You are 16 years old and you have a big important exam tomorrow. You know that nerves will make it hard to sleep so you carefully plan your evening, light supper, some light revision with your books just to set your mind at ease, a little gentle exercise with music to help you relax and an early bedtime so you'll hopefully wake up refreshed and focused, ready for the big day.

And then at 1am the blasted Houthi thugs in Yemen launch yet another ballistic missile at Israel and you along with millions of other Israelis are jarringly jolted awake by the alarming staccato of the pre-siren alert (because the missile is coming all the way from Yemen there is more advanced warning that it's on the way).

Half asleep but thoroughly discombobulated you pile into the small home shelter with your family, groggy little ones vaguely grumbling in their sleep about not having enough space as they try to snuggle up with their blankets and cuddly animals. The gawky mid-teen awkwardly trying to find space for his newly longer rangy frame, all the while plugged in reassuringly to his headphones and technology podcast that during these middle of the night alerts offer comfort. While trying to get comfortable he accidentally steps on his older sister who is herself trying to curl up with her pillow and her phone.

When it's all over a sleepy little voice somewhere in the darkness asks "Imma, how did I get here?" and briefly climbs into my lap for a hug. Honestly I can't remember this time, did he sleepwalk in here as usually does when the siren goes or did DH go get him when the pre-alert went or was it one of the big kids? It's all such a blur I can't even recall. The point is that everyone even in the depth of deep sleep is by now so totally used to the expectation of being woken by a siren that they often as not don't even really wake up and can often turn up in the shelter with their eyes still closed, walking over on autopilot. Even dreams are not a safe haven from the reality of missiles.

By Israeli standards there is nothing exceptional about this scene, by now we've all done it so often we really can pretty much do it in our sleep. And we are so much luckier than the many other Israelis who live in older buildings without family shelters so that when the siren goes they have to run to the basement communal shelter with everyone in their building in their PJs, or outside to a public neighbourhood shelter or if there isn't time then just to the stairwell which offers somewhat better protection than other areas.

This should not be "normal".

Pomegranates

 

As last year this has been a busy and very meaningful agricultural season for me helping to package and pick autumn produce related to the Hebrew lunar New Year last week.

None is more emblematic of our hopes and prayers for this coming year than the pomegranate, a fruit that is central to our culture, one of the biblical seven species which hold a special status in Judaism.

Because of the ongoing crisis volunteers continue to be vital in helping local agriculture. The first farm I volunteered on after October 7th 2023 was a kibbutz near my home which has huge tracts of pomegranate orchards and suddenly had few hands available to pick them.

I went to help because they were in desperate need but also because pomegranates were something I knew how to pick. For years we've been going every autumn around Rosh Hashana to pick pomegranates at another local farm, not as a volunteer, but just for the simple joy of spending time in these beautiful orchards at the peak of their glory, and of course the pleasure of choosing our own supremely delicious pomegranates for the traditional autumn festive season fresh from the tree.

So I knew a bit about how to pick premium pomegranates and handle them with the care and respect such fruit requires, though hours of work picking many tonnes of them while worrying about possible rocket attack overhead was of course a very different experience.
Pomegranate thorns can also be brutal. It's one thing if you are just picking a few pomegranates for yourself, it's another when you have a whole tree to clear of fruit and you need to get into all the difficult branches, thorns and all. Long sleeves are a must, as with most citrus trees.

By last year that kibbutz where I volunteered on the pomegranate harvest of October 2023 had manage to organise enough help from pensioners and high schoolers in their immediate area to manage without more help but there were other pomegranate farms further afield who needed volunteers.

Particularly memorable was the adorably scatterbrained ritual scribe of Yemeni descent and his quaintly chaotic organic pomegranate orchard overgrown with thistles on a small village in the south. Somehow despite the apparent neglect of the orchard he produced amazingly sweet giant fruits, most of which he used for juicing. Our volunteer groups both harvested the fruits and did shifts in his ramshackle juicing shed behind the equally ramshackle family home. It was a race against time to harvest all the pomegranates before they burst from ripeness and juice them before they started to go bad. He had orders to fill for the holidays, but this was also an important harvest for the year ahead, with much of the juice frozen to last the whole year until the next harvest.

