On our last evening in Bet She’an our long cultivated friendships with the Israeli students were blossoming and thriving. Our final activity together was to be a sort of hodgepodge ropes course mixed with team building exercises and Israeli spontaneousness. The first activity which I was a part of involved climbing up a rope ladder against a tree (harness enabled of course) and then sliding across a zip line, with the final goal being to drop a ball into a basket as you swing by on the zip line. The Israelis, agile and army-ready, made it look easy. Our group’s resident parkour expert scaled the ladder gracefully. Our boys glided easily. But if you know anything about me, I have never glided in my life, and graceful is, to put it mildly, not the first word anyone would use to describe me. But I was still not deterred from trying. It looked easy. It looked fun. I might not be agile, but I’d done similar things at summer camps and school retreats, and I’m not afraid of heights, so I was confident in my ability
So there’s your rising action. Stage is set, setting established, and this is the part where the story goes wrong. I strapped into the harness. I shoved the ball in my pocket and hooked myself onto the rope ladder. And I stepped up. Kind of. It took me about three tries to get onto the first rung, but I was in good humor and felt no judgement from my peers. And I started to climb. Kind of. I was pulling with my arms and shoving with my legs and yet my body failed me. I didn’t consider giving up, but pushed on until I was a little past the halfway point. And I was exhausted. I was shaky. I was an uncoordinated and un-athletic five foot six curvy Jewish girl several feet in the air on a swaying rope ladder. The guide at the bottom called my name and the other students cheered. They encouraged me to take another step, hoisting myself up another rung and then…
I lost my footing, my grip faltered, and I found myself falling, in slow motion, towards the ground. Until my harness buoyed me back up, so I was hanging upside down with my limbs flailing like a fish out of water. Blood rushed to my head and through the sound of my heartbeat in my ears came the supportive cheers of my friends below. They offered me guidance to get back to right-side-up, but even as I continued to struggle to rise on the ladder, it became evident that this task was going to be physically impossible for me. I hated giving up, but there was just no way. Crying from stress and embarrassment I descended, terrified of staying up but equally terrified of the judgement which awaited me on the ground.
My feet touched the dirt. I stared at the ground. There was a brief awkward silence and then they started to call out, cheering and chanting for me. “You’re still an awesome poet,” they said. “That’s what it means to give 110%” they affirmed. So I grabbed that ball from my pocket and I slammed it into that basket, claiming a goal. And they cheered and we hugged.
I may avoid rope ladders in the future, but I shall never allow fear of embarrassment to prevent me from trying new things. It is clear that people are supportive and kind before they are cruel and judgmental. I have some rope burn and I can’t help being a bit mortified, but above all I feel that my friendships have been strengthened. Someone has to see you in a vulnerable moment to fully appreciate you at your strongest, and so we shall not let this incident become awkward and taboo. We will laugh about it. And I will emerge from it. I fell, and it took a community to pull me back up.