To the Farm We Go

I have always been a terrible kibbutznik.

As a sweaty woman used to the gray skies and freezing temperatures of Chicago, the Middle East was not the ideal place for my complexion.

In addition to moving to a place that felt physically closer to the sun, I moved to a kibbutz, where being outside is kind of their thing. Meanwhile, I’m the kind of person who you look at and immediately think to yourself, “now that’s a person meant for fluorescent light.”

You see, the kibbutz movement is built around agriculture, meaning being outside and actually farming. I had never seen a tractor until I moved there 13 years ago (it was bigger than in my childhood picture books).

After a few years of working odd jobs around the kibbutz and volunteering for the army, I finally found a position in the kibbutz factory, the golden goose of our society. It is from this company that we kibbutznikim can enjoy all of the benefits that socialism has to offer without worrying about silly things like money.

The problem? Even our golden goose is an agricultural company.

Which meant my lack of farming knowledge was front and center, and I constantly felt like a house cat wearing a lion’s mane costume just to try to fit in.

Know the difference between hay and straw? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t even know straw existed outside of beverages.

Know the life cycle of cotton? Honestly, it never came up in my previous life.

I spent years trying to pretend that I could farm with the best of them. By my fourth year at the company, I didn’t even look horrified when met with a 14-foot tall cotton picker. I was replacing my city-folk ways.

But no matter what I did, I always was just that cat wearing the costume.

One day there was supposed to be a fun event in the fields showing a tractor actually baling hay. Beyond the fact that that very sentence alone sounds as fun to me as watching water boil, it was the summer. And the fields have no shade. And not only am I whiter than sour cream, but the sun gives me migraines. Did I mention I’m naturally sweaty?

I promise I’m fun at parties.

Anyway, I had already been at the company a few years. At this point, I had finally realized I was tired of pretending these things were interesting to me. I was a bad kibbutznik. I only went to these things for the snacks, anyway.

“I’m not going to go,” I told my team.

And suddenly, as if we were all conspirators of a rebellion, everyone announced, “Yeah, me neither. It’s hot.”

People who had grown up on the kibbutz. People whose parents or grandparents had literally built the place with their hands. Not interested in watching a tractor bale hay. I was stunned. I had spent years assuming I was the only cat in the building, quietly suffocating in my lion costume while everyone around me ran free and feral and sun-kissed. Turns out half the building was also wearing the costume. I was just too self-consumed to see their Velcro manes.

And without any fanfare, the group of us just didn’t go. We stayed indoors, where the air conditioning lives. We didn’t see the tractor demonstration, but we definitely still showed up for the leftover snacks afterward.

Fast forward to today, and I still feel like a terrible kibbutznik.

I don’t know what all of our products do, and after all these years, I’m too embarrassed to ask. But that’s okay, because this revelation was not one-sided: the people on the kibbutz also learned to accept the fluorescent-lit indoor cat that I am.

Now, as I pack my bags to wrap up this chapter as an accidental socialist and trade the relentless Middle Eastern sun for the gloriously air-conditioned of New York, the irony isn’t lost on me. I might be leaving this kibbutz soon, but at least I am finally leaving knowing the difference between hay and straw. It only took me five years, so honestly, not bad.