Sunday, July 14, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
By Forest Rain
I don’t
particularly like lavender, but a farm dedicated ONLY to lavender?! I thought
that would be something worth seeing. I never imagined I’d hear about lavender
saving Israel but then in Israel, you never know what you will discover.
Azizo Lavender Farm is located in the community of
Kanaf in the Golan Heights.
The name "Azizo" is inspired by a Latin inscription discovered on a lintel of the ancient synagogue in Deir Aziz, where modern Kanaf now stands. Farmer Dan and his wife Lilach chose this name to honor the deep historical connection to the land and the water source by the same name that sustained the ancient community and continues to nourish their lavender fields today.
The
place is beautiful and full of purple accents – and fresh lavender smells much
better than the lavender scent used in perfumes and detergents.
Farmer Dan happily explained the history of the business, growing and harvesting lavender. His lavender brought a small but crucial revolution to Israeli households. Everyone used to use moth balls to protect clothes – an effective but terrible-smelling solution. The first Azizo product was small bags of lavender to use instead. They work so well and last so long that some Kanaf residents still use the ones they bought in 1987!!
The
farm now sells a large variety of products made with their lavender –
everything from chocolate, liqueur, honey, and lavender ice cream to
lavender-based toiletries.
Nice,
wholesome, and a little boring until suddenly farmer Dan told us about October
7th.
We
didn’t know to ask. Who would think that a flower farm in the north of Israel
had anything to do with the horrors of the Hamas invasion in the south?
On
October 7th Dan got a phone call from a woman begging for help. Her
husband was among those evacuating bodies of the massacred to the Shura Camp
for identification. Within hours the rooms of the camp were piled to the
ceiling with bodies and the smell was unbearable.
The
soul could not deal with what they were seeing. The task needed to be done but the
workers were becoming physically ill.
“You
have to help me!” she pleaded.
The
next day the Shura teams received Dan’s solution - small bags of lavender which
they inserted inside their face masks and lavender oil they could drip on the
masks themselves. Instead of breathing death, they could breathe in lavender.
The
invaders massacred Jews to try to disconnect us from our land. Flowers born of
the ancient love story between the Jewish People and our ancestral homeland,
between this land and her People, saved the day.
Flowers protected those doing the unspeakably horrible and deeply sacred work
of identifying the massacred. They enabled the families of Israel to get
much-needed answers. We used sheer determination and technology too but we
needed flowers, a blessing from the land herself to finish the job.
Think
about that.
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