While we worked he extolled the health benefits of pomegranates in Jewish traditional medicine as handed down to him by his father and grandmother. The orchard was originally planted by his grandfather. He seemed constantly overwhelmed dividing his time between the pomegranates, other farming activities and his work as a scribe. We came home each time covered in sticky pomegranate juice, but also with giant pomegranates he had selected for us as a thank you for our work, symbols of blessing to serve at our holiday tables.

On a neighbouring village just down the road we volunteered to work the pomegranate harvest for another farmer who seemed the polar opposite of the scribe - meticulously organised and fastidious in everything from his clothing to his farm, his orchards in neat well weeded rows set up for the harvest with purpose built canvas baskets mounted on straps for each picker to wear to maximise efficiency, a tractor pulled trailer following us through the long rows of trees so that we could easily deposit our baskets when they were full. He was every bit as grateful and as warm as his more colourful neighbour though, and like him, it was all hands on deck from any family who could help with this big seasonal job.

The first fruits are the premium ones, regal with their crowns, stately elegance that required gentle handling. These were the ones that would go on sale carefully packaged in crates. As the season progressed the pomegranates became more full bodied and developed a deeper ruby colour, but they were also more likely to start to crack. These could be picked much faster as they went for juicing.

And this year? We're still only half way through the pomegranate season. The early varieties have mostly been harvested for Rosh Hashanah, but in October later ripening varieties like the Wonderful pomegranates will be harvested.

At one family farm we were picking pomegranates for donation to Leket, Israel's national food rescue organisation. The family had decided to donate a substantial part of their pomegranate harvest to those in need because this biblical fruit is such an important symbol of the holiday and there are so many families relying on donated food packages this year. At another family farm we picked enough fruit to fill last minute Rosh Hashanah orders and it was gratifying to see the crates of our freshly picked fruit being loaded up to go straight to market to provide people with this holiday staple.

I know I can ramble on a lot more about pomegranates and pomegranate harvests, they have always been one of my favourite fruits but having worked in so many pomegranate orchards in the last two years I love them even more now.

I know I end up spending most of my coffee breaks photographing instead of eating and drinking, they are just so gorgeous in every way, inside and out.

This time of year I can easily just sit down to a whole juicy pomegranate for breakfast or dinner, but it's also a fruit that goes in everything: in salads, desserts, sprinkled on tehina atop grilled vegetables or over desserts, used as syrupy molasses to create delicious fish and meat dishes, especially good with lamb and salmon. As a seasonal touch for festive jewelled rice, in addition to the usual raisins, almond and prunes.

It pairs beautifully with mint to create a light relish like salad or to coat fish. Pomegranate, finely chopped mint and honey are superb as a topping for ice-cream or over raw tehina or yoghurt, just eat with a spoon. A Persian Jewish relative taught me to make her family's Rosh Hashanah lamb-chestnut stew with pomegranate juice and pomegranate molasses, served garnished with pomegranate seeds.

Aside from being delicious and healthy it has such deep cultural meaning. It's an auspicious symbol of blessing, good deeds and fertility that appears in poetry and art since ancient times, from the tiny gold bell shaped pomegranate flowers and pomegranates that the bible describes adorning the High Priest's robe to the romantic descriptions in the Song of Songs and medieval Hebrew liturgical poetry. It can be seen on ancient Hebrew coins, in mosaics decorating ancient synagogues and in stained glass panels in modern ones.

It's traditionally eaten at the Jewish New Year, when we pray that our merits and good deeds may be as numerous as the seeds of a pomegranate so that God may judge the world favourably for a blessed year ahead, and most importantly, inscribe us all in the book of life and peace. If a fruit can also be hope and a prayer that fruit is the pomegranate.

What kind of real life moral and ethical dilemmas do our kids have to deal with on a daily basis?

It's Thursday night, and you are a 13 year-old Israeli starting off the local weekend by spending some quality time with your slightly frail, elderly uncle. You help him with some tidying up for Shabbat and take out his rubbish, and he suggests that going out for a light supper at a local cafe afterwards.

