Speak Your Truth

Corn seedlings on the Adamah farm.

O M G, you guys.

It’s been a while.

Since I last wrote, I began and completed my two-month Adamah farming fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut.

Some other stuff happened too. And I wanted to write about all of it, but I couldn’t.

For a few reasons. The first was that I had no time. Literally every moment of every day at Adamah was rigorously structured and scheduled, and even though the programming usually ended by 8:30 pm, there were either social events in the evenings or I just went to bed, exhausted.

But the second and more significant reason was that I honestly didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, if I should say it, if it would hurt people, if it was right for me to share certain things about my experience while I was still an active part of it.

I thought about writing a post that was purely educational, describing the daily routine and farming exercises I was doing, giving information about the program and the retreat center without discussing how I was feeling or coping. And I could have done that, maybe should have, so that I wouldn’t have to now dive headfirst into a massive recap post, but the former reason (no time) was too big of a factor. So I didn’t.

And now I have so much to tell you, but I don’t even know where to start.

And I also don’t know what would be interesting to my five or six readers. Do you want to know about what life was like on the farm? The physical labor? The different kinds of daily chores we did? How and where we lived? What we ate?

Or do you want to know about the other people in my cohort? The philosophy behind Adamah? My personal triumphs and challenges?

There’s honestly just way too much.

I don’t yet have a clear takeaway from my time at Adamah. It was really complex. It was really, really challenging at times. And really fun at times. Sometimes I just wanted to run away screaming, and other times I was happy to have landed where I did. Sometimes it felt like a slog to the end, and other times I appreciated every moment.

I think it’s fair to say that I had a different experience than most of the other people in my cohort. It’s fair to say that Adamah wasn’t exactly a perfect fit for me, that I didn’t always feel I was in the right place, that I didn’t have the kind of awesome, eye-opening, life-changing experience that many of my fellows seemed to have had (though I can’t make any assumptions about that).

I did have quite an experience!

Adamah happened on a few different levels for me. There was the farming/work level - easy, enjoyable, usually fun, usually interesting. I loved working with the animals, I loved doing homesteading (i.e., making cheese, jam, preserving things, etc.), I often felt at peace and fulfilled and even excited during work sessions.

Planting peas.

What I really liked about farming was the wide variety of different tasks that had to be done, the changes daily, the dynamic pace of farm life (sounds a bit oxymoronic, I know) in the spring as everything is growing like mad. We prepared empty beds by spreading compost and picking rocks, we seeded baby plants in the greenhouse, we direct-seeded and transplanted dozens of different types of vegetables and greens into the ground, we weeded and hoed, we laid irrigation systems, we covered beds with row-cover and plastic to protect plants from weeds and bugs, and, in the last few weeks, we harvested our crops. We spent hours and hours outside in the rain, and sun, in the cold, in the heat. In the space of two months, we brought the farm from total winter deadness into miraculous blooming abundance.

Earlier in the season...

Harvest time! (Pictured, left to right: kale and chard)

My favorite tasks were with the animals. We had chickens and goats, and my very first chore was to take care of the chickens - let them out of the coop in the morning, clean up their poo, collect their eggs, give them fresh water, and, in the evenings, close them safely in for the night. I liked letting down their walkway every morning, watching them suspiciously approach the outside world as if they hadn’t done this every day their entire lives, sliding, flapping and hopping down into the compost yard where their coop was located.

What is this thing you call... outside?

They were really beautiful, with incredible plumage, some of them truly decorative. I liked checking each nest for eggs, finding ones of all different colors, shapes and sizes, from one so big it didn’t fit into the carton to one so mini it looked like an Easter egg. I liked reaching under the roosting chickens to feel around underneath them for hidden eggs, still warm from being laid. I liked carrying the eggs home to our kitchen, to be used in our breakfasts and cookies and challahs. These were the freshest eggs I had ever eaten! (Sad truth: they don’t really taste any different than supermarket eggs.)

Check out that diversity!

