Jewish Time

While we are seasonally observant Jews, only going to services when it gets dark enough to stop working in time to change our clothes and go, we always observe the High Holidays.  Before I was Jewish myself, and before there were kids, Jon always found a way to go to synagogue on Yom Kippur.  When I began to learn about Judaism, I started to join him in his fast, not even knowing why.

Over time our traditions have solidified.  For a long while, Jon was sad that we didn't have any Jewish people to invite to dinner for the holidays. Our Seder table was filled by my family, always willing to join in but not having the back story. 

We have been part of a Jewish community now for almost 30 years and somehow our family keeps accumulating more Jews along the way.  My mother married a Jewish man from New York and Stephen now has a Jewish partner/spouse/love of his life from Lexington, Mass.  Benjamin lives in Israel and has an Isaeli Jewish girlfriend. The momentum is definitely building, even though no one would characterize any of this family as religious.  

The word "religious" has been co-opted, or maybe our family never would fit into that category.  We live  Jewish values, we are surrounded by Jewish community, we observe holidays, and we do a fair amount of work to sustain a sensible synagogue.  But, except for Benjamin maybe, we do not identify as "religious."

In the last five years or so, we have been closing the farm for Rosh Hashanah.  This takes some doing. Luckily Rosh Hashanah always falls on a weekday.  But weekdays  are CSA days, they are harvest days, and four of them are selling days.  Stopping that train takes planning.  

Why do we bother?  Why not just let the non-Jews keep the farm going, which they are entirely capable of doing, and let the rest of us stop? Because we can.  We own a business and we have the choice.  We don't follow a very high percentage of the commandments, so that's not our motivation.  It is about letting people know that there are others amongst them.  This culture is still so blind to the non-Christian calendar, unwilling to acknowledge or accommodate any holidays that are not baked in by Christians, and this is our tiny statement.  It only hurts us, as a business. It doesn't make anything easier.  But at least the people in our Thursday orbit will have to accommodate our Jewish identity.

Unfortunately Yom Kippur often falls on a Saturday and this is a leap we are not yet capable of making -- as most of our income for the week is generated on Saturday.  Again, we live in a culture that has made Saturday a workday and Sunday is nominally the rest day.  So the Jews of the farm don't work on Yom Kippur, but everyone else does.  

Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah.  There were five workers who still wanted to work, at least a half day. So I said it couldn't be a regular workday, it had to feel different.  They had to do work that allowed for contemplation and conversation.  They didn't have to Jewish about it, they just had to observe the day in their own way.  While nine of us were singing and praying and listening to thoughtful commentary, some were weeding carrots and picking flowers.  I hope they had a good day.

Singing in the choir gives me a job to do while we are at services, and I like the job.  This year our choir has survived some big transitions (new choir director, new accompanist, even a new prayer book) and so it was a bigger job than usual.  As I mentioned before, our director is unfamiliar with Jewish anything, so he is kind of a stranger in a strange land. He is a fine musician and he knows how to get good singing out of us, but he has no idea what is going on when the congregation joins in for the chanting. When the Torahs were out, getting carried around, he was completely unprepared for that in terms of our job of singing continuously.  We knew what to do, and the accompanist was ready, and we just dragged him along. In fact, he had to get out of the way when the parade went by.  There were several occasions where the accompanist was more ready than the director and the choir was able to fill in while he scrambled to figure out where we were.  But it all went beautifully, really, and the service was better than most in recent memory. It felt good to be there, singing familiar music, joyfully.  I got to sit next to my favorite fellow alto (who has a reliable ear and a beautiful voice) and that made the whole thing practically stress-free.

After services our motley Jewish family went back to the Common House and had a leisurely lunch with some of my/our closest friends from temple. It was perfect.  We didn't think about work for hours. We talked about the sermon, the service, the music.  We lounged.  We took our Jewish time.

There is so much to be thankful for, in these reflections.  I am very glad for Jewish time. Now I have to get up and go outside and pick flowers in regular time, and that is another reason for gratitude.

Mid-September Report

At this time of year, I can't think of anything to say that would be interesting to people who are not here in the vegetable vortex. But as I lay in bed this morning thinking, I decided to just write down everything about yesterday, a Sunday in the middle of September.  There was nothing remarkable and yet it was a day full of unusual twists and turns in our small world.