Just as you are sitting down to breakfast for dinner at a coffee shop in the nearby mall the pre-alert goes warning of incoming missile fire to your area. It's a big mall, there are safe areas, but they are a few minutes walk from where you are. You, an athletic, long-legged teen can easily get to shelter in time, especially with the pre-alert which often goes before the siren, extra warning time because the ballistic missile is coming all the way from far way Yemen.

But your elderly uncle? He has arthritic feet and legs plus issues with his back, so he walks at a snail's pace using a walking stick for support. There is no way he can get to shelter in time. Odds are the missile will be intercepted, but there is always a risk that chunks of shrapnel could come down in populated areas and sometimes even Israel's top anti-missile systems can miss, like earlier today when a Yemeni attack drone hit a building in Israel's southernmost city of Eilat.

What do you do? Run to protect your own life or stay with your elderly relative and do your best to help him find some kind of safer area (for example guiding him to an inner corridor away from windows). You can't carry him. Even with help from a kind waiter, you can't move him fast enough.

This was the call Jason and I had from our middle child this evening. "Imma, Abba, I can't just leave Uncle, but he's too slow to get to shelter in time, I don't know what to do, how do I help keep him safe when he's telling me to go save myself but I know he'll feel abandoned?"

How do you tell your child, go save yourself, leave our beloved elderly uncle and make sure you're safe?

This isn't the first time our kids have had to face such an ethical dilemma, caught outside the home when the siren goes, having to decide between running to save their own lives or stay with a slow moving older relative who can't get to shelter in time. Missiles and attack drones are fired at our country on a regular, often daily, basis. It's a fact of life. Our kids are learning these ethical questions as their real life lived experiences, not theoretical dilemmas in a class discussion.

 Do I really care about a restaurant review in London's Time Out magazine?

But it's symptomatic of a much wider, more sinister phenomenon. Israeli agricultural exports to the UK are down by around 20% since October 7. Anti-Israel activists are constantly working to portray anything grown in Israel as ill-gotten gains, "blood avocadoes" or "genocide grapes".

They don't care if these are grown by Jews, Druze or Arab citizens of Israel, I"ve met farmers from many different sectors of Israeli society who've had orders cancelled from Europe. Others have had their British and other European buyers grill them about whether they've served in the IDF or how many Gazan children they've killed or if their fruit was grown on stolen trees.

There is growing pressure on supermarkets not to sell products from Israel, while Palestine activists have taken to staging "actions" in which they raid supermarkets and stick anti-Israel stickers ("product of baby killers" for example) on anything they suspect of being from Israel or kosher. The Co-Op chain says that it will no longer stock Israeli products at all, while a London friend told me that her local green grocer now has a sign that the pomegranates he sells are imported from Iran, that great beacon of freedom and tolerance, not from Israel.

So this Middle Eastern restaurant review is just part of this wider picture. Israel and Jews viewed as irrevocably tainted, evil, immoral, but more than that, spreading the disgusting lie that Israel is a foreign colonial implant, rather than an ancient, intrinsic and authentic part of the Middle East.

Erasing Israel and Jews from a review of Middle East restaurants in London is part of a wider campaign to erase Israel and the Jewish people's origin as a Middle Eastern people and state, wipe out our roots and our historic identity, strip us of our heritage and plant a false myth of the Jew as European nomad.

It is all the more galling because the key component of Jewish identity, the Torah, whether you believe it is a divine sacred text or simply the Jewish people's national, ethnic saga, is entirely grounded in the Middle East. It only truly makes sense in the context of being Middle Eastern literature, from the metaphors based on distinctly Levantine geography and weather patterns to the descriptions of flora and fauna, to the central role of native agriculture and foods like wine and olive oil.

The Bible lists seven special species which have an added sacred connection to the Land of Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. All are central to our ancient cuisine, the rites of the ancient Temple, foods and recipes described in the Tanakh and Talmud. From fig cakes to jujube fruits (sheizafin) to lighting the menorah with olive oil and the Talmud connecting the seed rich pomegranate with being full of good deeds.

