Morning Milking 25/12

25/12

It’s cold these days at 3:00 am. The cold water from the tap seems warmer than the air. Walking towards the dairy in the dark, I hear every sound. In the light of the waning moon, I don’t need a flashlight to see my way. I can see all the Arava spread out in front of me. In the far south, there’s a glow over the desert that I know is the light of Eilat and Aqaba.

Nearing the dairy, I hear a diesel motor to the east. Is that a truck on the Jordanian Arava highway? Can I hear that well? No, here are lights. It’s an army patrol on the border. The patrol road passes just a few meters east of the cow sheds. Sheds, we say in English, but they are hardly more than roofs over open pens. I’m late for the morning milking, but in the distance, the bass line of a disco beat thumps faintly from the pub of Kibbutz Grofit, seven kilometers away to the south.

As we begin milking the cows, I think about a meeting I had attended at the beginning of the week, between dairy managers and merakzei meshek from the region, and Arik Reichman, the CEO of Tnuva. Yossi Malul, the Chairman of the Cattle Breeders’ Association was there, too. Tnuva, the largest food company in the country, is on the verge of transformation from a cooperative to a corporation. The Cattle Breeders is fighting to maintain the cooperative nature of the company. The fighting tone Malul takes is much more convincing than Reichman’s dry history of the process. The locals fidgeted, listening politely.

Yotvata’s Dubi Helman, who replaced Reichman as Secretary of the Kibbutz Movement in the 1990s, sat down next to him and exchanged small talk. Dubi says that the total privatization of Tnuva will lead to the breakup of the planned milk market. That will lead to a crash in milk prices, which will eventually lead to the collapse of the entire Zionist project, the entire country. Kibbutzim and Moshavim, already scrambling and scraping to get by, will fall apart.

Here in the Arava, it’s hard to imagine life without milk, even though Holstein cows don’t love our summer heat. In the pit of the milking parlor at 4 am, my neighbor Mike and I are hard pressed to remember that heat. Ten cows in, wipe the udders, hook up the machines, the work is tedious, but it makes a nice change. As a Shabbat rotation, it’s not so bad. Dip antiseptic on the udders, let the cows out, and do it all over again. We pass the time listening to music. Mp3 has made things easier, I don’t have to worry about smearing my cassettes with cow pies anymore. The first album is ‘Jackson Browne’s Greatest Hits’, a blast from the past. Suddenly, these songs about middle age in the middle class seem to make sense: “The Pretender” could have been written about the kibbutznikim of the 1990s: “I’m going to be a happy idiot/ And struggle for the legal tender/ Where the ads take aim and lay their claim/ To the heart and the soul of the spender/ And believe in whatever may lie/ In those things that money can buy/ Thought true love could have been a contender”.

I get pretty cynical sometimes. I watch the process of the de-ideologization of Zionism and think, it’s as if, like Esau coming in from the hunt, we sold everything for a mess of pottage. Arik Reichman and the privatization of Tnuva is just a symptom. The constant race for profits is the cause. Human life, meaningful life, with all its connections to the rest of creation, is the victim.

Lately, between reading for my Master’s degree, and the endless flow of material I read for work, I’ve been working my way through Peter Whybrow’s “American Mania”, a bestseller in the US that my wife bought me for my birthday. Whybrow, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, examines the “fast new world” that we have created, and how it reinforces patterns in human behavior, patterns of addiction and disease. I haven’t gotten through the conclusion yet. He has some prescriptions, most of which could be describing the life we lead here on the kibbutz.

Around 5 am, the electricity goes. Total darkness envelops us. A glimpse outside tells us that the whole Israeli side of the Arava is without power. An enforced break in our work allows me and Mike to step outside of the milking parlor and breathe the night air, to look at the stars and see the beginning of the dawn. Outside, there is total silence, punctuated now and then by a clink of metal as a cow puts her head through the fence of the pen to reach her feed. This is what Shabbat could be like. This is what life was like once, until a few decades ago.

A slurry of phone calls to the manager of the dairy, a grope in the dark of the dairy office for a flashlight, five minutes trying to get through to the local operator of 103, who can only tell me that the Electric company is working on the problem and the power will come back on soon. There are two or three flashes of light and music, and then more silence and darkness. Finally, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the power comes back, and we can get to work. A few minutes of fiddling with the machines, and we are back to milking.

The mp3 player, battery powered of course, has moved on to Shalom Hanoch’s “Mechakim le’Mashiach”. Another blast from the past, when Arik Sharon was the bad guy, not the great white hope. Now the whole world holds its breath while waiting for the results of Sharon’s blood tests. How the wheel does turn things around, eh?

The power stays on. Ten more cows, wipe ‘em, hook ‘em up, wait for the milk, dip ‘em, let ‘em go. Without electricity, two people wouldn’t be able to milk 300 cows in a few hours. The Eilat area has suffered several blackouts recently, and the Arava is especially vulnerable. Two massive power lines bring electricity to Eilat from the center of the country, but only one of them serves the Arava. Solar power is not really economical in most of the world, but here in the Arava, the statistics are in our favor.