Kishorit was founded 25 years ago, just as the kibbutz movement finished its remarkable 90-year run. By that year, 1997, the Israeli free market was conclusively on the rise, and by 2000, Palestinian suicide bombers had blown the old Labor Zionist peace dream into oblivion. The next year, the last kibbutznik prime minister, Ehud Barak, was voted out of office, and the movement largely faded to the margins of Israeli society. This community was founded on the site of an abandoned kibbutz, Kishor, which had dissolved itself after years of failure.

I passed the goat-milk operation, the country’s third-largest, and the winery, which produces 50,000 bottles a year. There were the usual bomb shelters, a reminder that the Hezbollah missile crews were just a few miles to the north and were unlikely to make an exception for the people here. In the members’ meeting room near the communal dining hall, a man named Oren asked me if I’d like to sit down and discuss a book. The greenhouses here looked like the ones you’d see at any other kibbutz, with rough tables and hanging tools and sweaty workers in cargo pants. I noticed signs of cognitive disability only when two of the workers walked over to say hi and see how I was doing; one of the differences between Kishorit and a typical kibbutz is that the people here are much friendlier. Not far from the goat sheds, a man in a red T-shirt stood in the shade of a terebinth, jerking his arms as he carried on a forceful discussion with himself.

Kishorit thinks of itself as a kind of neurodiverse kibbutz—that term, “neurodiverse,” being the one preferred here to older ones like “mentally disabled” or “special needs.” Many communal decisions here are taken in a plenum by democratic vote, in the kibbutz style, including both the 186 neurodiverse members and the 45 member families who are “neurotypical,” the term for what most people might call “normal.” Some members can work full days, others can barely work at all—the place runs on the old kibbutz precept that you give what you can and get what you need. In the winery, for example, I met Yaron Biran, 50, who was born in Emek Hefer on the coastal plain. He was hauling a crate of bottles and stopped to chat. His job changes with the seasons, he said—pruning, picking, packing. He was busy, and had to go. In the kibbutz grocery, an elderly worker named Haya encouraged me to try the cherry tomatoes. Another member is an adherent of Chabad, and has decided that his job is to help other members perform religious commandments like putting on tefillin. That’s OK too.

Yael Shilo, one of the two founders of Kishorit, was born in 1948, the same year as Israel, at Kibbutz Kfar Szold in the Galilee panhandle. The idea for a neurodiverse kibbutz came to her after she married a man whose son fit that description, and she has dedicated the rest of her life to making it work. Shilo’s parents, like the other founders of her own kibbutz, had escaped places like Germany and Poland for lives of physical hardship in the Land of Israel. They spent a full decade hauling basalt rocks just to clear fields so they could start farming. “They worked themselves into the ground,” Shilo said. Her father was from Vienna, her mother from Krakow. Back in Europe, most of the founders’ families had been removed from physical labor, but that world was gone, and the kibbutz and the nation needed a generation that was muscular and hardy. There wasn’t going to be much room for the weak or disabled. That was Shilo’s world as a child.

The capable body was always a preoccupation of the kibbutz and of the Zionist movement: the bronzed pioneer of the Jewish National Fund posters, or the old newsreels with hundreds of brash New Jews performing calisthenics in unison under the blue-and-white flag. “Your first glance when you meet a young native-born man will reveal a flourishing, muscular, tall body,” wrote the pioneer Yaakov Cohen in 1933. “The hunched back and the bent gait that many scholars have identified as almost racial trademarks seem to have vanished, and the anxiety and fear of the ‘gentiles’ and the feeling of inadequacy and inferiority that were the lot of the young Jew in the Diaspora seem to have been pulled out by the roots.”

Just as the sabra, the prickly pear adopted as a symbol for the native-born Jews of Israel, grew wild here, wrote the historian Oz Almog in his book The Sabra, “so were the native-born Israelis growing, so it was said, naturally, ‘without complexes,’ in their true homeland.” My own first kibbutz memory was at a swimming pool at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the late 1980s, when I was 11 years old, visiting Israel with my family from our home in Toronto. I was standing on the blistering stone floor by the pool when my attention was diverted by the sudden arrival of a raucous horde of boys and girls—it was kibbutz gym class. They hit the water like a dolphin pod and churned it like beautiful torpedoes, another lap and another. They were all foam, tan, and muscle, and to my Canadian eyes, they seemed like another species. It was like being a house cat wandering into a zoo and happening upon the cheetah pen.

Shilo remembers the kibbutz as a wonderful place, even if the community was never as equal as it strove to be. “In our kibbutz, like anywhere, there were strong and weak. The idea of equality is a dream—in reality, there are people who are charismatic and strong, the leaders, and people who are more marginal, and it’s naive to think that everyone was equal and loved each other.” But the kibbutz was nonetheless a great thing: davar gadol, as she put it several times in our conversation. You were never alone, and you always had someone to help you. So what if a new kind of kibbutz could be created, one that would revolve around people who hadn’t been magically cured of “complexes” and who’d never be invited to star in those glorious calisthenic films, one that would harness the power of community but put it at the disposal of people who’d ordinarily be out of the frame?