weekend #6: gallivanting in the north

Hello friends! I hope you all are well. I'm writing to you on Saturday night, 12 hours before I have to be back at the Mechina to start off our first day of normal routine. Tomorrow we'll attend some of our regular classes, then visit our volunteer work places for the first time! I've been placed in a center for 1-6 year olds, mixed Arab and Jewish population (though in reality they are mostly Arabs) where we'll be working 3 times a week for 4 hours each time. Then once a week I'll be a big sister through an organization that helps migrant workers and refugee families.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First of all, the photos, with better explanations throughout the post. Top: Me and a day year old calf in the cowshed in Kibbutz Hanaton. Second: The view from one of the trails we walked in the Galilee. Third: The Israeli border with Lebanon that we passed. Fourth: All of the Mechina at the starting point of Shvil Israel. Bottom: The view from the viewpoint in Camon, in the north of Israel.

On Tuesday night I returned to the Mechina after having a long and relaxing vacation with my family. I was still one of the people in charge of the week. On Wednesday morning we left for the north, stopping in a small village called Camon for an activity that I planned. We met up with a relative of mine who lives in the village, though we were all together at this beautiful viewpoint that overlooks most of the Galilee from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee and many of the mountains in between. She talked to us about what it's like to live in this Jewish village that is right next to a Bedouin village called Camaneh, and how coexistence feels to her, since the Galilee has a relatively large Arab population. After the stop we all got back on the bus and drove to Har Halutz, which is a small settlement also in the Galilee that was originally founded through the Reform Judaism movement. Every year the Mechina goes to Har Halutz for Simchat Torah, which is the last of the high holy days that celebrates Moses receiving the Torah, and there is a big happening where people from years past who were in the Mechina come and celebrate along with people from the community and this year's Mechina students. Though it was freezing, we all went outside and danced with the Torahs, and then we ate dinner with all of the past students from the Mechina (there were about 120 of them who came!). After dinner some of the people from the fourth year of the Mechina threw us a huge party in the woods behind the synagogue, where we all got to know each other and danced together to keep ourselves warm.

The next day we danced some more with the Torahs, and then went to eat lunch with different families from the community. They were very welcoming and cooked enough to feed the entire Israeli army. Afterwards we cleaned up the synagogue and took a bit of a walk around to see the sights of Har Halutz, and then returned home to Yafo.

On Friday the heads of the week got together, and we prepared the service for the Mechina for Shabbat. We decided the subject for the service would be beginnings, since we are about to start our regular routine that will take us through the year, so then we decided to hold it by the homework center that the Mechina totally runs for about 87 students from Yafo to symbolize that we are now taking charge of our year. The service was really fun to write, and I at least felt it was meaningful. Talya and I (another one of the people in charge) wanted to bring in some conservative melodies, since we both knew them from home and so far in our services at the Mechina we've only sung the reform melodies. It was a bit of a challenge but generally a success. We also brought a couple of poems (including Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in Hebrew), an excerpt from Possession by A.S. Byatt, a story by Etgar Keret, and an Israeli song called "Something is Starting Within Me." After the service we ate a very tasty Shabbat dinner, and then some of my friends and I went to the beach to celebrate our good friend Daniel's 19th birthday.

On Saturday we mostly had a free day, but at four we had a lecture to attend. There's a committee that's in charge of bringing guest speakers, and they decided we will have two parents of people in the Mechina come every week to talk about their jobs. Well, someone's dad is a really famous director who makes documentary TV shows. The day before we watched two episodes of his newest show about 18 year olds all over the country, and then he talked about it with us. He was only scheduled to talk for an hour and a quarter, but his thoughts on human nature and what he learns about the human race from his job were so interesting that he stayed for two hours! After his talk we had our weekly summary of how things went, and then Havdalah to end the Sabbath - at that point my role as head of the week was officially over!

The next day we woke up at 4 in the morning to set off for our Seminar in the north. After making ourselves sandwiches to take with us, we got on the bus and went to the most northern tip of Shvil Israel (the Israel path), which is a hiking path that covers about 950 km and is supposed to represent Israel. We walked the first stretch of it (the Mechina's goal is to cover it in groups by the end of the year), which goes right by the border of Lebanon and through the Snir River - it was one of the more beautiful walks I've ever taken. We ate a late lunch and then went to Tel Hai, still in the North. At Tel Hai there was a very famous battle, so we visited the memorial there and then set up camp for the night.