My second chore was milking the goats. I was a natural. Who knows how or why anyone excels at anything? While some people were nervous about handling the goats firmly, and had them constantly escaping and causing havoc, I wasn’t afraid of being the boss. Goats are stubborn; you have to be stubborn back. Obviously, this doesn’t mean being anything less than compassionate and caring, but it does sometimes mean grabbing their collars and holding on for dear life. And I became a pretty efficient milker fairly quickly. And the baby goats were PRETTY CUTE.

Being the goat boss.

Triplet kids, a few days old.

I was just comfortable with the animals. I’ve always wanted to raise chickens and sheep, and one of my goals at Adamah was to figure out how I felt around barnyard animals not just in theory but in practice. I feel confident now that I do want to raise animals, and that I can.

Then there were other tasks that were fun - making jam with last year’s raspberries, making garlic butter with fresh green garlic from the farm, making cheese - ! - with the goat’s milk. I really liked that aspect of sustainable/farm life, known kind of vaguely as “homesteading”. That concept has a lot of meanings, but to me it means going back to basics a bit, starting from scratch, using what you have instead of going out to buy something new.

Homemade goat's cheese!

This is a value that speaks to me, both as a hoarder’s daughter and as a fairly resourceful person myself. I’ve always preferred to fix clothes, for example - rips and tears, lost buttons, broken zippers - rather than get rid of them. (Not, to be fair, that this has ever stopped me from shopping for new clothes.) And I think it’s a value that I want to continue cultivating within myself, and one I want to incorporate into my family life in the future.

But there were other layers.

Even though this was a farming program, actual farming didn’t take up much emotional space for me in the program. From the beginning - really from before the beginning - I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would fit into the group, my cohort, and what kind of challenges and problems my different values and background might bring up in this new, unfamiliar environment.

And either I manifested a lot of those problems into being by coming into Adamah already on the defensive, or I was right to worry. Either way, things didn’t go very smoothly at first. And by “at first” I mean like the first month. Of the two-month program. And then a bunch of the second month as well.

It wasn’t all bad. I did, overall, have a positive experience, and I did learn new things about myself (although when I paged back through my journal from before I left for Adamah, I realized that actually I had pretty much known those things already. But there’s nothing like real-life experience to slap you in the face with all of your shortcomings).

But it was also really hard.

Because Adamah, and Isabella Friedman, operate within a completely different set of assumptions than that in which I had been accustomed to move. They exist in a world that is totally unfamiliar to me: an ultra-liberal, super-lefty, politically correct, non-gendered, inclusive safe space where every time you introduce yourself, you include your preferred pronouns lest anyone assume you might identify with the gender in which you’ve been socialized.

Now, that - i.e., gender stuff - didn’t particularly bother me (though when, on one of the very first days, someone referred to females not as “women” but as “people socialized as women”, I felt a little like I was in the Twilight Zone), but it was a manifestation of the kind of philosophy that drives Adamah/IF: a philosophy that makes no assumptions, but accepts every single value/belief/idea that anyone might hold as having equal validity. Everyone’s beliefs and feelings, whatever they might be, all equally worthy. In other words, relativism. Nothing had any absolute value; nothing was absolutely true or false. Including, for example, Judaism.

Isabella Friedman is identified as a Jewish retreat center, but open up some of its many non-conventional prayer books and you might find the words “Jewish” and “Israel” surgically removed so as not to “exclude anyone.”

This makes my head spin. To have a Jewish prayer book purging itself of references to Judaism in an effort to make itself more inclusive - to strip Judaism, and Jewish prayer, of its unique identity - to, in essence, sanitize Judaism to make it more universal and welcoming - this is apologist, it is embarrassing, it is inauthentic. It is a lie.

IF seems to be a space where Jews can come to struggle with how to combine Jewish and liberal values. I watched my cohort battle those issues every day. They wanted to find some magical space where they could hold a unique Jewish identity and embrace selected Jewish values while still rallying for tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity, and universal love. I guess a lot of people do find this, or some semblance of this, at IF.

