One pomegranate at a time

A quick story before Shabbat, an observation that I've been meaning to share because to my mind it embodies so much the spirit of Israel right now.

It feels like another lifetime, but it was only a few weeks ago. At one of the pomegranate orchards where I volunteered an elderly couple showed up. The wife took the farmer aside and explained that her 89 year-old husband was desperate to do something to help, but he wasn't really up to the task, even though he had agricultural experience.

The farmer helped find them a tree with a lot of low hanging fruit. The elderly man sat on a crate from which he could reach many pomegranates and in the time that the rest of us were clearing whole trees of their fruit he painfully slowly, with what looked like arthritic hands, snipped off the fruits hanging near to him, snipped a couple of fruits, gently put them in a crate, rested a little, drank some water, then cut down one more fruit, and so on until he was clearly exhausted by his efforts and his wife insisted that he go home to rest.

The farmer came and thanked him personally, hugged him and and told him that his careful work had yielded the most beautiful premium pomegranates for market.