birthright.
I feel like I've lived this past week since I've been back in the states almost in limbo. Yeah, I'm here, in Maryland, but so many of the times I find my mind on the other side of the world. We got back to College Park last monday at around 11:30 at night, and despite the fact that I had been on a plane for 12 hours and a bus for another five or so i didn't fall asleep until like 3. Fourteen hours after that I was back at school, unpacking and getting ready to start classes the next day. So instead of having any time to absorb everything I had seen and done in the ten days we were in Israel, I've been finding myself having to do it subconciously over the past three days or so until now, when I should be practicing for Musical Theater and Francois, but I just really, really need a day to think. So instead I'm sitting here watching American Beauty on TNT and sitting here.
Israel was incredible. Not just in the sense that it was fun and all, because it was (oh, it was) but i felt it was also a spiritual experience for me also. I kind of expected it to be, but it was different from what I thought. It's finally seeing all those things that you had heard about and read about and seen pictures of your whole life and always believed in them, but naturally, seeing them makes it real. Finally being at the Wall and Jerusalem and Masada and the Dead Sea and the paradise that is Ein Gedi and walking around the streets of Tsfat and riding camels in the desert and spending time with 100 other people in a Bedouin tent and being fifty feet from Jordan and peering into Syria and Lebanon and seeing clear, blue water for the first time and seeing the tragic beauty of Yad V'shem (Jerusalem's Holocaust Memorial...ours is good, theirs is better) and seeing
this waterfall at the Benais river and
this rainbow over the Golan Heights and
seeing God speak to you over the Medditeranean Sea
and eating Kosher Burger King and chinese food and falling in love with falafel and schwarma and and learning about how Jews and Israelis have fought so hard and so devotedly for this land, because they know that we deserve it and noone else will do it for us.
It was also really fun remembering so much Hebrew that I thought I had forgotten in the however many years its been since 4th grade and JDS. Anyone want to learn a totally useless but fun hebrew phrase? Here goes:
"Ani panter, ve yesh li chaverim" = "I am a panther, and I have friends."
I can't wait to go back.