The first day!
Bus 157 met at JFK airport on Sunday, August 7th. Though many were tired, everyone was excited. We soon boarded our Swiss Air flight for Zurich. After a long flight, the highlight of which was the mushy protein of indeterminate kind for dinner, we arrived in Zurich, where some of us purchased real Swiss chocolate. However, most of the products could actually be bought in a local CVS-globalization has somewhat destroyed the need to buy something in its country of origin.
We then came to Tel Aviv. We were greeted joyfully by dancing, and we were taught a dance and song for Alochim Simcha - brothers joy. We boarded the bus and headed to a spectacular beach north of Tel Aviv. We were taught that it was the site of the first attempt at “illegal” immigration into Mandate Palestine in the 1930’s, and then we all remarked how glad we were that Jews could be freely in the state of Israel.
Next we came to Kibbutz Afik, where we are staying. It is nice and we were served the first of many Schnitzel dinners (a testament to the large number of yekkies who helped build Israel). We had a really interesting discussion on why we are on Birthright. We then played a series of ice-breaker games (we do a lot of those). The really fun one was one where someone got up, said a defining characteristic, and then everyone else who shared that characteristic got up and ran around to find another seat, and the person who didn’t have a seat was next “it“ and had to say their characteristic. The game got violent at times in the struggle for chairs. We learned things like how many people eat elk, how many people hate the Steelers, etc. Afterwards we retired to our rooms, though many of us hung around and talked till late in the evening.
We woke up the following morning and, after a delicious breakfast, we headed out for our Gilaboon hike in the Golan. It was very fun. The true highlight was a spectacular waterfall where we went swimming. Our Israeli guide commented that we did the hike better than most groups.
Next we went to a former site of an Israeli military bunker. The area had interesting modern art dinosaur sculptures made out of scrap metal. We also went on a tour of the bunker, and discussed tensions on the Israeli-Syrian border while having Syria within our view. We then headed to the Gadot lookout in the Hula Valley and discussed the dynamics of what a peace treaty with Syria would look like and ideas about the future of Israeli security.
What was interesting was that whereas many of us had been to a lot of battle sites before, usually they are historical sites of conflicts that are long over. While the conflict we were examining occurred almost 40 years ago, we were reminded that there is not yet peace.
Then we went to the Kinerett cemetery. It is a beautiful cemetery, but also quite different from most Jewish cemeteries. There were flowers on the graves and music playing from a speaker. We saw the grave of the poet Rachel, and discussed her beautiful poetry.
In the bus on the way back to the Kibbutz we rocked out to “Party in the USA” to remind us of home. After dinner we did our first edition of “Roses and Thorns” where we shared the highlights and feedback about the trip. We closed the night with Israeli dancing and energy for tomorrow.
