By Charles Ribakoff

“You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by
And so become your dreams, because the past is just a good-bye
Teach your children well…”
–Graham Nash

I will never look at a salad the same way again, but I am getting ahead of myself.

I am in Israel, traveling this time with Patty and our girls, and good friends, and friends of friends to celebrate a bat mitzvah here in Jerusalem. It is Nicki’s (age 7) and Corky’s (age 10) first time in Israel. While all my trips here over the last 40 years have been special, this one is even more so, as I get to see it through their eyes.

There are about 40 of us, half kids, half at least chronologically grown ups. It is not true that we are all bozos on this bus, but we are bus-bound all over.

So one of the things that’s different about this trip for me is we are doing lots of touring, visiting lots of sites I have been too blasé or lazy to revisit. After all, one could think that a place with 5000 years of history wouldn’t change much over only 40 years. One would be wrong.

It is said the state bird of Israel is the crane, and cranes are everywhere, with buildings going up around them. Even the YMCA across the street from where I stay here, a magnificent building of old Moorish architecture, has a condo tower under construction in its backyard, a former soccer pitch. (And, no I’m not getting sucked into talking about building in the settlements, which, since you asked, I think should fall into the ocean. But I digress).

But the history of Israel, for all these millennia, was built around farming, immigrants eventually building collective farms –eventually the legendry kibbutz movement, where all work, responsibility and results were divided, and shared—evenly. Making the desert bloom, and so on, which, on a helicopter at an altitude of only 500 feet, you can clearly see, one of those legendary things that is actually true.

OK, there were lots of sheep and sheep herders and traders on camels and stuff, too. No offense meant. But the first thing anyone had to do was eat, so let’s stick with the farming angle. Besides, it fits this story.

I suspect it’s been a lot of years since a Ribakoff tilled the land (not counting my apple picking career, which lasted an entire week, when I was a teen living here). Not much is known of the fields of Slutsk, the city in Belarus from which at least some Ribakoffs embarked to America, but I suspect working the fields in Brooklyn, where at least some of them ended up, was not productive. The market for used cars in Worcester has been far better than the market for, say, rutabagas, for the past 60+ years, and so whatever agriculture there may have been in our blood generations back has turned to gasoline.

Jews are taught that we each have an obligation called tikkin olam, repairing the world, and we are further taught that, even though there is no way we are going to complete this work in our lifetimes (it is hard enough, after all, to repair an oil leak in 2006 Taurus), that is no excuse for us not to start.

The start of this journey is often around the ceremony of bar mitzvah (for boys), or bat mitzvah (for girls), at age 13, deemed in biblical times old enough to join the community. Part of this process includes the performing good deed (a good deed is called a mitzvah). While many 13 year olds today seem as interested in joining Facebook as anything else, the good deeds part has survived.

Which starts to explain what I am doing here in a tomato field, sweating like a pig (maybe not the most appropriate thing to sweat like here).

It turns out the bible teaches that one is to do something called gleaning. I always thought gleaning was some kind of tooth paste. The bible obviously tried to teach this to me on of those days I skipped Sunday school, so it has to be explained to me, slowly. Gleaning is when you go back over a field that has already been harvested, to gather whatever hasn’t already been picked for whatever reason, and gather them to give to the poor.

We are joining our young celebrants as we look for, in effect, used tomatoes. We are being organized (although organize is a difficult word to ascribe to any travelling group, which is more like herding cats) by a group called Table to Table, which finds volunteers to do stuff like this to deliver, literally, tons of fresh food to shelters for Israelis and Arabs.

The instructions are simple enough: bend over, find a tomato that hasn’t been spoiled and is properly ripe, pick it, place in basket, repeat until done.

This, if I may say so, oversimplifies the task. Among the first things I learn is that a tomato that has ducked one of the super-efficient harvesting machines that work these fields, has probably has made a conscious decision not to get harvested. The little sucker has hidden itself from, what, for a tomato, is the grim reaper for sure. They hide under cover of steel wool-like leaves, in among the undesirable yellow tomatoes (even John Kerry couldn’t mooch off yellow catsup), and, worse, the rotten ones.

When you grab hold of a rotten tomato, harvesting fool that I am, you learn quickly that what you get is a handful of rotten, gooshy, gucky, stinking red gook. The yellow ones are like a broken promise – firm, healthy looking, but rejects. The few good red ones left are like hitting a jackpot.

I am happy Corky and Nicki are out in the fields with me. For one thing, someone has to complain more than I do. For another, it is one thing to talk in theory about the doing good things, another to lead by example, and a glowing good time to do it all together.

Maybe as important, they are city kids. It is important that they learn that hamburgers come from something before McDonalds, and salad doesn’t grow in a case at Shaws. They turn out to have more zest for this than I – faint praise, indeed, but still – they, bend easier than I, and are not handicapped by trying to keep a cigar lit while picking. That they understand they are putting food on the table of a hungry person a pretty good bonus, too.

We dig right in, rotten tomatoes and all. We are all knee deep in guck in no time, giggling like fools. Patty, the best camper of us all, has the most discerning eye. Occasionally, we even find a real tomato.

Well, the minutes go by like hours, but the baskets somehow fill up, and the time goes by. Even all bad things must come to an end – sorry, General Motors — and at some point we are called in from the fields. We have enough tomatoes for a mile long salad bar, and enough of their remnants on us that we should probably all walk through a car wash.

A person wiser than I once said that it is a fundamental error to assume that a family vacation is supposed to be fun. Family vacations can be a lot of things, and if we didn’t remember them, eventually, as fun, no one would ever go to Thanksgiving again, like, I am reliably told, no woman would ever have more than one child if she remembered what it was like.

But here we are, a long way from home, making memories, memories that will last more, if not a lifetime, at least more than a lunch time. Even many lunch times, and a shower.

Seems like a win to me.