On Sunday, we get to start a little bit later because Takoma Park opens at 10 (Saturday markets open at 8).  So Carrie and Benjamin and I met at the stand at 7:00 to load up.  But half an hour earlier I had received a terse text message from Zach -- one of his two workers announced that she would not be able to go to market with him and he was looking for help.  As it happens, this weekend we were unusually low on people: several regulars were on vacation, one was sick, and my mother and Michael were hosting family.  The stand was already staffed by three people who had agreed to work a shift on their day off. I didn't have many ideas at that hour of a Sunday morning. When I had written the work blog the night before, Sunday seemed so straightforward.  There would be a market crew, a stand crew and Carrie and I would set up the CSA together.

But you can't just let Zach go to his one market of the week without enough people to do the work, so I tried to think of the answer while we loaded Benjamin.  I thought Carrie could go and I could do the CSA by myself.  She didn't say no but she clearly didn't like that answer as Sundays are the one day that she shares Zoey care with Kate, and she didn't feel like leaving the farm for that long. Jon couldn't go because he had a commitment to help someone at the temple with a little project. So, it came down to me. Hmm. We got Benjamin out of there and then we went to start on the CSA room together. I texted Zach and said I could come and he should keep me posted on his search for a worker, knowing that he would not want me to come unless he was truly desperate. He was really looking for a young person with time on her hands.  Carrie and I began to fill shelves with winter squash and watermelons (very late in the season but some new farmers suddenly discovered they had watermelons with nowhere to go, so they got in touch with me and said they would deliver them, and they did, in a car, loose) and kale and beets and potatoes.  I sent Zach another text and said he had to tell me soon, if I was going to be useful. He said come now. I left Carrie to do everything by herself. She had plenty of time before we opened, but it's a big job for one person.

I almost never go to market unless it is truly necessary.  I certainly never take money. But I was heading off to a market that I had never worked at before, specifically to work as a cashier selling vegetables that were grown on our farm but not by us.  Okay, an adventure.  I filled a thermos with my morning hot drink, made a sandwich and drove to Dupont Circle.  Parking was hard but I did it. The market had been open for a half an hour by the time I got there and the place was jammed.  It is a busy and big market, right in the middle of the streets of Dupont Circle.  I have only been there at 6 in the morning to pick up vegetables from Heinz, but this was a whole different scene.  I found Zach and Sam holding down the fort very competently, but they had a long line of customers waiting to pay.  I made myself useful.  We got through it and I learned things I didn't know and met people who have a long relationship with Zach and his vegetables. It was completely familiar and friendly and I was so glad I had missed the unloading and setting up, I was just there for the easy part. When I could see that all the backstock was off the truck, I said I really had to get back to my own farm because we were getting ready for our annual CSA open house.

This open house used to be a much bigger event, with maybe 50 - 100 people and three or four hayrides and some walking tours.  Now it has devolved to a very small event -- we barely advertise it and we don't do a potluck dinner anymore. We just have a two hour hayride/tour/snack gathering and a few families come.  So I came home and talked to Jon about what he could make for the potluck snack (chips and salsa) and I got the hayride set up. Carrie had cleaned up the area for gathering and eating.  At 3:00 about five families with small children arrived, they piled on the wagon and Jon drove them around the farm with Michael Lipsky as the traveling tour guide.  My mother and I stayed back and waited for stragglers. Each of us took a golf cart load of late arriving parents and children to meet the hayride as it slowly wandered around the farm. The kids had a great time and it was fun to meet a small portion of our CSA customers.  People are just too busy nowadays to set aside time for something so discretionary -- except for those who have little kids and need diversion. Pigs and tractors and chickens are just right for that.

We said goodbye, then Mom and Michael L. and I  finally unloaded the Takoma Park truck that couldn't get in behind the stand during the festivities.  Then we helped the new worker close the stand and then it was time for me to go to choir.

We had such an odd choir rehearsal, for the last one before Rosh Hashanah.  Our new choir director had plans for making sure we were ready, and our cantor had other plans.  So we spent the evening doing a rapid and not-singing run through of the services, which was truly not the best use of our time, but the choir director was powerless to stop that train, as he can barely even pronounce any of the Hebrew and has never seen a service yet.  The whole thing was just weird and unfortunate. We ended up feeling sorry for him when we really should have been singing.

And that was Sunday.  Completely different from Saturday when I got to spend the whole day in Loudoun going round and round on one tractor or another and different from today, our day of no selling and only a little bit of picking.

This is why I can't think of anything to write lately.  No time to think, and almost no time to write. But life is busy and full and I am surrounded by people I enjoy and appreciate and we are all getting through this season without suffering.  Benjamin just got home on Saturday after a week long loop through New England on his motorcycle, visiting people and having a good time. Now he will be here for a couple of months, earning some money and writing a paper that needs to be written.

Compared to almost all the news in the outside world, life is idyllic here in this vegetable bubble.