Cohort 1: Day 10 in Israel: North American Kennes and Reunion!

Happy New Year! It is finally 2015! As Robby would say, “this is the year we (the seniors in our group) graduate.” As a Chicago community we all stayed up together until midnight at Kibbutz Sde Boker to celebrate the new year on a mountain top. When 12:05 hit, all of us were already asleep since we had to wake up at 4:30 AM to climb Masada. So we got our four hours of sleep and the Chicago group went with the whole Kennes of American Diller teens to Masada. We took the Roman ramp up the mountain and met our tour guide, Eitan. Most of our group has been to Masada before, but Eitan's tour was different. He proposed the question, “Why Masada.” If you don’t know the story of what happened at Masada, it is quite tragic. Herod the Great, who was the ruler of the land, a crazy one. He wanted to be feared, so he killed his wife and most of his kids so that his throne would not be overtaken. He also built six hideouts in the desert of Israel in case riots broke out so that he would have a place to hide that no one would find. Flash forward a little less than a century and the Roman empire is in rule now and all the Jewish people need a place to be safe, so they remembered Herod’s hideouts and went there to save their people. The Greeks found them and surrounded them and were going to take them captive for slaves or prostitution. Instead the Jews hiding out there wanted to die with dignity since the Romans weren’t just going to kill them, so they all tragically killed each other and committed suicide. The interesting thing is this story has happened in five to six other places in Israel, so Eitan kept asking “Why Masada?". At the end of the tour he told us his theory, but he wants people to research and create their own theory, so I won’t let you know what he thought. 

After a great tour we were able to take the cable car down Masada and saw the beautiful views as the trolley car drove us down. We went directly there to a Kibbutz to eat lunch and debrief the Kennes, but everyone was just excited to go to the Dead Sea. We finally made it to the Dead Sea and an amazing thing happened--we all floated! Shocking, I know. It was so nice to just sit down in a sea and naturally float and have relaxing conversation. Even though the salt was refreshing on the skin we wanted a bigger spa experience, so we ran out of the Dead Sea and ran to the Dead Sea mud buckets to drench ourselves into the skin softening mud. It felt pretty gross at first, but after leaving it on and washing it, I understand why people pay hundreds of dollars for the mud. The mud really works wonders--my skin is still soft and glowing. 

After showering it was time to say goodbye to the Americans and finally meet back with our Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv. We met at a restaurant where they hire deaf employees and ask the customers to try to learn the sign language they teach you to order and communicate with the waiters. It was a very interesting experience and it was fun as the waiters were very funny. After, we went into the theater at the restaurant which is a theater of blind and deaf people who learned a play that took them five years to learn. It was a stunning show as they explained all their dreams in life and it was spoken in Hebrew with Hebrew, Arabic, and English subtitles and a Sign interpreter. This play was very moving and even though it was a long day everyone was invested in watching the play. After the play it was past 10:00 PM so all the Americans had a really long New Year's Day and were tired, but it really was a New Year's Day to remember. The saying for Passover should go for new years too, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

By: Colin Silverman