Page 12 - Issue 32

into whose labor I was thanking for feeding me
bread.

This summer, seven years since my last summer at
Galil, I went on a surprise shlichut to machaneh to
be Rosh Mitbach. Suddenly, I lived and breathed
the labor that makes machaneh run. Here are a
couple of scenes from this past summer, in the
form of a day in the mitbach:

7:00 AM
Three tzevet members stumble into the mitbach,
sleepy. A big part of meal prep is the music, and
today a tzevet member has put on his favorite
Chance the Rapper album. We check the day’s
menu and groan - this morning is waffles, which
means confronting the walk-in freezer. This freezer
is big enough to contain all of the many pre-frozen
elements of machaneh meals but it’s always
overcrowded. Getting one thing out requires
moving multiple very cold boxes and searching
through very cold shelves. The freezer feels nice to
poke your head into on a hot afternoon but not
this early. We put on sweatshirts, take a deep
breath, and confront the freezer. Once this task is
done it’s a breeze - waffles into the oven and then
the warmer, fruit salad to chop, cereal and yogurt
to get out. We start to wake up as the music
plays.
Because of Covid restrictions, this summer
machaneh is eating in an open-air pavilion on the
other side of the campsite, so we transfer the
food there from the mitbach on a golf cart. This
adds lots of time and effort to meal prep and is