Moshav Klahim and Plans

Day 20

PS - Visiting the Mormons

The Brigham Young Center for Near Eastern Studies sits on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem. It offers a monthly evening music program, which although enjoyable in itself, is the excuse to go out there in the evening and watch the city as day turns to night. Which is what we did.

By bus it’s a roundabout ride and we were pretty much the only people on it in both directions and it went from our part of town through East Jerusalem where, curiously, the ever present Israel flags weren’t.

The school itself was empty since all the students were sent to study in Greece after 10/7.

When the concert was about to start, the MC made the “what to do if there is an emergency alert” announcement. This is pretty much done at the start of any event, kind of like our land acknowledgement statement, and it is similarly ignored. This time was interesting though since they said, “In case of an alert, stay in your seats.” I guess the thinking was that the chance of a missile hitting the hall was less than the chance of injury if a few hundred folks headed to the exits.

The bus back down the hill was an experience. The drivers go like they are getting paid by the trip. This time he was clipping around a curve when a small car came out of a side street in front of him and then just to make things interesting, did a U turn, briefly disappearing under the front of the bus before coming out the other side. All’s well that ends well though.

Moshav Klahim

We decided to go out with another group, Ma’ale Adumim instead of Leket. Their post said that they were going to go and pick and pack melons and you could choose which one you wanted to do. We wanted to make sure, so we WhatsApp’d Beth, the organizer.

Us: Beth, we wanted to make sure that we could do the packing tomorrow because we don’t do well in the sun all day.

Beth: No problem. That’s how it will work.

Us: Great, we’ll see you at 6.

We did connect with the bus and hit the road. The routine was a little different since we started the trip with someone reciting Tefilat Haderech which seemed a little unnerving.

Not long out, Beth got a phone call …

Beth: I just got a call that they packed all the melons in the packing area, so we’re all going to pick first. Once we have a load, some will continue picking and others will start packing.

Ricki helped pick for a shortish while, trying to supervise over enthusiastic pickers of green melons. After she wisely stayed in the bus with a few other. I headed out into the field with the others.

I was on the ground with our friend Moti. He was born on a kibbutz in 1956 and has spent a lot of time on farms. He has been on every trip we’ve taken and is out with some group or other almost every day.

The reason I’m telling you about Moti is that as we were going along, the tractor got stuck in some mud.

So, I said to Moti, “Can’t he rock back and forth and get out that way?” and he said, “No, if he does that, it will just dig a deeper hole. They are going to have to bring another tractor to pull this one out.” After a bit, the foreman comes out. The first thing he does is give the tractor driver royal sh*t for getting stuck. The second thing he does is get onto the tractor and try to get out by rocking back and forth. The result is that he dug a deeper hole.

The third thing he does is call for another tractor.

Eventually we collect enough cantaloupes and some other yellow melon and head to the packing shed.

And that was pretty much it for the day. Still too hot. We didn’t leave until all the melons were packed. Ricki outlasted me. We were both glad to get back to Jaffa Street.

Plans

Tomorrow is erev Shavuot, followed not surprisingly by Shavuot itself. Robin is taking us out of town to meet some friends so we are leaving in the afternoon and returning late after the chag. So, there will be NO POST for two days.

If Hamal is operating on Thursday, we’ll go there and we don’t know what we’ll be doing the following (last) week of our trip. You’ll know when we know.