So, we started planting in the sadeh (Adamah’s field) almost two months ago. Onions were first, tiny green shoots so thin you could barely see them against the soil, but a whole bed of the tiny starts had an unmistakable green haze of growth. Next were beets and chard, with tiny red-green leaves. Then spinach, with matchstick-sized pointy green shoots, and cucumbers, planted before their true leaves are out, with only two smooth oval cotoledons unfolded like tiny clamshells against the ground.

We know that these baby plants will eventually turn into vegetables… but when they are so small, it’s easy to forget.

And when they are under white billowing strips of row cover, which we use to keep bugs off the crops without chemicals, it’s easy to forget they are there all together.

Which is why I felt such heart-leaping delight last Friday when I took the row cover off our brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, collards, kohlrabi and kale) because they needed weeding…

…to discover huge heads of kale – bushy, curly, foot-long kale-sized leaves, happily growing away!

I’d peeked under a few days before, and the kale still looked like baby plants. But the sunny days towards the end of the week made everything shoot up, and there they were, a whole bed of perfect bunches of kale.

Clearly, I wanted to eat them immediately.

We have an altar at the sadeh where we bring our first fruits. It’s our way of acknowledging the mystery and awesomeness of creation, as well as connecting to the agricultural laws of the Torah. It’s a reminder that the forces of nature are beyond our control. And, whether it’s God, or not, the fact that things grow at all is a miracle that we mustn’t take for granted. We express gratitude through self-restraint: before diving in, we offer up some of the harvest to acknowledge we are a part of – not masters of – the world and all that is in it.

I noticed the kale on Friday but didn’t get a chance to harvest any. On Saturday I was down at the sadeh and felt such an urge to pick some – but it was Shabbat, and I resisted. It’s a bad habit, my friend Aitan said, to start harvesting on Shabbat. But on Monday, Aviva (our farm apprentice) and I picked a handful of the leaves, and put one on the altar, and headed home to feast.

I shared the kale with the folks I work with – but they were hesitant. Shouldn’t we have a ceremony? A celebration of the first harvest?

I put a leaf on the altar, I said. It’s not like I wasn’t grateful. How much ceremony do we need?! This is a farm, things grow and we eat them—too much sentimentality is cloying.

But they were insistent and I reconsidered. The Adamahniks arrived on Sunday – twelve amazing young folks who are here for the next three months, excited to work hard, get dirty, and experience how Jewish rhythms of time can be meaningful in their lives.

And so for all these reasons, it seemed appropriate to conclude the first week of the program with a ceremonial kale harvest before Shabbat. And I’m realizing that my eagerness to chow down is exactly the reason for making a ceremony – that for the first first fruits of the sadeh, simply putting a leaf on the altar and saying ‘There, I did it, can we eat now?’ doesn’t cut it. It wasn’t enough of a mechanism for me to truly stop and appreciate.

On Friday, before we closed for Shabbat, we harvested some of the four kinds of kale growing in the sadeh. We then processed, as pilgrims to Jerusalem, down the field to our altar. Just in time for Shavuot, the holiday of the first fruits, we came together as a community, to give thanks…

and eat more kale!