Kibbutz Life: Climbing the Cherry Picker to Success

On my first day of work in the date orchards of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, something gigantic, majestic, and bright yellow caught my eye, captured my heart, and inspired my soul.  It was like the apatosaurus in "Jurassic Park," huge of body, long of neck, and lumbering along through between the trees, its long neck easily overreaching them.  It was the cherry picker, the hulk of a machine that was the most valuable tool in the date orchard team's arsenal.  And I knew immediately that I wanted to use it.  It was the golden yellow of a school bus, with in impressive body that housed the engine, hydraulic systems, and wheels for moving around the tractor.  The platform at the top of the hundred-foot crane was not just a little cubby.  It has easily enough floor space to live in, with a radio that constantly blasted Israel's favorite music station, Galgalatz, and the floor panels could open and close like a claw to allow 360 degree access around the entire perimeter of the tree that was being worked on.


I could tell just by looking that this was no ordinary piece of equipment that would just be lent out for use to mere volunteers like myself.  Operating the cherry picker was something that one had to earn.  The last time a kibbutz volunteer was allowed up there to chop down date branches, her machete cut down a couple of her fingertips along with the branch.  Seeing how this was only my second day of work, I knew it was going to be a long time before I even had a chance of riding the big yellow dinosaur.


After leaving Sweden on October 18, with the usual amount of nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future that comes with my itinerant lifestyle, I made my way to Israel, for the first time since 2006.  This was partly to please my parents, who had decided that if I was going to travel around the world farming and exploring and living in a developmental limbo as far as future plans towards life and career go, I might as well do it in Israel and get some nice kosher food out of it, not to mention see some friends and family, some of whom I hadn't seen in too many years.  And while I was doing that, I might as well check out what it's like to live on a kibbutz. A kibbutz is an Israeli commune, originally socialist by nature, although in recent decades most of them have sold out to private industries and are now just nice places to live and work, without the original romance of living off the land that the kibbutz movement was founded with.


So, I saw friends, family, and the gorgeous expanse of Israel's geography that I've missed since my last time here, a winter vacation during my sophomore year of college with some friends.  At the same time, I was also applying to kibbutzes, which was more disparaging that I thought it would be.  I would look up interesting kibbutzes online, send them an email telling them that I would like to volunteer for a couple months, and then hear back from them the next day that they would be happy to have me, and all I need to do is go through the Kibbutz Programming Center.  Unfortunately, for an organization that was created for the socialist kibbutz movement, the KPC is one of the most greedy, demanding, and un-user-friendly organizations I've come across.  They make you pay around $600 for the program, just to volunteer, half of which is a non-refundable deposit, and then it takes a month to do the paperwork, so that people who just want to show up and work are out of luck, plus there is a rigorous amount of paperwork, medical exams, and recommendations which are required.  If you get through all of that, then you can be sent to a kibbutz to volunteer, but you don't get told which one until basically the day you leave.


Well, lucky for me, I have some contacts on the inside of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu who got me in past all the paperwork and hullabaloo and I was able to show up just a couple weeks after calling, after space opened up for me, and start working and seeing what the kibbutz life is all about.  Sde Eliyahu happens to be one of the last successful, traditional-style kibbutzes in the country in that it is a socialist commune, where everyone works, is given equal compensation, and live for the kibbutz itself, and not some corporation that has bought them out.  As volunteers, we are given basically the same treatment, only lighter in scale.  We work 6-8 hours a day, are given 3 square meals a day, a dorm to sleep in with sheets, towels and work clothes, free laundry, free medical care, a monthly stipend (not much, but we don't spend much either) and a general sense of being taken care of by the powers that be.  Sounds like a good deal, I figured.


When I first arrived I told them I had agriculture experience and I would like to continue it, and be able to work outside, as opposed to washing pots and pans all day.  Actually, I had been told by previous volunteers, of which I apparently know dozens, that I should absolutely expect to be put in the dishroom at first (when I told this to my cousins in southern Israel, their 10-year-old son asked me, "Why would you want to come all the way to Israel just to wash dishes?"  He made a disquieting good point). Fortunately, they decided to assign me to the date orchard, where the dates were being harvested.  This involved the professionals going up on the cherry picker and chopping down date branches which were wrapped in bags.  We then shook the dates off the branches into the bags, then emptied the bags into crates to be processed elsewhere.  I was working with some fun Australians on a Jewish youth group program, and while the work was hard, it gave me the satisfaction I was hoping for, which I have found I often get from doing useful, manual labor.  I kept expecting to be moved to another job, but apparently the pros on the date team liked me and saw no reason to get rid of me, so I stayed on.  There was also the fact that after two weeks, the Aussies left, so there were half the number of volunteers working.  Since out of all the other volunteers, plus the Hebrew students who were there to learn and work, I was the only one assigned to dates who showed up every day, worked hard, and didn't disappear in the middle of work, I was made to look even better.


