Perspectives

As the trip winds down, it's impossible not to start thinking about the changing reality I face. I've never been very good at dealing with the end of trips or camps, losing people and going back to life at home. I'd love to say that as I've gotten older and more mature I'm better at handling the change, but I'm not sure that this is true.

Change is so constant in the human life. In an hour, our group plans can change because Hamas decides to send more rockets towards Israel. In 3 days I leave the country and go back to the American existence. Yet there are so many things on the planet that don't change, at least at a pace that the human eye can see. At Masada, I stumbled into the old synagogue that I was bat mitzvahed in 4 years ago. It was eerily the same, and the very same Rabbi that had done my service was there folding up a tallit from a service that had just taken place. Judaism has evolved, but essentially remained the same for nearly five thousand years. The desert landscape of the Ramon Crater that I saw perched on a mass of rock at 5 am Sunday morning looks the same way it did two thousand years ago. It boggles my mind that in my day to day and month to month life there can be so much change, yet my life overlaps with forces that remain constant. The sun always rises in the east, every single morning. Even though we are so small, we are such a part of things so large in comparison to us.

Change can shift your perspective almost instantaneously. The last few days have been a whirlwind. Not necessarily because of jam packed itineraries-- not at all, actually. We've been doing a plethora of random activities, some scheduled and some the backup plans that have been messily thrown together after areas were deemed unsafe because of rocket threats. It's a scary new reality that I'm experiencing-- actually living the "Israeli reality" instead of seeing it inside a TV screen. The past days have been full of new perspectives like this one. I've seen conflict in Israel from an Israeli mindset, watched the world wake up sitting high above an ancient desert crater, and sat for hours in a Dead Sea spa surrounded by Russians covered in mud. That's a first, let me tell you.

There's been so much change in my life in the past week, and the juxtaposition of this and the ancient, unchanging places and landscapes I've been to has forced me out of the bubble perspective I've grown up in.
I've been trying to come up with a deep and profound closing for this, but I don't have a revelation just yet. I'll let you know when I do.

- Lily Greenberg Call, 16, San Diego