Israel Article

OUR “MAIDEN VOYAGE” TO

ISRAEL: The Tent’s First Teen Trip to the Holy Land

This year Temple Israel has joined local synagogues and days schools in the successful “Boston/Haifa Connection,” a program that brings together teenagers from Boston and Haifa in a meaningful “mifgash,” or encounter. Nine teenagers joined Rabbi Suzie Jacobson and Assistant Director of Education Brigid Goggin for a two week trip to Israel. In March, our friends in Haifa will visit our community. Here are two reflections from trip participants to give you a window into this wonderful experience:

Amanda Powers:

One of the reasons that I went on the Israel trip was because I felt that as a Jew growing up in America, I was expected to have a well-defined and thought out relationship to Israel. I felt like I didn’t know enough about this country that I was supposed to love. Throughout the course of the trip, I thought a lot about the phrase “Jewish values.” For me, this has always meant social justice, community, and resilience. To a lot of the Israeli teens, Jewish values meant military service and nationalism. When we visited the Kotel to pray with Women of the Wall, I was shocked to see that to some people, Jewish values meant silencing our prayers with whistles, or trying to prevent us from praying at all. This made me very grateful for my upbringing, and my Temple Israel Jewish values, but it also made me feel disconnected from Judaism as a whole. However, since I’ve been home, I have been thinking a lot more about what I am taking away from this experience, and I am realizing that I can love Israel and still have my problems with it. I loved being in a place where everyone was Jewish, and everyone celebrated my holidays and sang my songs. I loved watching the sun rise over the Negev and I loved eating plates and plates and plates of hummus. I loved learning from all the people I met. And my Jewish values are valid and true even if they are different from other people’s.

Louie Goldsmith:

I had traveled to Israel twice before. Once to visit family and again on a birthright-esque sight-seeing, camel-riding, Masada-hiking tourist extravaganza. This time, I didn’t just visit and see Israel, I truly began to understand it. This did not happen through the sheer volume of time I’ve begun to accumulate in the Holy Land, but rather because this time we talked. We talked to one another, examining our own beliefs; to our host families, coming to understand how Judaism plays into their daily lives and how the nation defines their faith; and to a diverse array of normal people from across the nation, people who differed in culture, religion and ideology, but each of whom holds complicated and valuable beliefs regarding Israel. I first came to recognize the complexity of the situation we were trying to understand, “50 shades of gray” in the words of one of our tour guides. There are no easy answers and the best place to start is simply asking the questions. As we traveled around the nation, we engaged ourselves as we engaged others. The value for me in this trip came not from places seen or even the conversations we held, but rather how we as a group examined and critiqued, agreed with and dissented from viewpoints expressed to us, finding our own place and our own beliefs about Israel.