We’re marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel with a year-long celebration! Keep an eye out for “Memphis Celebrates Israel at 70” branding at your synagogue, at events around town, and online. In this series, we’re asking Memphians to tell their personal Israel stories. Do you have a story to tell?
I’ve been to Israel twice. The first time I was thirteen, and my father was working for the United Nations. It was in 1983, so there was a lot of conflict between Israel and Lebanon at the time. My mother and I stayed in the United States until then the end of his stay in the Middle East. He picked us up in the white UN car and we stayed a few days in Jerusalem. As a thirteen year old, everything was amazing, and I really didn’t feel any tension. Then we went to Damascus and spent six weeks there. That was my introduction to Israel, but it was strong enough that when I graduated from college, I wanted to go back.
This would have been in 1991, just after the first Gulf War. My best friend in college spent his first semester of our senior year in a conflict resolution program in Jerusalem. He and his classmates had spent a few weeks on a kibbutz in northern Israel and had an open invitation to come back. When we were trying to figure out what we would do after graduating, we thought “Well…we could go to Israel and work on the kibbutz!” So that’s what we did, basically looking for a way to spend a lot of time out of the country and not spend a lot of money.
Honestly, there was no political or religious reason for us going. We were just both familiar with Israel and it made sense to us at the time. I think we got there in September, which was not wise, because a lot of holidays happened right when we got there. We ended up going into the Sinai for a few days and spent time on the beach. Then we went to the Kibbutz Gadot, which is right at the Southern tip of the Hula Valley. We showed up, and they remembered my friend. It happened to be the height of grapefruit season, so they threw us right into the fields.
There was a group of seven or eight volunteers from Denmark, and a couple Swedes, a woman from the Netherlands, someone from Australia, England, South Africa. So, we were volunteers on the kibbutz and there were probably sixty of seventy members. We just immediately started picking the grapefruit, which is an incredibly difficult job in the heat. You can’t just pluck them off. They had these machines that would top off the grapefruit trees so they would stay bushes, and you would actually crawl inside the bush and pick it from the inside. And this variety of grapefruit had like four inch thorns all over the place, so you’d reach out and get pricked.
So, that first week was really tough. We would get up at four in the morning and go out to the fields and work for three hours, come in for breakfast, go back out and pick for another three hours, come in for lunch and sleep all afternoon. But, what I learned on the kibbutz was the value of work. On this kibbutz the only way of measuring the person was the amount of work they put in. It was brilliant – whatever fruit we had picked that day would always go into crates, and they would line up the crates next to each other to be transported. Then, at the end of the day, when they would bring us back into the community from the fields, they would always pass by what we had picked that day so we knew exactly what we had contributed to the kibbutz. And the most offensive thing someone could do was refuse to work. When members wanted to protest a decision made communally, they would go on strike.
It truly was a socialist kibbutzim, where your value was your work. Basically, the jobs you got were based on your work ethic, and so over time, you were able to work yourself up the ladder until you got the best job, which was picking avocados. You got to use this machine that would lift you up into the trees, and time would just fly by. The kibbutz was really interesting. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary while we were there. The other thing about the kibbutz was that you had members from all over Europe. I remember one guy, I think he was from Bulgaria, and he had been a professional accordion player. So, for special events he would come out and play. He was spectacular.
It was difficult work, but I would never replace it. It was such an amazing experience, and the new perspective I had on work, on physical work that I gained there, has served me well.
Dan Harper is a PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics in the department of English at the University of Memphis.