In 1990 the typical “veteran” religious kibbutz – established before 1950 – had a population of about seven hundred. Its diversified farm economy included hundreds of milk cows and tens of thousands of chickens. It grew field and industrial crops, as well as fruit and vegetables, on about 2000 acres of land, most of which were irrigated. It also had a manufacturing plant. This socio-economic complex developed within a double value-frame: of national–pioneering and of halakhah. The Religious Kibbutz Federation is unique in that it set out deliberately to rationalize halakhic and national–pioneering norms by bringing about a confrontation between them.

When the Orthodox pioneers of the 1930s and 1940s undertook to mold a new social reality subject to the authority of halakhah, they were aware that problematic situations would arise that would thwart the attainment of their goal. But they were also aware that it was only through the process of building pioneering social institutions that the RKF could stage the confrontation between these institutions and halakhah that would force their mutual accommodation.

This chapter, then, is concerned with the meeting between new religious–ideological norms representing the needs of the present, and halakhic norms representing religious continuity, as well as with the influence of the former on the perception of the latter. This may be viewed as an encounter between two channels of religious charisma.