SH-24-150's blog

Hello friends! Our adventures in Israel are going pretty swimmingly, I would say. Yesterday morning we explored Tel Aviv and saw Independence Hall. We enjoyed a particularly entertaining seminar from one of the guides, the take-home message of which was that Jews are not swimmers. In the afternoon yesterday, we traveled to the Negev Desert to the site where David Ben Gurion and his wife are buried, and we learned about the impact he had on Israel's upbringing. In the evening, we stayed at a Bedouin village and slept in a Bedouin tent.

We said goodbye to the Golan Heights today, leaving the beautiful kibbutz guesthouse for the mystical city of Tsfat, the birthplace of Kabballah Judaism. Lior led us through the old part of the city, with its winding alleyways and cobblstone paths, and we were lucky enough to visit the shul where Kabbalah began. Afterwards the group headed to Haifa, a sister city of Boston. We went to a firefighting station where two local firefighters spoke to us about the recent Mount Carmel forest fires.

Leaving our busy lives behind for a while, most of the group enjoyed our first of two beautiful Shabbat days in Jerusalem with late sleep-in and a trip to Gan Sacher, the city's largest park. Frisbee, books, boxing and swings were all on the agenda. In the spirit of the sabbath, we gathered in the hotel earlier in the day for a discussion on Jewish identity - as expected with a diverse group of young Jewish adults, the responses varied greatly. We discussed our personal connections to and emotions about the Holocaust in preparation for our visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocuast museum.

Shorashim Bus 150 arrived to Jerusalem yesterday afternoon, and since then, it's been incredibly overwhelming for those of us (most of us) who have never been to Israel before. First of all, it's incredible to see a Jewish state; tons of different types of Jews live their lives, secular and religious, rich and poor, married and single, young and old, constantly aware of the uniqueness of their country. Those of us who have only studied it in a classrom can hardly believe that Hebrew is, in fact, the primary language in this country.