Greetings, friends! After a lot of debating, I HAVE decided to keep a blog recounting my gap year in Israel, my year at the Mechina.
Why did I finally decide this? After attending yesterday's orientation, I realized this program just offered too many amazing opportunities for me not to share them! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This week my dad and I went shopping for hiking and easy-camping gear, picked up bed linens for my bunk, and bought a new backpack in preparation for the program. Then, finally, yesterday we had parents' day, a two hour informational event. I got to meet everyone else who will participate this year - all fifty one people seem absolutely amazing! There are two other girls from the states, and one from Italy - all speak a little bit of Hebrew but are hoping to improve it greatly this year. The rest of the people are Israeli. We also saw the head of the Mechina who interviewed us for the program, and met our counselors -- all in their twenties, these four will basically help us in every way they can - and the head of volunteer work, who is going to place us and help us with that aspect of the program. We will be split into two groups in which we'll have our classes and other activities, and within each group there are two smaller groups, who are our roommates in the apartment.
At this point I can hold back no longer - I want to talk about the Mechina, both what I gathered about it from my visit in December and what I learned yesterday.
Mechina, a derivation of the word preparation in Hebrew, is a specific kind of program that was designed to prepare post-high school Israelis for their mandatory service in the Israeli army (after graduating from high school and before going to college). There are thirty eight Mechinot in Israel, and I'm pretty sure I've found the best one (I say this with the arrogant confidence of someone who has only visited two). The mission of the Mechina is to prepare these young adults not only for the army, but for adulthood; they want to ensure that these youngsters will become responsible adults of Israel and of the world. This particular Mechina is run by the Reform Judaism movement, which has a credo of adapting Judaism to modernization and progress. So, in accordance with that, students do the following things:
-volunteer four afternoons a week, three in one institutional framework, and one in another more individualized setting. As the mechina's head of volunteer work told us, we are not there to "save the world," but to help out in Jaffa in any small way that we can. Jaffa itself is a very interesting and complicated place - Jews, Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, Ethiopian immigrants, migrant workers, and others live together in a not-so-easy coexistence; Jaffa, as one of the Mechina's "graduates" put it, is also the home to all of Tel Aviv's criminals. A few of the existing programs that people volunteer in are afternoon youth clubs/hangouts, a center for children aged 3-6 who have been classified as "at risk" and are basically kept out of their homes from 7 in the morning to 7 in the evening for safety reasons, an educational center that the Mechina actually set up to help kids with their studies, and many, many others.
-study in casual and informal "class" settings, lectures, seminars, and discussions about Israeli history, different Israeli populations, Islam and other relevant topics. This learning is supposed to contribute to our volunteer work, so we can understand the people of Jaffa and Israel and learn how to help them and work with them.
-travel a LOT all over Israel in order to meet and see all different kinds of environments and people who live here. The Mechina basically wants us to encounter every kind of ethnic group and political or religious ideology present in this small yet tightly packed country that is a homeland to so many different people. We will be touring settlements beyond the "green line," ultra-orthodox neighborhoods, and so many other places...
-learn a way of life different than our own. Two mornings a week we will be required to get up earlier than usual and start our day in a different, special way, be it with prayer, or yoga, or a walk on the beach (which is quite and wonderfully close) or anything else. This mission of the Mechina culminates near the end of the year with a program called "Lech Lecha" (translated as go forth) where each student spends three days in a lifestyle they could never imagine. In the past, people have lived with ultra-orthodox families, Druze families (an ancient religion related to Islam that can be found only in northern Israel and the mountains of Syria and Lebanon), radical settler families - one guy last year even lived as a hobo in Tel Aviv just to experience it!
-learn how to look at our Judaism in a new way, especially since there are people of varying degrees of Judaism involved, from completely secular to seriously reform, etc. This mission is harder to explain, but one of our counselors said we would talk a lot about tefillah (prayer) and its significance to us and others. We will be required to separate Sabbath from the rest of the week, but we get to choose how, and it can always be different - it never has to be "conventional;" we can do tai chi to welcome the Sabbath if we so truly wish!
-learn to be adults and build a community. Each apartment (we have four, each with 13 people - they are coed but the rooms within are not) has a budget for food, for example, and if we excede it, noone will come pay the difference - noone will buy eggs for us if someone forgets to. When we go on hiking trips and we are in charge of navigation, as long as it's not dangerous, if we spend a day walking in the wrong direction, all that our counselors will do is call the bus driver and tell him to meet us wherever we end up.
Now of course, there are fifty two of us - we'll learn to work together, build our own environment and community. People who have been in this Mechina in the past (we are the 9th year) say their group holds their best friends, their new family, those they can count on always.
So tomorrow we begin, with a four day hiking trip in the Judaen Hills near Jerusalem, in which we will get to know each other, learn much more about the Mechina, etc. Then we will move straight into the apartments in Jaffa. Generally we come home every two weekends (Thursday night to Sunday morning) and many of the holidays - so expect the blog then, though I promise the posts won't always be as long as this one!
Until then!
Maya
PS - For any of you who read my Spain blog, you'll remember that by the end, my English was rusty and very comical. Though here I am not forbidden to speak or read English, I am absorbed so deeply in Hebrew here that my English will likely become EXTREMELY comical - so please bear with me!
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