Shabbat

After beginning our Shabbat holiday on Friday night, we all started off Saturday by catching up on some much-needed sleep. Most of us have adjusted pretty well to the time difference, but the extra few hours of sleep really helped out. Our first activity of the day involved us all splitting up into groups and coming up with short skits/presentations about historical events throughout Israel's history. I think the group found the activity enjoyable since most of us weren't familiar with every event and the perspective of the Israelis was especially interesting for us to hear.

After lunch, we had another small group activity. Each group was given a list of factors in building your Jewish identity (having a bar/bat mitzvah, celebrating Passover, etc.) and each group had to rank their top five statements. Again, it was interesting to see how the American/Israeli perspectives were different. Since the Americans typically came from communities where Jews were the minority, we put a greater emphasis on the importance of self-identifying as Jewish while the Israelis took that more for granted since almost everyone they know is Jewish.

As the sun set on our first Shabbat, we performed a short Havdalah service and had dinner at our dining hall. We finished up the night by playing a few ice breaker games as a group. It's taken awhile, but I think we're all finally starting to learn everyone's names! We all had a great time on the Kibbutz, but we're all excited to head out on the bus tomorrow morning for some hiking and to see Tzfat.