But in my eyes, that space couldn’t exist.

If you mangle and manipulate and alter Judaism, if you wrestle it into some unrecognizable iteration where performing a pagan ritual is just as Jewishly valid as reciting a bracha before eating, then yep, sure. You can have your magic space. If you’re comfortable with sculpting Judaism into something it isn’t, picking out concepts you like and ignoring ones you don’t, praising the Jewish call to pursue justice while ignoring the Jewish invective to protect, love and cherish Israel, then IF is the place for you.

These were the dynamics I saw unfolding in my first weeks at IF. And I was really struggling. I noticed everything: careful tiptoeing around the idea of Israel, because the base assumption there is that everyone who comes sees Israel as a oppressive, colonizing human rights violator and champions Palestinian rights, as this is a CORE liberal value. How we never even said the word “Israel”, even when we were learning about how the Jewish tradition is rooted in land and farming (in Israel). How, when my cohort did refer to Israel, it was always “Israel/Palestine.” How no one blinked when someone suggested we incorporate a Buddhist, spiritualist, pagan or Wiccan ritual into our practice. How that was perfectly acceptable, perfectly normal, perfectly okay.

In other words, there were no red lines. There were no laws and no prohibitions, no place that was too far to go, no violation of Judaism that wouldn’t go unchallenged. The sole value that was consistently upheld - weirdly - was kashrut.

So yes, I struggled with this. A LOT.

Because I came from Israel, a place where I lived, worked and breathed Zionism and observant Judaism for nearly seven years. A place of Torah truths, of strong beliefs, a place where compromise can mean you die. I lived in communities that were of course pro-Israel, communities where most people believed in God, and not just any God but Hashem, the God of Israel. And they not only believed but they practiced. They kept Shabbat, kept the holidays, and kept halacha (Jewish law). At Shabbat meals, we debated and discussed points of halacha, and the underlying assumption was that everyone at the table respected this body of laws as a base line of Jewish observance.

And we talked about Israel and the Palestinians, but from the obvious position of standing up for our country, believing we had a God-given right to the land, supporting the IDF (in which many/most of my friends had served), agreeing with policies and compromises that ensured Israel stayed strong, stayed alive. There was debate and disagreement, but always firmly within the boundaries of loving and supporting the Jewish state. We were proud Zionists. We had Israeli flags. We partied on Independence Day, wept on Remembrance Day, saw our core identities as Israeli and Jewish.

To come out of that, and into Isabella Friedman, was an icy shock to my system.

And I felt it. Maybe some other people would have struggled less with accepting Adamah and IF ways. There were a very few other observant Jews who lived and worked there, and while I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how or why, they clearly loved it. But I’ve always been a person who respects truths and falsehoods, right and wrong, black and white. I hold some things to be true and I reject the things that don’t fall into this category. This is how I live. This is the only way I know how to live. I’ve never been an in-betweener, I can’t live in a muddled world of maybes. I understand that gray space exists, and that most things aren’t so starkly one way or the other, and I can accept that up to a point, but when it comes to the basic fundamental ideas that drive me, I need a rock to cling to. I need a stable place to stand.

This is probably why I came to observant Judaism, why its body of laws and doctrines, its absolutes, its basic truths spoke to me. I had a need within myself for a meaning that stayed in one place, that I could always refer back to, that existed outside of my own consciousness, that was rooted and solid and real. And I found that in Orthodoxy.

And Isabella Friedman is an island of sand.

One of the last closing activities we did at the end of our fellowship was a session called “Speak Your Truth.” We each stood up in front of the group and had five minutes to talk about some change or idea or vision that had come to us during Adamah. I spoke about two major things that had come up for me.

