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At a certain hour in the day, a young Jewish farmer has learned all she’s going to learn from pounding 350 pounds of freshly picked cabbage in a food-grade drum. This is when the lessons move to the classroom — or, rather, the instructional yurt.

On a recent evening after dinner, the topic was dust. The starting point was a passage from Genesis: “Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”

The 12th-century rabbi and scholar Rashi posited that the dust of creation came from the four corners of the Earth. Did this mean that we are by nature worldly and interconnected? “There’s no one answer,” Mr. Sadeh said. And he dispatched the Adamahniks to study essays by Barry Lopez and Rebecca Solnit on the topics of economic migration and rootedness. In sum, where do we call home?

For several of the fellows, the answer was right here, in this yurt, in the holy city of Falls Village. Meredith Cohen, 31, came to Adamah after working eight years in education (starting with Teach for America, in New Orleans). “When I discovered Adamah, I thought, ‘Everything I want in life, that I thought I had to work and build, already is in this place,’ ” she said.

So when her fellowship period ended last fall, Ms. Cohen said, “I never left.” Now, she manages the dairy-goat barn as one of four apprentices.

The problem with marching in the advance guard of Jewish thought is that the rest of the army can seem pretty far behind. Rory Katz, who starts rabbinical school this fall at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in Morningside Heights, recalled what happened when her parents’ synagogue booked a speaker from the Jewish environmental group Hazon, Adamah’s national parent organization.

“They spent a whole weekend around the topic of food activism,” Ms. Katz, 26, said. “They did a lot of advertising trying to get people to come. And then my mom said it was boring. My dad said it was boring, even though he had helped organize it.”