Tale of Two Desert Peoples

Dr. Daniel Hillel

During a winter storm, some years ago, snowed in at the Dulles airport for two days, my father read The Negev, one of the books that Dr. Hillel had authored about irrigating the southern desert of Israel. Dad was impressed, found Danny's contact information and invited him to speak at Hanford. It was through Danny, who was then teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that my father met and hired Mike Fayer, a graduate student, who now manages the lab from which my father retired in 2005. It was Mike who organized this honorary symposium and who planned the dinner which Danny rose to speak.

Daniel Hillel went to school in the United States, served in the Israeli military in more than one war, and married a professor of archeology for the University of Norway and a college in Massachusetts, who manages archeological digs in Haifa, Israel. Danny tells a story of when he was a young man, about 23 years old, after having graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey at 19, began a kibbutz, or commune to study and tame the desert, harvesting water and working to grow crops in the arid soil of Israel.  The group began with 12 individuals.  Three of the group died at the hands of marauding Bedouins; later six more joined to make 15 in total.  One day, they looked up to find a military convoy approaching with a black limousine.  Out stepped the prime minister of Israel.  Did they have permission to be there?  No.  As they scurried to justify their project, the aging inspecting leader, David Ben Gurion expressed interest.  Before long, the prime minister resigned his post in the government (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurion) and brought his wife to join the kibbutz.  Danny was asked to be in charge of Ben Gurion, and he described with a glow, that he was one of the few who could ever say he had been boss to David Ben Gurion.
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I had a tape recorder and for a moment thought of recording the speech, but it felt irreverent, so I will try to remember the essence.  Danny reviewed the story of two peoples--one, an oppressed group, who escaped captivity with a strong leader crossing a Red Sea to tame a desert near a dead sea.  Danny then described another group that escaped oppression.  They crossed a wilderness with a strong leader and came to another desert near another dead sea, even near a Jordan River. This desert also began to flourish.

The "promised land" of Utah raised up pioneers in Soil Science such as Richards, Gardner, Kirkham, Israelson, Anderson, Widstoe, (and Gee.)  Dr. Kirkham's granddaughter sat across from both Danny and my father at their center table and beamed.  During my folks’ mission to New Zealand this past year and a half, Mary Beth has scanned and sent her grandfather's missionary journals to New Zealand to my father.  Though her father had married a Presbyterian, and she has been baptized into both faiths, she seemed glad to claim the legacy, as Danny lauded her father and others. 

My father responded, remembering his visit with my brother and grandfather to Israel, as Danny had been late to the airport, parking in a no parking zone, jumping up and down to be seen over the crowd with his diminutive stature, and upon finding them, went to the impoundment station to retrieve his vehicle.  When they asked him to pay, he refused to speak Arabic or Hebrew, in which he is fluent, to avoid paying elevated fees.  My father lauded him as a host, for his kindness. 

When Dad closed, I noticed he had forgotten to invite them to test our congeniality, so I stood quickly and mentioned that my parents loved company, and because my father's mission president had taught them the joy of ice cream sticks, as president of an ice cream company in Logan, they had five boxes of Creamies in their freezer waiting for guests.  (No desert there.  And here is your double dare--test their hospitality!) 

Dad's den, sheltering autographed tribute from SSSA conference