Family Affair / The Agmors

Yodfat

W The cast: Reumi (38), Anat (38), Nadav (11), Noga (9), Naama (7) and Ayelet-Ora (3.5).

W Reumi: The name comes from: "Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who [reu mi] hath created these things" (Isaiah 40:26).

W The home: It is flat-roofed, detached (on a half-dunam - 1/8 acre - lot), spread out on one floor (130 square meters), next to natural woods (oaks, terebinths, rock roses), and four years old. Previously the family lived in a caravan in the same community, with three children ("Ayelet-Ora was born in this house, in the bathtub"). In the front, next to a stack of firewood and two containers for recycling runoff drainage water, is a vegetable patch with lettuce, cabbage, radishes and more. In the back are fig, pomegranate and olive trees, 14 chickens and a mule named Susita. The animals are raised in partnership with Reumi's brother ("We are a clan").

W Real estate: The house cost about $120,000 (in 2005). Reumi installed the electricity, the sewage system, some of the furniture and the recycling system with his own hands.

W Recycling: All the food leftovers go to the chickens, the gray water (from showers, laundry) goes to the fruit trees, the kitchen water sustains the vegetable patch and the drainage runoff nourishes the passion flowers.

W Inside: The large, clean, well-lit space holds a living room with low sofas, a dining table, an open kitchen (with sizzling pots) and a big hill (Mount Atzmon) in the window. We go to check out the other rooms.

W The other rooms: On the other side of a vaulted oriental-type passageway is a foyer with small desks for writing and other creative work. Four doors open off this space. We peek in. Two are bedrooms (one for the parents, one for all the children), one is a security space, used for working, and the fourth is a clothes closet. In the children's room is a knitted blanket on Ayelet-Ora's bed. Reumi's mother knits a blanket on the occasion of the birth of each first child. Back in the kitchen, Anat serves goat stew ("organic"), winter lentil soup and hot tarte tatin. Before we partake, a blessing is said: "Blessed art thou, Lord of the universe, who feeds the world ..." Reumi: "We are traditionalists but outwardly secularists."

W Livelihoods and occupations: Reumi is vice principal of the Ziv Democratic High School for special education in Kishorit (a village for people with special needs), where about 50 people with serious mental disorders, aged 15-21, are living. With a civil engineering degree from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in hand, Reumi suddenly switched to education, obtained a teaching certificate from the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem and he started teaching six years ago ("I was trying to find myself, and I can say that I am moving in the right direction"). He loves the job and often drags work home ("like if a kid has disappeared"). He commutes to work by hitchhiking; the family Mitsubishi is used by Anat.

W Anat: A social worker, on Mondays and Wednesdays she works at the community oncology institute in Nazareth, and on Sundays and Tuesdays she visits sick people in Migdal Ha'emek and in Jezreel Valley communities, as part of a home-hospice program ("I don't call them 'terminal,' because the end is also a beginning, only we don't know of what"). In these visits she tends to the sick and assists their families both to cope psychologically and with the bureaucracy, to get what's due them. She also sings them songs ("Singing is healing"), many of which are from the Jewish liturgy. In her three years of work she has parted with about 60 patients who died. "I live with the sadness," she says, but she is capable of containing the grief in the wake of a personal "life crisis" she underwent and from which she emerged with the help of a small light. Once a week she sings in a choir.

W Choir: Every Wednesday evening, Reumi and Anat welcome 10 to 15 friends into their home for choral singing "that touches the inner God." The conductor is the composer Diane Kaplan, a Yodfat resident, and Reumi provides guitar accompaniment.

W The children: Nadav is in fifth grade in an anthroposophist school in the village of Misgav (five minutes away). He also takes part in fencing and soccer groups, and knows by heart all the words of Arik Einstein's "Mondial Song," in which the names of world soccer stars are rattled off - both the old and new versions (Anat can also sing it). Dreams of being a fisherman or a soccer player (for Hapoel Tel Aviv).

W Extra detail: He was born in the Technion dorms, without a midwife and with the help of Reumi only.

W Noga: In third grade (same school), plays the saz (a Turkish stringed instrument), likes to knit, embroider and dance ("but not in a group").

W Naama: In first grade (ditto); wants to be a mountain climber.

W Ayelet-Ora: Attends a local day-care center (with four other girls), where she gets breakfast, a fruit meal and "lots of love and warmth," her parents say.