Overall, life moves at a pretty slow pace on the kibbutz.  We, the volunteers and students, almost never go off the property, since most of what we need is located on the kibbutz.  Only a few times a month do we go into the nearest town for some cheap beer, fast food, and a bit of a break.  Otherwise, it's a pretty straight routine I have found, waking up at half past 5 to report for work at 6, breaking for breakfast (hardboiled eggs, herring on toast, maybe some shredded veggies) and coffee, working until 1, going to lunch (usually some elaborate meat and chicken dishes, fancy salads - basically the best food I could dream of, served on a daily basis), and then the rest of the day to hang out, go online, read, nap, go for walks, or do whatever else I want with.  It's simple, I'm happy, and there's not much else to it.


And it seems like that is the general consensus for many people here.  After talking to some kibbutzniks (the residents, there are about 800 of them) and some volunteers and students who have made their own impressions, kibbutz life is just slow and simple by nature.  There is not much to do for entertainment, either on the kibbutz or in town, and residents are given plenty of money to live on and save up, but they rarely take vacations, or live with any kind of luxury or elaborate lifestyle.  In terms of work, for those who work on the kibbutz, there seem to be few jobs that have much hierarchy, meaning there are not too many promotions and only so far one can climb up the professional ladder, or cherry picker, so to speak.  But at the same time, the people who live here don't really seem to mind that.  As the volunteers'  "house mother," Henia, told me, it takes a very special, and a little bit crazy, kind of person to live on a kibbutz.  It is like a life-long womb, and as long as you are happy with that - protection, providence, and routine - then a kibbutz can be a wonderful place to live.  During the early days of the Sde Eliyahu, when her husband's parents were building the place, they were working hard, living in tents with malaria and all sorts of hardships, and happy as can be.  People worked for the sake of creating something they loved, and it became that they were living for it too.  So if today, kibbutzniks are still living and working for something they love and need, then they probably don't need to move much higher than where they are now.  They can do their jobs and be happy that they are making their community a better place, without need for ambition or greed.

As for me, I had just one thing that I wanted to aspire to.  Weeks went by and after a slow period of sewing shut the holes in the date bags for 6 hours a day, I started to ask if I could please go up on the cherry pickers.  I told them that my service here on the kibbutz if they would only give me one day up there, in the golden tower of authority, at the tops of the date palms.  They told me that the only way I would be allowed up there would be to watch a two hour training video, all of which was in Hebrew.  It was a nice way of saying "No."  But one day, actually 3 days ago, I arrived for pre-work coffee and found only 3 of the men on our date team waiting.  The supervisor came by and told them what to do that day, in Hebrew too complex for me to understand.  I only understood them saying that there weren't enough of them, and the supervisor saying to take me along as well.  Was he sure?  Sure, why not, let him try it out.  I assumed this mean pruning olive trees or digging up irrigation hoses or something like what I had been doing for the last week.  But we got in the van, drove out to the furthest date fields, and pulled up right alongside that regal, elegant piece of accomplishment that we call...well, I don't remember the Hebrew word for it, but you know what I'm talking about.  They told me that we were going to be pruning the date tree branches, if I thought I was up to it.  They sent me up on the platform, turned on the ignition, gave me a giant, heavy pair of hydraulic mechanical pruning clippers, put Radio Galgalatz on full volume, and got to work.  And it sucked.  It was terrible.  The clippers were heavy, it was hot, the music was bad, the trees were short so were were never more than 5 or 6 feet in the air anyway, and the date branches are covered in massive thorns and leaves with dagger-sharp tips so that I was in constant danger of having an eye poked out or an ear perforated, and by the end of the day, I was sore, tired, soaked in sweat, and poked so full of holes, I felt like I had been given a full body massage by a porcupine.  And then the next day, we went back for more.  Now I have cuts and pinholes all over me, my hands and arms are sore from holding the heavy clippers, and I'm actually glad I came down with strep throat just in time to call in sick today.

But the point is, I managed to make it to the top.  I rose to the top of my ladder, and I accomplished what I've been waiting over a month to do.  Even if the result was not what I wanted, the taste of success was still as sweet as I had dreamed.  I guess it helps that my hopes and aspirations for the two months I am planning to be here are fairly low, but I guess that is one way I can relate to the kibbutz lifestyle.  If I am well taken care of, given good work to do, and allowed to rise to accomplishment every so often, well, I can be happy enough.  But I've also decided that after a couple months here, there is nothing about Sde Eliyahu, or even Israel as a whole that really pulls me in and makes me want to make a long term commitment.  

So what's next for me?  Tune in for my next posting, where I will tell you how I'm managing to come full circle and end up back in Peace Corps Mali.