was the powerful concept of intentional living in communal ways.
From a mathematical perspective: we in our planned urban communities in America have managed to come up with a simple, basic form that seems to work well: the square. Our street blocks are squares, our farms our squares. However, take a look at the research of Ron Eglash, who suggests that the native villages elsewhere in the world have much more creative, efficient, and powerful layouts, in mathematical shapes called fractals. We have forgotten this beauty, just as we have forgotten our origin as a communal as well as individualistic people.
I’d like to offer just one more example appealing to why we ought to consider the issue of intentional communities very carefully. Meredith Throop writes about The impact of Water Privatization on West African Women and argues that the women in the areas of West Africa that she studied had an efficient, sustainable system of supporting each other. If one day, one woman was sick, another woman would fetch water for both her family and her friend’s. With privatization (imposed from the West), this system died very quickly. In this case, capitalism was by far the more harmful option to a sustainable and beautiful way of life; and the power imbalance becomes evident here, because while capitalism isn’t inherently harmful, imperialism is. And this was imperialism.
To come next post: The new Jewish intentional community.
