"How can you live here?" ask most visitors to Sde Boker, a 55-year-old kibbutz in Israel's parched Negev desert. The question is understandable: Temperatures easily reach 120ºF in the summer, and the area receives less than four inches of rain per year.

"There's not a lot of noise here," laughs 9-year-old Omer Yahel, as he sits in the cool shade of the palm and acacia trees outside the former home of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. Ben-Gurion lived the last ten years of his life at Sde Boker. He and his wife Paula moved there, in part, for reasons similar to Omer's. "I wanted to break away from my busy schedule," Ben-Gurion writes in his memoirs, "and to take a few moments to plunge myself into the vast stretches of the desert, to renew myself by experiencing the awesome effect of these open spaces."

But personal renewal pales in comparison to the primary reason Ben-Gurion advocated settling the Negev. "It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested," he said. Moving to Sde Boker when he was 77 years old allowed him not only to recapture the pioneer spirit of his youth, but also to set a personal example for others.

Nir Shaya, an athletic, exuberant 12-year-old, pays scant attention to Ben-Gurion's political idealism when he wolfs down meals with his friends in the hadar okhel (communal dining hall) instead of eating at home with his family; national goals never enter his Oasis mind when he shoots hoops with his buddies at Sde Boker's sports center. And yet, the close friendships he has forged, his feelings of freedom and community mindedness represent the fruit of Ben-Gurion's Negev ideology: "We could easily settle five million people here…and in spaciousness, comfort, calm, and beauty. We would house [them] in small localities to preserve and maintain their communal spirit."

Community spirit also flourishes about a mile down the road, at Midreshet Sde Boker. Although it shares a similar name with the kibbutz, Midreshet Sde Boker consists mainly of faculty and students at the Desert Studies department of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. A boarding school, a field school for college biology students, and an army base attract people of different backgrounds from around the world.

"I fell in love with the Negev during my army service," says Hadas Novik, who works as a youth activity coordinator. Although she grew up in northern Israel, where a carpet of greenery rises and falls from the fertile coastal plains to the forested highlands of the Galil, Hadas experiences a mystical enchantment while hiking in the wadis (dry riverbeds) that surround her Negev home. Ben-Gurion described a similar feeling in his memoirs: "Nowhere else in the country, not even in Jerusalem, does the continuity with the past have as much significance as here." The Torah, he points out, describes Avraham's spiritual ties to the Negev desert, saying, "Avraham planted a tamarisk (tree) in Beersheva and proclaimed the name of God, the Eternal" (Bereishit 21:33). From these simple words, Ben-Gurion links the concept of God to the "act of cultivating this barren land." In other words, "Avraham consecrates this land to his people and in this way, we are simply following his tracks."