ISRAEL 5
My Israel tour is nearly over and yesterday I did my final all-day seminar. The highlight for me was meeting a young lady, 18 years old, who acquainted me with the Israeli volunteer systems.
I've been running into these 18-19 year-old volunteers at the various farms I've visited; they are an enthusiastic, even boisterous lot and this young lady filled in some dots for me.
Israel has a mandatory military service for all young people. But they also have an option for young people who would rather give a couple of years to volunteering. Unlike the U.S. Job Corps program, this is relatively unregulated. A young person can kind of chart their own volunteer activity in lieu of the military requirement.
Apparently many of them pick farm volunteering. As a result, many of these farms have 2-6 18-19 year olds driving machinery, building fence, pruning vineyards, learning shepherding skills and all sorts of manual labor and practical work. To show how Gen Z is thinking differently, when I asked during the seminar "what attracts a young person to farming?" the older folks said "profitability" and a 14-year-old girl sitting on the front row said "healing ecology." Folks, that's a good sign for the future.
I don't think these volunteers get paid (hence the term volunteer rather than intern, apprentice, or any other designation), although they may get some sort of stipend. The point is that the culture encourages this post high school and pre-vocational period to expose young people to manual labor and a connection to the land.
These young people actually carried many farms through the war (Oct. 7) when many farmers got called up to service. During the war, 5 percent of the Israeli population was called up; for perspective, that would be equivalent to 15 million U.S. citizens. It was a major drain on everything.
The U.S. does not have a strong youth volunteer ethic. Most of the time when Americans talk about volunteering it's retirees looking for something meaningful to do. But imagine if finding something meaningful to do were inculcated into young people so as they enter adulthood, they would have these memories of what bringing a cluster of grapes or a lamb chop to the table actually entailed.
The U.S. doesn't have this on-ramp to prepare high schoolers for gratitude and understanding in their adult life. We're indulgent to the point of abuse. As I think about teen suicide and mental health problems, I can't help but wonder if every American pre-20 year old were required to devote two years of life to society doing the actual hard work if it wouldn't bring more humility to life. Whether it's the military or manual labor, such an interlude creates a prelude to personal accomplishment, self-worth, and the intimate friendships that naturally develop from hard core volunteerism.
Interestingly, I've run into numerous farms here already that provide a platform for emotional therapy. Many are PTSD farms. Something about getting your hands in the dirt or spending the day tending animals reconnects the emotional pathways toward healing. In my book YOUR SUCCESSFUL FARM BUSINESS one of the future farm enterprises I predicted there was what I call "the therapy farm." I first encountered these in a big way in the Netherlands.
From physical to mental problems, the society goes out of its way NOT to institutionalize anybody, but to place people into affirming places where they can thrive as part of a team. Perhaps one of the biggest contributions good farms can offer is a haven for the hurting. Of course, the best farms for this are the ones with a variety of plants and animals, that don't douse everything with chemicals, that smell nice and are beautiful.
Bottom line is I salute any culture that invests attention on making sure its young people enter adulthood with an appreciation for hard work and what it takes to put food on the table as well as to defend those who put food on the table.
