After a week and a half our Israel mission has reached its end. It’s been fun, and we learned and experienced a lot. The main focuses of our trip were to explore what it means to be Zionistic in the modern day, to provide an update at the seventieth year since Israel’s establishment, and to consider our hopes for Israel’s next seventy years. All of our speakers, tours, and activities focused on at least one of these topics. Personally, when I first opened our sourcebook, I was skeptical of the relevance of a number of items on our itinerary. While many of these (the tasting tour, host Shabbat and visit to the De Karina chocolate factory to name a few) looked like a lot of fun, I doubted that they would expand and enhance my understanding of Israel. I was very pleasantly surprised. I now have a better appreciation for the diversity of Israel’s population and the complexity of Israeli identities, have forged meaningful relationships with people who have given me new ideas and philosophies, and have expanded my perspective on Israel and the meaning and principles of modern Zionism.
Not only has this trip had an excellent balance in the types of information it offered us, but also in the medium in which it offered that information to us. We have had discussions with professors, toured the holy sites of multiple religions, visited the borders of Israel, and lived amongst the residents of Cleveland’s sister city, Beit Shean.
While for a few of us, this was our first trip to Israel, many of us (myself included) have been at least once before. And while I can understand the complaints that we never went to the beach or didn’t have enough time to go shopping, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Even at the places I had visited before, like Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem), there was never a moment in this trip when I wasn’t learning something new.