This is a culinary culture steeped in the indigenous species and native agriculture of the ancient Middle East, not Europe or anywhere else. This is who we are, a people whom even when exiled far from the cradle of our heritage found solace in dried Middle Eastern fruits brought from their faraway ancient homeland all the while yearning to be home in Eretz Yisrael.

I think of this cultural and psychological war on the Jewish people every week when I'm out in the fields and orchards and greenhouses of modern Israel. The farmers, religious and secular, who maintain the ancient religious laws pertaining to agriculture that only apply to Jewish agriculture in the Land of Israel, the farmer growing pomegranates to donate to Leket so that even the poorest will have pomegranates for their Rosh Hashanah table, the vintner who takes pride in growing an old varietal of grapes used to make the kind of sweet kiddush wine that is much ridiculed today in our age of finer wines and chicer wine grapes.

It doesn't get more Middle Eastern than that. Take that Time Out. OPINION: Why were Israeli establishments left off Time Out's list of best Middle Eastern restaurants? - Jewish News

The last Jewish baby born in Hebron before the 1929 massacre and pogrom against Hebron's Jews

August 24th is the anniversary of the 1929 massacre of the Jews of Hebron by local Arab marauders. 
One of the farmers I volunteer with is the daughter of the last Jewish baby born in Hebron before the 1929 pogrom and massacre of the Jews by Hebron Arabs who'd been incited to violence by the anti-Jewish polemics of Haj Amin al-Hussein, the British appointed mufti (Islamic religious leader) of Jerusalem, and a prominent anti-Semite who later allied himself with Adolf Hitler and aided in the annihilation of Jews.

1929 was during the Palestine Mandate when the region was ruled by the British. Hebron, one of Judaism's most sacred cities, was home to a centuries old Jewish community centred around a core of Torah scholars and famous yeshivot.

Jews and Arabs both lived in Hebron, but the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of Judaism's most sacred shrines, was controlled by Islamic religious authorities who had turned the site into a mosque and banned Jews from coming any closer than the 7th outside step, as a sign of humiliation instituted during the Mamluk period towards Jews (and other non-Muslims) for not converting to Islam. Some of the Arab clans in Hebron maintained this fiercely disdainful attitude toward Hebron's Jewish community while others had cordial relations with the town's Jews.

My farmer friend's mother was a tiny young baby in 1929. Her family only survived the massacre because their Arab neighbours were friendly to the Jewish community and came to warn them that they had heard other Hebron Arabs planning a massacre of Hebron's historic Jewish community. Their Arab neighbours dressed them in Arab style clothing and smuggled them out to Jerusalem on a wagon, escaping the horrific massacre.

Seventy Hebron Jews were murdered in the pogrom, many others were injured. A few brave Arab families from clans friendly towards the Jews protected their Jewish neighbours and hid them in their homes. The Jewish community was forced to flee Hebron, not just by the Arab violence against them, but because the British decided that the best way to "defuse" the "situation" was to remove all of Hebron's Jews from their homes and expel them. The British enforced similar expulsions of Jews in response to Arab anti-Jewish riots in parts of Jerusalem's Old City and elsewhere in mandatory Palestine.

My farmer friend's family ended up refugees bumping around to various places before finding a new home at the edge of Jaffa and the new city of Tel Aviv. As native Arabic speakers they soon made friends with both the local Jewish and Arab communities, engaging in commerce with both and establishing themselves as pillars of the local community.

One night, just a few months after they arrived in their new home, they heard a noise at the front door and found a baby wrapped in a blanket. One of the family thought they glimpsed an Arab man running away but they were unable to catch up with him. My farmer's friend grandmother picked up the baby and started to breastfeed him alongside her own baby, who would grow up to be my farmer friend's mother.

Just like that my friend's grandmother became a mother to "twins", despite the difference of several months between the two babies noone commented or seemed to notice, as luck would have it my farmer friend's mother was a small baby and the foundling left outside their door was on the larger side.