After sleeping the best I've ever slept in a sleeping bag, we woke up and started our seminar on challenges, which was totally constructed by a committee of eight people in the Mechina. The first day was about personal challenges, so we started a hiking trail of about 8 km, but were instructed to take some rocks in our backpacks in order to create our own personal challenge. After the trail we ate lunch, and then drove to another Mechina in the north. We got to meet all of the people there and we hung out with them, and slept in their apartments. It was really cool to see how different their Mechina is - for example, they have an actual campus, with separate apartments, and a dining room with a hired chef, and their Mechina is not in a city but in nature in the middle of nowhere. Despite the differences we all got along really well, and we invited them to come stay with us in Yafo.

The second day of the seminar was about one man's challenges while in a group. We started with a non-traditional prayer service, which was comprised of a series of excerpts. We watched the running scene from Forrest Gump, read a kid's book about a grandfather's family who helps him pull out a stubborn carrot from the ground, and listened to an Israeli song called "Others' Dreams." Then we went to a forest (still in the North) and split up into our apartments. Each of us were asked to lead a 10 minute activity with the people in our apartment. It was super fun, because all of my roommates brought fun activities from games to meditation to theater activities to discussions about the trees around us. In the evening we went to a
Kibbutz in the north and did something called Outdoor Training (ODT) which is basically group building through outside games.

In the morning we woke up and ate pancakes, which was amaaaaazing, as usually we eat bread, cheese, and/or cornflakes for breakfast. (This was the third day of the seminar, which was about one man's challenges within his community.) Then for morning prayer we did yoga. After that we were given a tour of the Kibbutz's cowshed, which is its main source of income. A bunch of people from the Kibbutz itself came and talked to us about the community, and then my friend Michal's mom, who lives in the Kibbutz, talked to us about the Mikveh she runs. The Mikveh is a spiritual bath that many Jews use on certain occasions. After learning more about it we went to help revitalize it by painting the walls and working in the garden. After that we had an amazing dinner that someone from a neighboring Arab village catered for us, and then we went back to the Mechina!

All in all it was a really fun week, and very rejuvenating for the new hectic routine we're starting tomorrow! Wish me luck, and hope to talk soon!

weekend #5: on the cusp of the real beginning

You must be wondering why I skipped weekend #4 - and why I am calling this a weekend at all if I'm writing at midnight between Monday and Tuesday.

All of October (until Thursday night) Israel has been on a semi vacation because of the high holy days, a series of four holidays that bring in the Jewish new year. Thus in the past sixteen days I've been home for half of them, sleeping and vacationing with my family (and my mom who has been visiting from the states for three weeks). So my blogging calendar has been a bit thrown off, but the eight days I was at the Mechina were packed and very important.

(By the way, I'm going to try to explain the photos on the right time this time around. From top to bottom: General picture of the demonstration we held at the Clock Square. 2nd: Picture of me and my friend Lotem leading the march to the square with our sign. 3rd: My bed is on the right, with the blue sheets, and Anat's bed is the one on the left with the leopard print sheets. In the middle is our joint closet. 4th: Our kitchen! 5th: A fellow apartment mate adding to the decoration. 6th: The decoration my roommate Tal added to the wall in our living room. Bottom: Our joint shelves, and my bed again on the left.)

The first week after Rosh Hashanah was our intensive preparation for volunteer work. Every day we had three lectures in the morning, and then a tour in volunteer places, and then in the evenings we had some kind of planned activity or time to hang out in Yaffo. I loved a lot of the places we visited, and it may have been my favorite series of lectures we've had so far. We had experts on all of the different ages, from the "soft age" (birth to six years old), adolescence, and the elderly; an expert on how to work with kids/teenagers who have learning disabilities or attention problems, one of the social workers who represents the welfare organization in Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and other topics that directly tie into the people and populations we'll be working with. The next week we all had short interviews with Rotem, the head of volunteer work at the Mechina, and told her our four preferences for volunteer work three times a week, and then our preference for our once-a-week framework. We'll find out in the next week our placements, so I'll let you all know :). I'm hoping to either work with the soft age or with 1st-3rd graders, either with a mostly Arab population or with Ethiopian immigrants in the neighborhoods of Yaffo Daled, Lev Yaffo (heart of Yaffo), or Ajami. Then once a week I hope I'll either tutor Darfurian refugees in Hebrew and English, or be a big sister to some kid who needs it!