The first was that my time at Adamah had strengthened and sharpened a lot of my existing ideas - not in coexistence with Adamah ideas but rather in opposition to them. The stark contrast between what I believed and the Adamah/IF philosophy had certainly pushed me to examine the former, but I didn’t find it wanting. On the contrary, I found it more true than ever. I found that my faith was stronger than I had known, that I was more grateful than I’d ever been before that I knew exactly where I stood with God and Judaism. There was so much flux, so much questioning, so much insecurity and confusion and yearning and need among the people in my cohort - and most people who come to IF - to find some kind of Jewish inner life to which they could connect, and, seeing that, I was able to see and appreciate more clearly the strength and endurance of my own convictions. Baruch Hashem!

But the second thing was a less savory truth that had been cogitating in me since before Adamah (as my journal entries prove) and which came to a brutal head during the fellowship: the fact that having such strongly, clearly defined beliefs, clinging so resolutely to certain truths and ideas, makes it much harder for me to love and accept other Jews who are following different paths.

At Adamah I realized that I have to change my paradigm around that prejudice. And that maybe it shouldn’t be as hard as it seems. Because, as I told the group, what I had come to see, through a dim veil, perhaps, through my own anger and frustrations, was the beautiful truth that though others were taking very different roads, we were all still seeking the same destination: to reach the Divine, to find and celebrate sparks of light and Godliness.

So divine.

They might not practice like I do, they might not see the Torah in the same way, but they are still searching for truth and meaning through Judaism. They - and I - all of us - are searching for higher connection. Through their own channels - whatever they may be - they are reaching for God. And God may signify something completely different to them than it does to me, and I have to be okay with that too.

I had - have - to genuinely love them for this, and recognize that their intentions are the same as mine, even if I disagree or struggle (a lot) with their methods of connecting. And I have to not only respect their paths but love them for wanting to be close to God.

It feels almost like hubris to proclaim that I want to own and feel that kind of all-accepting love because it seems to me as if that’s something only Hashem can do. Only Hashem can truly see into their hearts, our hearts, and see how we really feel, see how much we yearn for Him, see how our actions and beliefs are driven by love for Him. Only Hashem can really understand how different passions and intentions and goals are unrevealed forms of desire for a more perfect world, for revealed divine truth. I can’t make that alchemy work. Obviously! I struggled so much with what I saw as contradiction and inconsistencies within the Adamah and IF philosophy/practice that I could barely see past them. Even as I write out these revelations, it’s mostly theoretical. It’s a mission now that I’ll be pursuing all my life - to really truly feel and believe all of this, to really truly love all Jews. Gahhh!!

It will not be easy.

It wasn’t easy, these past few months. That’s why I felt I couldn’t write about it. I didn’t want to just give over a litany of complains, I didn’t want to rant and rage and list everything that bothered me about Adamah or how much I felt I didn't fit in. I also didn’t want to whitewash anything, to pretend everything was great, to just write about how awesome farming was and how fun it is to milk goats. Neither of those things felt authentic.

But mostly, I knew that once Adamah was over, I’d have a perspective on it that I didn’t have during, and I had no idea what that would be. So I decided to wait and see.

I think it’s all still kind of swirling and settling. I don’t know how I’ll feel about it a year from now, or if I’ll even think about it very often. The bottom line: Adamah wasn’t for me, but I certainly had a worthwhile experience. And I would recommend it to anyone who is not as heavily invested in religious/conservative/traditional values as I am, and who is interested in farming and cares about food sustainability. I would definitely recommend it to liberals!

There’s a lot more to be said about it, but I don’t know if any of it will ever be said (by me). There was cohort drama, there was obviously major upheaval around the Israel/Palestine issue, with me at the center. There was a lot of healthy vegan food and focus (/obsession) around sustainability. There were magical bonfires and hikes and fights and discomfort, there were moments of crying in bathrooms and moments of ecstatic dancing in yurts. But all of that is lost to the annals of history. Or, at least, to the archives of this blog.

Life is happening to me so quickly lately that I have very little time to write any of it down. So this is where I’m going to leave this post. I apologize if it was all over the place, or lacked concrete details, or totally skimped on everything interesting in your eyes. I have to move on from this period of my life and my blog has to move with me.

Becaaaause . . . WE’RE GOING WEST, BABY! Stay tuned!