My farmer friend told me that to the best of her understanding the baby had been left with the Jewish family because he was born out of wedlock to an Arab couple from Jaffa who's parents did not approve of their union, and so marriage was not a choice for them. She told me that her mother's family worked out who the baby probably belonged to, a couple who would have been killed for "family honour" if the pregnancy had been discovered, but despite not being able to be together they wanted to save the baby they had created out of love for each other. The new Jewish family in the neighbourhood who already had a nursing baby seemed like their best option to give a good life to their illicit son.

The farmer's grandmother named the baby Abraham, because Jews and Arabs are both descended from Abraham. He grew up as one of her children, part of this Hebron refugee Jewish family. He married, had children and to my farmer friend was simply "Uncle Abraham" - she never learnt the story of his origins until after his death when her mother explained his history. "I, the last Jewish baby born in Hebron, was saved from an Arab massacre against the Jews by our friendly Arab neighbours. This is why God sent baby Abraham to us, so that we were able to save an Arab baby from an honour killing, the secret baby son of an Arab my father knew. Our lives were saved and we merited saving another life."

From destruction to rebith

"On a day of destruction we're working on restoration"

ביום חורבן עסקנו בתקומה

With these words today's volunteer group leader bid us farewell after a morning's work helping a farmer hard hit by the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023. To this day there are still some huge pieces of Hamas rockets lying in the yard, remnants of the massive Hamas onslaught which caused such terrible damage to this large farm which grows so many vital staples. Since the war began about 60% of the farm work is done by volunteers.

Today was 17th Tammuz, a fast day of mourning for the destruction of ancient Jerusalem first by Babylon in 586 BCE and then again by Rome in 70 CE.

Symbolically the group I joined today was mostly coming from Jerusalem, the modern thriving rebuilt city representing the return of so many Jews from centuries of exile.

It's not easy to work in agriculture on a fast day, not only for the volunteers, but for the farmer and his family who as traditionally observant Jews were also fasting. We focused on indoor packing and sorting work, out of the searing summer sun.

Almost everywhere I volunteer I meet people from so many different places and backgrounds, there is no one rubric to define the people that go out to help on Israel's farm, no one defining characteristic other than a deep desire to help and a love of Israel.

Today I sorted and packed chili peppers, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers with:

a retired early reading specialist teacher from Jerusalem

a couple of kibbutznikim from a Dead Sea area kibbutz

a retired Jerusalem agronomist who still lectures at Israel's top universities

a nurse from Ashdod

a social worker and a retired post office worker

an elderly gentleman born and bred in Netanya who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Israeli archaeological sites

a professor of mathematics born and raised in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) who emigrated to Chicago after the fall of the USSR and regularly visits Israel to volunteer in agriculture

a tour guide from Abu Ghosh

a bus driver from Jerusalem

a receptionist from a Jerusalem area clinic

a young father working in hi tech and his adolescent son

a couple of teachers and a retire nursery school aide

Secular, religious, traditional, left, centre and right. Strangers brought together in common cause to do good.

We have a tradition that one of the causes of the fall of the Second Temple period Jewish kingdom to Rome was due to baseless hatred, internal Jewish feuds and rivalries which weakened the society and made it vulnerable.

Jewish culture centres around discussion and debate, the Talmud is full of people disagreeing with each other, creative thought is ingrained, two Jews three opinions. The question is how we understand this cultural inheritance, do we argue to understand each other or do we disagree on principle and shut ourselves off from hearing people who think differently. Have we learnt the lessons of the disasterous societal divisions that paved the way for the calamity that befell us at the hand of Titus' Rome?

In modern times a tradition has developed focusing on the three weeks of mourning between the fast of 17th Tammuz and the fast of 9th Av to reflect inwards, to encourage dialogue between different communities and ideas, to pay more attention to those we disagree with, to try to really hear.

Over hours of chili peppers and cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbages we talked and got to know one another. It's work that's conducive to conversation, groups of us gathered around long tables facing each other, cooperating on sorting the produce, comparing what was good and what needed to be discarded, organising the packing crates, the stronger insisting that they would do any heavy lifting, the more eagle eyed doing quality control to ensure we were truly helping the farm get the job done to the highest level.

