We have finally arrived at our Electives Week!! The group had been split up into 3 areas: Community Service (Tikkun Olam) at Kibbutz Hannaton, the Sea-to-Sea hike and Gadna (Israeli army). The students will be away from each other until Wednesday afternoon experiencing this amazing programs. We will post as many pictures as possible and I'm sure we'll be getting some amazing blog posts when everyone returns. In the meantime..enjoy the pics!!
Tikkun Olam at Kibbutz Hannaton
Gadna (Israeli Army)
Sea to Sea Hike
More excerpts from students at our Havdalah Service:
Hey everyone, bet you're surprised to see me here, as I'm sure you didn't know about my secret passion of speech writing, well anyway here we are half way through the trip and I'm not sure what to write about. Should I talk about our hike up Masada, our two hours standing in line to see five minutes worth of cave. Or our experience with Robert um oops I meant Avraham. We rode donkeys and camels and buses and peed all across Israel, we ate shwarma chicken and rice chicken and rice and of course chicken and rice. We learned new ways to conjugate the word Bedouin, and facts about camel spiders. No lie I just made all of that up and have been playing flappy golf on my phone this entire time. But my ability to do so shows the insanely good times we have had together, here's to another great half of the trip. But all jokes aside this trip has been incredible despite the fact I feel like I've been everywhere in Israel this is still the best time around. The people, not the food, have made this trip the joy that it is. I hope you all have had as much fun as I have Shabbat shalom and long live goon squad --- Bruce Margoshes
Havdallah
The blissful state many of us have found ourselves in here, away from our typical day-to-day worries, could be described as an "escape from reality". For me, this experience does seem to feel like a momentary fleeing from the grasp of reality, but I've come to think that our socially accepted definition of reality could be a misinterpretation. Why is it, that a sense of being held back from this newfound sense of bliss, is considered the inevitable truth of our lives back home? I'd like to think that anything that draws us away from being completely in-tune with the present moment is the opposite of reality. Here, away from a constant influx of iMessages, most of which, in a year from now, we won't remember ever receiving, we actually partake in genuine human interaction that we'll remember for a lifetime. So who's to say that this isn't reality? Because I don't know the last time life felt this real.---- Lauren Hart
