Olive Harvest Pancakes

One unseasonably warm day last week, I woke up early (despite my general reluctance to do so) and traveled to a Palestinian village in the West Bank to help a local family harvest their olives. And that’s why my own family had pancakes for dinner that night.

If the connection isn’t apparent, let me explain that last summer, I published an essay in the Times of Israel about my experiences attending Jerusalem Pride as an Orthodox Jewish ally to the LGBTQ community, and a reader commented:

“I would humbly submit that Mrs. Chaya might spend her time better baking cookies for her five children.”

In all fairness—and I obviously do want to be fair to this brave and humble anonymous commenter. After all, he took the time to click over to my author bio to ascertain how many children I have. So in all fairness, I’m the one who brought up cookies in the first place. My essay described volunteering with the Free Parent Hugs group, handing out sunscreen and home-baked treats.

It’s a side point, but it’s technically possible to bake cookies both for vulnerable communities and one’s own potentially neglected children. Recipes can be doubled.

Anyway, I screenshotted the trolling comment and made it the banner photograph on my Facebook page. Mostly because I thought it was funny, but also because in some ways, just possibly, that troll might be the teeniest bit correct.

Back to the pancakes. Weekday dinners aren’t a fancy affair in our home. I have a set menu that remains the same from week to week, and each day has two options, depending on whether I have some time and energy to prepare dinner, or absolutely no energy. For example, on Wednesdays, I make eggs or pancakes. When I’m busy and tired and need to get something nutritious on the table: eggs. When I have time for meal prep and cleanup: pancakes.

Our family hasn’t had pancakes in quite some time. There’s a lot going on. Maybe you’ve heard.

With so much happening, it’s easy to miss—or ignore—the rise in Jewish harassment and violence against Palestinians in the Territories. I find it devastating and infuriating. I feel ashamed about it. I have been looking for ways to be of service, to counter all my dread and grief with positive action.

And so I found myself riding in a van through a Palestinian village. We parked on the highway and continued on foot along a steep hillside below the Jewish town of Beitar. The farmer we had come to assist hadn’t been able to harvest his olives since October 7. The leader of our group reported that Jews attacked and beat him the last time he attempted to reach his trees.

When we arrived at the grove, the trees were bare. Someone had arrived before us and stripped every olive from the branches.

Since the farmer’s family owned another group of trees down in the valley, we hiked down to harvest them. We met up with a small number of women from the family who dared to venture out despite the threat of harassment by gangs of thugs, or of interference from the army.

We spread tarps beneath the trees and got to work, rapidly plucking all the olives within our grasp. Using small rakes, we scraped the upper branches, climbing on ladders to reach the highest fruit. The falling olives hit the tarp with a tap-tap-tap sound like the first rainfall, the subject of so many prayers this time of year.

We knew we might be confronted. There had been a violent incident the day before at a harvesting event. A military drone had hit a volunteer, and troops had pointed their weapons at the assembled Jewish activists.

I attended training months ago to do solidarity and deescalation work in fraught situations like these. Maybe I could be a calming presence, a bridge, because I look and dress similar to the mothers and sisters of the people who have been disrupting the olive harvests. I hoped my participation wouldn’t have the opposite effect. I mostly hoped we wouldn’t be challenged at all.

As we worked, the heat of the day intensified. The Palestinian women paused to rest but didn’t stop working. Sitting on the outstretched tarps, they gleaned the olives that had escaped the tarps and lay scattered around the bases of the trees.

Hours passed without anyone arriving to thwart our efforts, and our pace relaxed a bit. As I was heaving a bucket heavy with olives into a large burlap sack, I spotted one of the women from the village sitting under a tree, shaded by leaves that cast patterns on her black dress. She wasn’t picking up stray olives; she was just resting.

“Hi,” I waved to her. “Marwa, right?”

She nodded.

“I’m Chaya.”

“Hi,” Marwa said. “I’m pregnant.” She said it apologetically, as if to explain why she had the nerve to sit idle.

I thought of my mother at 19, working on a kibbutz near the border with Lebanon. She woke up with a fever one morning and, complaining she was too sick to work in the orchard, was assigned to laundry duty instead.

This was a shock to the soul of a pampered California teenager, enough so that she was still telling the tale decades later. By that time, my mother had acquired so much grit that I couldn’t imagine her spending the day in bed with a cold.

Marwa accepted some green apple slices from my backpack, and we got back to picking. Now that I knew she was pregnant, I tried to make her give me the harder tasks. Sometimes she let me.

After we finished harvesting the trees in peace, our group of Israelis, Palestinians and Americans gathered the sacks of olives and all the equipment, and hiked out of the valley and back to the road.

We posed for a group picture while we waited for the vans that would take the volunteers back to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Marwa introduced me to her young son, and got out her phone to show me photos of her daughters. I told her about my own kids.

I was spent by the time I reached Jerusalem, but it was only 2 PM. As I waited for the bus home, I meditated wearily on everything I still had to do that day—how I would get my son home from preschool, what I would make for dinner, what I still needed to prepare for a meeting later that night.

It was Wednesday, egg day. But my 12-year-old daughter had been asking for pancakes for weeks, and I kept telling her I was too tired or too busy. And again today, I didn’t feel like measuring out flour and sugar, standing over the stove, pouring batter and flipping the pancakes.

Months ago, at Pride, a young man came up to the table and asked me where he could find a knitted rainbow kippah. I pointed out some stalls at the festival that might be selling such a thing, and he thanked me.

While we packed up our booth hours later, the young man returned with his new kippah. I oohed and aahed the same way I do when my teenage son comes home with a cool new accessory. It felt good to share that moment of maternal warmth.

It felt good to fuss after Marwa like a sister, to connect as mothers. I find great comfort in reaching beyond my personal sphere and trying to do good in the world. It’s an antidote to despair and helplessness.

That commenter who told me to bake cookies for my own kids was wrong. Afternoons hugging strangers at Pride, mornings helping people who have every reason to be suspicious of me—and vice versa—those are hours well spent. I hope my children learn from my example.

But inspiration can come from unlikely sources, even from trolls. Sometimes I need to focus on the people right in front of me. I want my kids to feel my love, strong and attentive. Scrambled eggs nourish the body, but the occasional stack of pancakes lets my daughter know I think about her while I wait for the bus.

If I could push myself to wake up early for strangers, I could muster the stamina to care for my own children with even more dedication.

I thought of my own mother, may she rest in peace, forever changed by her summer in Israel, relentless in everything she did. I pictured Marwa at rest in the shade, guarding the precious, tentative life within her, and then standing up and getting back to work.