In the year and a half I've been out on farms almost every week with so many volunteers I've seen this dynamic repeat itself so often. It isn't guaranteed. Sometimes you're in a big open field where the work is more individual, less conducive to conversation, in more difficult conditions. But more often than not the task at hand requires team work, helping each other learn a skill, divisions of labour that play to a diverse skill set of the more fit and the less fit, the taller and the shorter, the more observant and the less so.

And that builds communication and dialogue and ice that by mid-morning break down has been thoroughly broken. Strangers looking out for each other, that someone shouldn't lift a heavy crate alone, to watch out for sharp thorns or a particularly rocky field, to make sure to keep drinking lots of water in the heat of the greenhouse or sun scorched field.

By the end of the workday we part as old friends, we who were strangers to one another as we boarded the bus at the break of dawn that very same day.

It is the antithesis of sinat hinam, baseless hatred, the tragedy which led to the Roman destruction of ancient Judea and Jerusalem.

On this 17th Tammuz we remembered the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the horrors that befell our people, but we also actively did something construction to bring about the redemption and renaissance of our people from our painful history and present.

ביום חורבן עסקנו בתקומה

Tammuz 17th

 These days if you are an Israeli or a Jew you have it thrust in your face many times a day from ignorant and hateful people around the world that Jews "have no connection to the Middle East", that our people are colonisers, interlopers, thieves and charlatans.

As a Jew who prays three times a day facing Jerusalem and the ruins of its ancient Jewish Temple, who's annual calendar revolves around the rainy cycle of the Land of Israel an who to this day mourns the destruction of our homeland thousands of years ago, this canard is nothing short of ridiculous, a topsy turvy mirror universe accusation that denies the very meaning of Jewish ethnic, cultural and religious identity through the ages.

Today for example was the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, the day the walls of Jerusalem were breached during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and centuries later, again, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Both sieges were two of the most cataclysmic tragedies to befall the Jewish people, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah (Judea), the killing of many and the exile of much of the Jewish people from our ancestral homeland, first to the Babylonian empire and Egypt, later also to Rome and elsewhere in Europe, the start of many centuries of constant persecution, pogroms, expulsions, spurious blood libels and scapegoating and worst of all the Holocaust.

Millenia later the fast of the 17th Tammuz marks the start of a Jewish period of mourning leading up to the 9th of Av, the date on which the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnetzer and in 70 CE by the Romans under Titus. The assault on the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was an attack on Jewish sovereignty and civilisation, not an accident of the siege of Jerusalem, but a prime target in the attempt of first Babylon and later Rome, to subjugate the Jews, humiliate them and punish them for challenging the might of the region's great empires.

That's right, here and now in the 21st century Jews in Israel and around the world are fasting and mourning the destruction of our ancient capital Jerusalem and its sacred Temple. It is flesh of our flesh, a wound that still bleeds as down the ages the terrible consequences of that terrible day continued to ripple down our agonising history.

On 9th of Av we will sit on the floor as a sign of mourning and read the painfully graphic descriptions in the biblical book of Lamentations, Eikhah, detailing the suffering of our people during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. We read Lamentations in its original Hebrew, the language clear and accessible to speakers of modern Hebrew today. The descriptions are not for the faint of heart, our ancestors agony our agony.

So painful is that memory that even in modern Jerusalem, today rebuilt and developed on a scale our biblical ancestors could not have imagined, we still feel those scars from the assaults by Babylon and Rome, not only as an almost genetic memory but physically in the heart of our ancient capital, where you can still see blackened, singed, huge blocks of stone where they fell from the ancient walls during the Roman sacking of the city two millennia ago.

It feels ridiculous to have to say these things which are so obvious, such a core part of the culture I grew up with, my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with, facts ingrained in our ancient Hebrew prayers, our calendar and our very consciousness. An unbroken chain that binds each generation to the one before in common memory.

And yet today I'm finding I have to explain this over and over and over, even to people who I once thought of as friends, who question why my country, my people, have any right to exist.

Yet another reason to fast and mourn this year.