Divorce in the Kibbutz: Lessons To Be Drawn

The kibbutz in Israel constitutes one of the few places in Western culture where one is able to examine the essence of an “authentic emotional divorce” because of the minor role of factors that are extraneous to the disruption of the emotional marital attachment itself. This is the case because the kibbutz is a society that is based and functions upon principles that neutralize to a large extent the legal, economic, and co-parenting obstacles to a constructive divorce. Although there are significant differences in the severity of the postdivorce conflict, the divorce crisis is rather similar in kibbutz and non-kibbutz settings regarding both the quality of the emotional responses and the nature of the influencing factors — thus pointing to the ubiquitousness of the human condition.