Today we woke up and went
straight to breakfast then we split into our color groups and had some nice
programming where we talked about our communities. In a group of around
5 kids we created a new ideal community on a piece of graph paper. In the
program we had buildings that we could put in our community and each building
cost a certain amount of squares on the graph. Also, as an added challenge, we
could not have any of the buildings touch one another. It was very interesting
to see who thought we needed what and how they justified their opinions.
After
that we had some programing at David Ben Gurion’s grave where we learned about his
life and assessed some of his famous quotes as a group. I loved hearing all of the
wonderful and unique opinions of the people in my group. Then we headed
off to lunch and had a bit of free time. We Chicago kids led the pack in
exploring the canyon near Sde Boker. Everyone had a “climbing” buddy as we
climbed down the beautiful downward slope of the valley that revealed an
excellent view that stretched for miles of what used to be a riverbed.
Afterwards we had some inter-group programing where our color groups mixed with
other color groups and had a program where we talked about the Jewish
populations in different communities and as our conversations developed we
ended up talking about all of our experiences with anti-Semitism. It was a beautiful
thing to see how everyone supported one another even though we all lived
hundreds of miles away from each other. We then listened to a wonderful lecture by
Avraham Infeld and we learned about all of his views on the Jewish community. He feels that Jews should be connected with one another through identifying with at least three of five categories--memory, family, language, Israel, and Mt. Sinai.
We ended the night with an
extremely powerful night circle where we really bonded as a group and we popped
party poppers of the edge of a cliff to celebrate the New Year!
By: Kyle O'Day
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