It was early evening when we knocked on the farm door and asked if it was possible to buy a tin of olive oil.
The farm website stated that they produce fine oil.
Sure enough, the door opened and a woman with a big smile and good eyes wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, sat the children down at the table and without asking too many questions served them bowls of rice and lentils.
"Come on, kosher here, you can relax. Sit, sit. Where do you have to hurry?"
Iris' house is the only one within a good few miles of gray rocks.
Individual settlement.
A pair of words behind which you expect to see tough people who do not like strangers and certainly are in no hurry to invite them to dinner.
But Iris is very far from this character.
She came to the desert for the children.
For their sake she and her partner set up a farm and changed their lifestyle.
"The system did not go well with the children. I saw that they were not understood at school. They are diagnosed this way, they are diagnosed differently. They were a bit lost. I did not do so well as a student either. "And love. And nature and hard work. It only did good for all of us."
They take honey out of a rock, I have no other words.
The last to try to live off agriculture in the Mitzpe Ramon area were the Nabataeans, and that was quite some time ago.
But Iris' family, all smiling almost like her, grows olives for oil, and grapes for wine, and apples and sabers, all in the highest quality, and does so in soil conditions that do not look like something where you can even dig a small pit for planting.
"To pour for you too?" She asks me. I do not remember when the children attacked lentils like that, and she catches my eye. Excuse me, dear readers, I know this is not standard Hebrew. Do not pour rice, nor pour schnitzel. known. But mentally alive, experience shows that people who offer to pour you food usually do so cordially and with talent that can also be tasted. She has a story, no doubt. And she, too, will merge. And yes, I do not know a person who has no story, but for people who have left, and changed lives and established something, there is still some special interest.
Outside, the cold of Mitzpe Ramon is raging, and the first rain is falling on the Negev plateau. Iris says that in her previous life she served permanently as a forklift operator, and for years she has been rescuing boys just before they arrive at the prison and adopting them at her home. Forklifts are precise people, they lack to be inaccurate, and they know how to pick up fragile and heavy things and put them in place with such a soft delicacy that it is hard to believe that the forklift arms are made of steel and not upside down. Sometimes you just need these features to save teens who are getting a little lost.
Iris suggests tasting her jams.
Lids open.
Not for anything, but she needs to empty jars and shelves for the next round of winter fruit jams.
"Taste!"
We taste a dark and deep liqueur of plums, and the children threaten to eliminate the guava and pomegranate medicines.
For such experiences people fly to the other side of the world, and we just got out of the trailer for a moment to buy some olive oil and maybe peek into the home and eyes of someone who has lived his life in the place where we stayed “Embrax” for two days.
• • •
Things have been writing for almost a week since we returned the trailer to the parking lot in Sdot Yam.
In the days that have passed we have not stopped talking about the trip, telling others and ourselves about it, and especially breaking our heads over what was there that left us with such powerful impressions.
There is not yet a developed culture of caravans in Israel.
The parking lots are small, the prices are expensive, and in most cases it is difficult to find a person to help you solve a technical problem or find a plumbing connection in that place that you got lost.
But it is certainly temporary.
With all the ambiguity about the future and the corona, the fear of isolation and the desire to ventilate, the idea of dragging a small, well-equipped and mobile cabin with you is a patent-pending, and it is likely that more and more Israeli families will adopt it in the near future.
And we have not yet said a word about the reverse.
The average Israeli man is able to order a towing hook for his new car just because he feels like checking, at some point, if he still remembers how to do a reverse with a stroller.
Ask: Do I have a trailer?
Of course not.
Do I need a stroller like this?
Hmmm ... would you define "need"?
So why did I want a towing hook?
This is really a good question that was only solved on this trip.
It turns out that deep and powerful childhood maximization has to do with the idea of harnessing something and dragging after you.
Kids love trains, but only when I got to the kibbutz did I realize that there are places where the ability to do an exact reverse with a stroller is considered a test of masculinity that is second to none.
Some men in the world love to hunt, others collect old cars.
We try to drive backwards without shame and without the rear wheel climbing on the salvage.
Decades have passed since the last time I started a tractor, and yet two weeks ago, as soon as we started tinkering with the trailer of the car, I got an ancient youthful excitement, and I admit, though not simply, that the moment I put it in reverse - something inside me danced a bit.
So it may be that the turtle and the snail thought long before us about the idea of moving on the roads with the house on their backs, but only man, and especially the Israeli man, is able to get so excited about nonsense.
• • •
Like many others, I also reacted happily to the fact that the word "troll" won the title of the Hebrew word of the year.
This choice proves once again that the Hebrew-loving public in Israel has good taste, although one must admit that there is something worrying about the troll experience being such a significant part of our contemporary lives.
What's crazy about me?
lots of things.
The suicide of the ultra-Orthodox writer Haim Velder is all over the place.
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to interview Velder many times.
He has always been happy to represent the ultra-Orthodox-Lithuanian view and has done so eloquently and pleasantly, albeit representatively and fluently.
In any case, it was impossible to guess which secrets and skeletons concealed life, and which life was managed by Velder.
Either way, once an ultra-Orthodox person decides to take his life, he hereby declares at least two things: a - that he does not believe his society is capable of forgiving, b - that he does not really care that the last act he does in his life will be a grave violation of Torah laws.
And in conclusion: that he does not really believe.
An influential Jew died this week for blasphemy.
Sneak into the dead instead of taking responsibility and trying to mend.
And it's crazy, and painful and very severe.
And the decision of the ultra-Orthodox world to silence the story is crazy.
Equally insane is the saying "the most dangerous place for children is home."
Minister Merav Michaeli has said this once, and since then this nonsense has been uttered from time to time by scholars and experts, and always with the infinite importance of the inventor of the wheel.
The most dangerous place for children is the home, because the statistics do not lie, and statistically, most of the injuries occur in the home.
It turns out that not everyone is supposed to look at statistics.
By the same token, the most dangerous place for man is the atmosphere.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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