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Adamah Fall 2011 Newsletter
The
Fall 2011 Adamahniks
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is a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center
that connects people to their roots — to the land, to community,
to Judaism and to themselves — by providing educational programs and products in order to build a more sustainable world. |
Flooding, Planning, and Humility
From our Director, Shamu Fenyvesi Sadeh
For the past seven years, we have farmed four beautiful acres of floodplain on the Hollenbeck River, one mile from the Isabella Freedman campus. The sadeh (Hebrew for "field") was Adamah’s first, and remains our biggest project on the land. Thousands of visitors, more than 180 Adamahniks, and a dozen staff members have hauled manure, seeded, weeded, and harvested there. The vegetables have fed thousands, from retreat guests to local food bank recipients, from the Adamah community to our pickle fans all over the country. And the sadeh has nurtured our spiritual community. The sadeh has hosted countless ritual gatherings: pre-Shabbat learning and singing, my daughter Ibby’s baby naming, willow beating for the winter rains on Hoshana Raba, and first fruit offerings on our altar in the corner of the field. Thanks to our honoring of the soul together with the soil, since 2004 the Hollenbeck River has been named 'The Most Mikvehed River' in North America. (Mikveh is the pre-Shabbat ritual dunk in the river.) Thousands of meals, friendships, love, and even long-term partnerships have been born there.
 And in this moment we are unsure of our future in the sadeh. The realities of climate change—in particular an increase in huge rain events—are making for more frequent and more damaging flooding. Though the sadeh has flooded almost every winter we have farmed it, this year’s floods were more aggressive and more frequent. We experienced three flooding events in August and September, and many of the floods carried away hard-earned topsoil. We are searching for higher, drier land, making the most of our land on Beebe Hill (see below for news on the Kaplan Family Farm), and making plans to start small gardens all over the Isabella Freedman campus.
So this fall we reflect on our vulnerability and we plan as best we can for an uncertain future; it’s a bit like trying to balance on a slippery log floating on rough waters. As we reflect on our actions and our fate during the month of Elul and the High Holydays, this feels like the right challenge. We remember to give thanks for what we have, and to have compassion for those all over the world who are completely dependent on their increasingly fragile land for their nourishment.
Adamah News
Kaplan Family Farm
 Thank God for our highlands! Although our land on Beebe Hill does not flood, we have been suffering from erosion from town culverts that dump water right in the middle of our fields. No more! Thanks to a grant from the USDA, we have put the culvert water underground to a nearby wetland, and prepared a site for a new 30 x 100 foot greenhouse. And we are making use of our steep slopes by making terraces and expanding our berry orchard. Watch for gooseberry and currant jams next season!
Food Justice Projects
This summer we were able to share over 1,000 pounds of our harvest with a new food justice partner. Tuscan Homes is a housing project for seniors in Hartford, CT. It is located far from grocery stores and most residents do not drive, so they were thrilled with the vegetables. Collard greens, herbs and, of course, pickles were especially popular. We got to chat and exchange recipes with the seniors and are excited to build on the partnership for next season. This season we donated plants to Project Sprout in Great Barrington. They work with high school students to grow food for the school cafeteria. We brought vegetables weekly to the food pantry Jewish Family Services in West Hartford.
 For the past 3 years, teenagers from Northeast Community Center’s Job Training Program have joined us in the fields and in the kitchen. This year we taught the teens about pickling and helped them make pickles that will be served in their school cafeteria. Consider it a pickle in the door of the industrial food service!
"Working at Adamah was great because not only did I meet great new people, but I was able to learn how to harvest and how many people it takes to bring in a full harvest." —Erica, participant in Northeast Community Center’s Job Training Program
DIY Food Week
 At this year’s inaugural Do-it-Yourself Food Week Lead Pickler Adam SaNogueira and other Adamah staff had the opportunity to give over important skills enabling people to bring traditional foods into their lives. Some highlights from the week include hearth breads from the cob oven, milking our goats and making cheese, crafting fresh ravioli stuffed with veggies harvested, and of course fermenting cucumbers to make traditional sour pickles. Throughout the week, tours, classes, and discussions focused on sustainable agriculture and food production and their place in modern society. The atmosphere was energetic and the food was hand-made and gourmet. Join us next summer for an expanded week of food learning by doing.
