From Yad Vashem to Sunday Funday
The emotional rollercoaster that is a Birthright Israel adventure reached its critical maximum today.
We started off the morning at the Jerusalem Gold, with a breakfast in which the definition of culinary efficiency was undoubtedly represented in the french toast. With plenty of prep throughout our relaxing Sabbath, we "counted off" on our way to Yad Vashem.
Located in the scenic Jerusalem forest, surrounded by meandering trails that would make a runner's calves tingle with excitement, Yad Vashem encompasses the essence of the word "journey;" not in a physical sense, and it is definitely not "anyway you want it." :) The journey is exactly how your inner spirit and body feel, regardless of your mental control. The ability to feel the entire range of the emotional spectrum is omnipresent throughout the 3-hour tour, but it is a soup of turbid composition, where every time you dip the ladle, the soup appears different with every sample. Sometimes the taste is bitter, other times it is hearty, but it is never sweet. Nonetheless, we arrive, and pad our souls with selfies and smiles on the look-out before traversing the bunkers of our past.
Our tour guide did his due-diligence in providing preliminary facts about what is considered the World's Holocaust Museum. Although some statements from him were opinionated, our guide gave our group a sense of flare throughout our serpentine path of Yad Vashem.
The museum is structured in a way that is a mix between chronology and various demographics: pre-world war, German nationalism, propaganda and scapegoating, confusion, looming fear, hopelessness, sadness, all culminating to hope, post-war, and the realization that time can erode Earth's most terrible of scars. Old, young, Jew, Jood, Jude, gentile, German, non-German. We talked of death camps, survival, our responsibility to carry this burden so that the sands of time never fall to the bottom of the hourglass. Walking through a dark hall remembering the fallen children of Holocaust, we emerged from the other side to the land of hope that is Israel.
Personally, the sheer magnitude of Yad Vashem threw the middle of my day completely off balance. Being fairly unreligious, I have 100% invested my Jewish identity in culture and in the actions of human beings; but that's beside the overall experience.
To put the past behind, we stopped for lunch at a mall that gave us a little taste of Western influence.
Stuffing the feels away quickly, we all left for Tel Aviv to see a political epicenter through a prominent historical event that sent a fissure down Israel. Stopping on what we Birthrighters would have originally thought was a normal street downtown turned out to contain one of the most historical pieces of modern Israel; it was Rabin Square. We discussed former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin: his life, his contributions, his controversy, and his assassination. It was a heavy day, and we concluded our history lesson with a recital of Rabin's eulogy given by his granddaughter's.
Taking off our sad faces, we all willingly threw on our party hats; the evening began with a darn good dinner and a musical concert. There were corny jokes, a lot of clapping along, and plenty of swaying. A pseudo-competition between the DC Shorashim group and us broke out as we gloated about how amazing our Israeli's were, when in reality, we were all one. Regardless of lameness we probably felt, we all enjoyed the chance to be kids again. Maybe some of us even picked up a few Hebrew words in the process.
It was Sunday FUNDAY and our group ended our evening in Tel Aviv with a fun night out. :)
Photo Credit: @lazyandrogyny
