Not exactly picking oranges on a kibbutz but…

Although this seems to be getting repetitive, I would like to stress that it is difficult to update this blog on a daily, let alone weekly basis! It’s not as though I am not filling up my time enough to write novels of information about my travels and adventures here abroad. It’s just hard to choose what people will not just read (yes mom, I know you will read and kvell about whatever I write) but actually find interesting and culturally revealing. So, after picking and choosing, here goes nothing…

This past weekend, 3 friends and I traveled up north to a Kibbutz (communities spread out all around Israel, where families live and work in agriculture, in a factory, in an office, or anywhere for that matter) called Kibbutz Yiftach. One of my friend’s friends from home recently made Aliyah and is joining the army. He lives on this kibbutz and invited us to stay there for Shabbat. After our 3-hour bus ride and 20-minute hitch hiked ride up the mountain (sorry parents, it’s the only way up), we arrived at our destination, just 1 kilometer from the border of Lebanon. To give a little perspective, the same man who showed us where there was an extra room for us to stay the night, was the same man who lead the Shabbat dinner and Kabbalat Shabbat, and who also poured us tube shots all night at the “mesiba” (party), which by the way, who knew kibbutznik’s knew how to party as hard as they do? As we sat down for Kabbalat Shabbat, my friends and I couldn’t help but recognize that we could hear the muezzin calling for prayer just across the border. I wonder if they knew we were praying as well.

The boy who we were visiting (Corey) joined a program in the US that transitions Americans into the Israeli army. So, Corey and 20 other self-selected Americans live together on this Kibbutz for 4 months before enlisting into the IDF. My 3 friends and I were quickly welcomed into this American “family”, since everyone was our age, give or take about 2 years. In this small group of kids, I met a boy who went to Tufts and we had about a million mutual friends, and 2 girls who went to high school with my camp friends. While it was so nice making these connections with my new friends on Kibbutz Yiftach, its hard not to feel some pangs of guilt about the 2-4 year journey they are about to embark on, as compared to the life I will be living for the next 2-4 years. On Saturday night, as I sat on the bus going home after Shabbat, driving past the West Bank and back to home sweet home in Tel Aviv, I kept thinking about the American girls, some even younger than I am, and how they made this life changing decision to pick up and leave the USA and come here to protect Israel; to join the army in the most turbulent country in the world.

With this kind of Jewish geography being played on a daily basis and my extended family in Israel welcoming me here as if I’m their own daughter I don’t exactly feel far from home…

Fun fact: the Hebrew language does not have a word for “skiing” or a verb for the word “rain”. I can’t imagine why. Perhaps because this country is pushing about 9,000 degrees each day with 0% change of rain for the next hundred years. To have these outrageous words in the Hebrew dictionary would be too much of a tease.