W Reumi's bio: Born in Yodfat, 1971, second of five siblings. His father, Yehuda, native-born, was one of the founders of the community (he was a shepherd, a Jewish Agency emissary to France and the director of the local council's education department); his mother, Dalit, Iraqi-born, is a graphologist. Attended elementary school on Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan and in Paris (because of his dad), and high school in Misgav. Before entering the army where he was an intelligence officer, he took a 10-day horseback trip across Galilee; afterward he cruised in the Caribbean for six months before returning to Israel and obtaining his matriculation certificate (five units, the highest level, in mathematics), studying at the Technion, training himself in computers, working for Elbit Systems and fleeing.

W Fleeing: "I was driven by external motivations - money, honor - but then I realized that my needs were different: to encounter myself through encountering other people." Accordingly, he studied education in Jerusalem and came to Kishorit. He met Anat in the army.

W Anat: Born in Ra'anana, 1971, to a family from Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, she has two older brothers ("from the same parents"), plus a brother and sister from her parents' second marriages. Her father plays the French horn, formerly with the Philharmonic; nowadays he lives on Harduf, an anthroposophist kibbutz, where he teaches people how to sing "on the way to discovering their voice"; her mother is a social worker in Beit Elisha, a hostel for people with special needs on Harduf. "I myself forged a synthesis between my parents' occupations: social work and singing that touches higher realms," Anat says. She attended high school in Ra'anana, was a counselor in the scouts and, in the army, a service conditions officer ("for the staff") at Megiddo prison. Afterward she went East (with a boyfriend) and came to Harduf to study anthroposophy according to the Waldorf method. There she found Reumi (again).

W The meeting: The beginning was in 1991, at Megiddo: She was dealing with service conditions, he was an intelligence officer, and both of them were in the prison ("We met in that romantic setting"). When he came to the base she conducted the admissions interview with him and fell in love immediately, she says. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend. After backpacking in the East (with the boyfriend) and returning (without him), she found Reumi in Galilee with the help of a mutual friend. She (now available) was studying at Harduf; he (not available at the time) was living in Yodfat. It took him a little time to get free, and by the time he left for Haifa to attend the Technion, she was with him.

W The wedding: 1996, Yodfat, in a tent ("a community wedding"). Anat wore white on white (a white miniskirt over a longer white skirt, NIS 200), Reumi wore a white shirt and black trousers. Her father played the French horn, his father wrote a moving blessing and the guests plied with them with many gifts and few checks.

W Finances: "We don't have a credit card," they say. They use only the Israel Post bank ("no overdrafts").

W Giving birth: Only at home. The umbilical cord? "That's peanuts already," Anat says (Reumi takes care of it, with scissors).

W Daily routine: Reumi gets up at 5 A.M. and meditates, sometimes puts on phylacteries, and goes walking on the mountain (Atzmon). On his return he drinks a glass of tap water ("that has stood for a night"), wakes the children (6:30) and goes out to feed Susita and the chickens. Anat gets up at 6:15, has a glass of water or "floral" tea ("a local mix") and makes sandwiches. At 7 the older children leave to catch the school bus, and by 7:30 Anat is organized ("no lipstick, no nail polish") and takes Ayelet-Ora to the day-care center before going to work. Upon her return (at 1 P.M.) she picks up Ayelet-Ora and hurries to make lunch. The other children come home at 1:30; lunch is at 2 ("as much organic food as possible"). Everyone does homework until 3:30, "and then the gates of the palace open" to the enrichment groups and to friends.

W Evening: A family supper at 6:30 (with Reumi), and before sleep they sing (to a melody of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach): "To my right is Michael, to my left is Gabriel, in front of me is Uriel, behind me is Raphael, and on my head shechinat ha'el [the spirit of God]."

W Television: None. The children have access to the computer twice a week for half an hour at a time.

W Belief: "We do not grow stronger in it but deeper" (Reumi).

W Quarrels and making up: "Whoever got angry does the making up."

W Settlement: "Two states for two nations" (Anat); "Too bad the Jews don't have a wise leader" (Reumi).

W Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): Anat - 9-10; Reumi - 9.876; Nadav - 8-9; Noga - 10 ("Everything that is not good, is good in some way"); and Naama - 9.5.

The place

Yodfat - A Galilee community of more than 100 families ("a warm place"), founded in 1960 by Dr. Yosef Schechter and his pupils ("the Schechterites"), who preached Jewish farming and spirituality.

	The Agmors at home in Yodfat.
	Photo by: (Avrahami)