Every week we have four people called Matashim who are in charge of the week: making sure the schedule runs smoothly, as well as preparing an activity for each day, be it morning prayer or a Mechina-evening. We had amazing matashim that week, who gave us a karaoke night and a night where we all blindfolded ourselves and then were split up into pairs (which rotated ever so often) and talked about personal experiences. Then, on Wednesday night, they told us we all had to wake up at six the next morning because the head of the Mechina, Arale, had a morning activity. My roommate Anat and I decided to go to sleep early (midnight) so we could be awake for the morning. The matashim woke us up and as we got dressed I casually checked my phone and saw that it was actually 3:15 in the morning! The matashim had decided to do a night tour with us in Jaffa where we apologized for what we regretted this year and then sent it away from ourselves - this was all in preparation for Yom Kippur, which was the Saturday after, and is the Jewish day of atonement. We stopped at different places along the way, and atoned personally and in small groups, where we also told others what good qualities we see in them that we would like to adopt. After each reflection we took a bit of paint and smeared our legs. Then, with dawn's first light, we went down to the beach and washed away the paint. It was beautiful to be awake at sunrise, and was a really exciting bonding experience for all of us. We went back to sleep for another hour and a half, then woke up for three lectures in a row. Our personal goal was for everyone to stay awake, and to help those around us stay alert, and it... kind of worked. The lectures were very interesting: two were about the Yom Kippur war of 1973 from two people who received high medals of honor in combat. The third lecture was from Arale's brother about the nature of Jewish atonement.

At the end of the week we always do a summary of how everything has been, and I was dying to go home and sleep. But, as happens every week, at the very end of the summary the matashim for the upcoming week were announced, and I was one of them! So we stayed a bit after to plan some of he events for the following week, and then returned home for Yom Kippur.

When we came back Sunday, we met in a museum in Tel Aviv that chronicles the personal history of Yitzhak Rabin, one of Israel's prime ministers who was assassinated in 1995, and the history of Israeli society. Afterwards we returned to the Mechina, and in the evening us matashim had our first group night. We planned an activity based on the Israeli game show 1 against 100. We composed a survey about people and life at the Mechina and then earlier in the day had everyone answer anonymously. Then, in the evening, we used the most commonly picked answers for our "game show," where we gave everyone cereal, and told them they had to win their milk for it (milk is the most prized commodity in the whole Mechina, as it always runs out way before we go grocery shopping again). The event was definitely a success.

Not much happened on Monday, but Tuesday was a very frustrating and exciting day simultaneously. At eight in the morning (after a night where me and a bunch of my friends, as well as almost everyone else, went out to Tel Aviv's most southern district, Florentine, which is right next to the Mechina, and stayed up very late)we had a sports day with our army sports trainer, which was supposed to be a contest between all of the apartments. However, only half of the Mechina got up and came, which made us postpone and shorten the rest of the day's events, because we had to have a Mechina-wide discussion about appropriate behavior and decorum (it was unacceptable both to us and our mentors that only half of the Mechina showed up to a required activity). The whole debacle was not only frustrating because of the subject, but also because we practically had to cancel the Matashim's activity that we planned for the Jewish holiday Sukkot (which was last week and why we had vacation) - we shortened it to a short discussion instead of a full-blown interactive activity.

However, the last thing we did on Tuesday was really exciting, and mostly made us forget the rest of the day's events. Two weekends ago, a right wing extremist group broke into two Arab cemeteries in Yaffo (one Muslim, one Christian) and destroyed a bunch of headstones. My committee, Yaffo and the community, decided we wanted to respond to this despicable event, and decided to consult the Mechina and ask them if they were interested in organizing a small and impromptu protest. When we got positive feedback, on Tuesday we had everyone gather and make signs that showed that as a Jewish and pre-Israeli-army institution we were against what happened and we want to partake in Yaffo's coexistence. When we finished our signs we walked to Yaffo's Clock Square and stood on the side of the road, singing fun songs and holding our signs. The police was immediately alerted, but since there were less than 50 of us who ended up coming it was legal for us to hold a demonstration without asking permission, so there was no trouble. The police then sent a reporter from their news website to take photos of us and write a short story about who we are and why we decided to protest! It was really exciting to feel that we have a voice in Yaffo, and that now we have a connection in the city's communication scene! (The site is also in Arabic, which makes this connection all the more important for the Mechina.)

On the way back from the Clock Square I was holding one of the signs with my friends (you can see in the photos) when the owner of a falafel store asked me:
"What does your sign say?"
(I read it aloud for him.) "Price Tag [the name of the right wing extremist group]?! It costs less for us to live together!"
"Does that mean you're against what happened? And you're for living together?"
"Yes, definitely!"
"Marry me."
"Excuse me?"
"Marry me."
"Uhh... not today, I'm busy."
"Then tomorrow?"
"Um.. sure?" (I walked away.)

So I guess my political engagement has landed me a fiancee...

Tomorrow evening I go back, and then on Wednesday morning we set off for the North to celebrate the last of the high holy days, Simchat Torah. Then we have a weekend at the Mechina, and then a four day Seminar also in the North. After a weekend at home to rest, we start volunteering and taking our regular classes! I'll be a Matashit until the seminar, so I have an exciting, hectic, and tiring week-and-a-half ahead!