From the Mouth of an Adamahnik
Interdependence: God Said It was Good
by Jenna Harris
If I had to describe my experience at Adamah in just one word, it would have to be "interdependence." This is a word I do not think I had given much thought to before my Adamah summer. That is the beauty of such a Fellowship, as it not only challenged the very core of my beliefs, but even added a couple of new words—and even yiddish phrases—to my vocabulary in the process.
This new word first caught my attention in an Adamah weekly schedule. If you have not seen the schedule firsthand, take my word for it: it is a masterpiece. Every week, Associate Director Sarah Chandler spends hours compiling the myriad needs of staff, fellows, and apprentices. She expertly weaves together a complex system of chores, work shifts, classes, etcetera, and never fails to include a tidy and relevant quote at its header. Glancing over one particular week’s events, the class on the evening on the Fourth of July stuck out. It read: Interdependence Day with Shamu.
The Fourth of July has always been a summer rite of passage of sorts for me. In addition to working a full day that I was used to having off, I was shocked to find that we were going to have an evening class. I suspected that the class was actually a decoy, and that a pool with greasy watermelons, a grill of veggie-burgers and a lawn of horseshoes awaited. I even wore a dress to class, just in case. I should have known better. We Adamaniks were living in an alternate reality of tents, bikes, goats, vegetables, and lots and lots of singing. Interdependence Day with Shamu was not a surprise Fourth of July party. It really was a class.
This brings me to the point of all of this. Fortunately for me, this year the Fourth was not an annual beer-drinking and firework-watching holiday. I ended up loving the class and learned more from this "Interdependence Day" than from any "Independence Days" of the past. As the Fellowship consistently did all summer, this class challenged my beliefs, expectations, and values on every level: ecologically, Jewishly, in my understanding of community and vocation. Our society often praises and espouses independence. I have always prided myself on being independent and self-reliant. Adamah has allowed me to see the importance of interdependent and deeply connected relationships in maintaining a sustainable and spirited community.
In fact, this class really was at the heart of what the Adamah Fellowship is all about: the interdependence of all things. Wikipedia explains that "in an interdependent relationship, all participants are... self-reliant while at the same time responsible to each other... Interdependence recognizes the truth in each position and weaves them together." In Adamah, we witnessed this interdependence at its base level through our food system. As Adamahniks, we relied completely on each other for the daily farm operations and thus our sustenance. We shared our skills as individuals allowing us to be the best community that we could. This interdependence extended beyond our human relationships and included animals, plants, and the very ground on which we walked. Adamah has shown me how deeply we are interconnected with one another and the earth no matter how disconnected our modern lives outside Adamah may feel. I have learned how absolutely necessary these human, animal, plant, and land relationships are in sustaining life.
Interdependent relationships are not easy. Conflict is an inherent part of living in community. Anyone who has spent the day weeding or the night in a sopping wet sleeping bag will tell you that "nature" is not always a Garden of Eden. Cycles are part of the seasons, human relations, and life. Jewish learning at Adamah has given me a framework to help understand these relationships and cycles. Judaism connects the ecological and human community created at Adamah, allowing space for awe more than just a biological explanation of life. Judaism allows me to see deeper. Flowers, the sweetness of strawberries, the richness of farm fresh eggs, the miracle of pickles, the miraculous birth of baby goats, and the beautiful music of Adamahniks are all blessings.
We can agree that much of the way we live is unsustainable due to our reliance on fossil fuels and consumer culture. Beyond this, living completely independent lives is also unsustainable. The Hebrew quote above the gateway to Kaplan Family Farm reads, "And God saw that it was good," suggesting that the interdependent relationships found in nature are inherently good, and by mimicking these relationships, humans can learn to create more sustainable relationships with one another and the land. As we learned in our permaculture class, "permaculture, in its simplest form, is a design methodology to help us realize more sustainable human communities... The focus is not on the elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way we place them in the landscape; thus, at its core permaculture is not any one system but a way of thinking about systems and hence a paradigm shift."
Adamah has truly been a paradigm shift for me. All I can say—to use another newly learned phrase—is Baruch Hashem!
The Summer 2011 Adamahniks
Alumni News
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