Day Three...
“This Bamba is bomb.” - Aaron the new lawyer
Felise Pomerantz and Laura Nichols here, blogging from aboard the bus on our way to Tel Aviv from Tzfat. We are going to give our highlights, since Felise is a hair stylist and is so good at that already. Day three brings us enlightened artists, bargaining lessons and fresh squeezed pomegranate juice in the tiny cherished hilltop town of Tzfat. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, let’s start from the top.
After an action-packed first day which I’m sure you’ve all read about already we spent day two hiking (some of us crawling) around the Golan Heights. The trek was treacherous, the waterfall refreshing and the view inspiring. Every time one dared to look up from the rocky path they would expect to see an amazing view of the Golan heights stretched regally across the terrain or get hit in the head with a tree branch they were too focused on the ground to notice. Either way it never got boring, contrarily it was a breathtaking perspective of a place we’d only ever read about. Felise was the only one of the two of us willing to jump in the waterfall and brave the risk of wet clothes for the rest of the day, so she can best describe the experience herself (for the record I was too scarred by the wet clothes left over from the attack of the swamp children splashing our cowering figures on their rampage through the river we hiked through the day before).
“I can’t remember the last time I’ve done something that exhilarating, my heart was racing and I loved it.”
Today we learned about Judaism from a perspective some of us had never had before, and it was more personal than it has been so far on the trip in our minds. Though the experience was an individual one the atmosphere of the group was weighted with an air of thoughtfulness that hadn’t been felt before. This made the following trip Felise and I took through the market less about souvenirs and more about what it symbolized to us as Jews. This was no longer about bargaining shekels’ and trying to remember to say ‘todah’ instead of ‘thanks.’ This was about our history, our families and our identity as American Jews. And cute jewelry, of course. This is indicative of many inspiring days ahead.
Signing off,
Laura and Felise
