Submitted by Rachel Glazer

Emma Goldberg (New York, NY):

For my first Shabbat back at home, I committed myself to a full 25-hour halachic observance. Laptop shut down, cell phone turned off, wallet shoved somewhere deep in the recesses of my dresser. Twenty-four hours later I found myself on the couch, eyes glued to the clock, anxiously counting down the minutes until I could power up my computer and delve back into my normal life.

It wasn’t the absence of Facebook or text messages that I minded so much. It was the lack of creation. I had been working on a short story all week and lines of prose kept leaping into my head, winding their way to my fingertips and impatiently pulsing towards fresh notebook pages. I had spent the previous Thursday beginning that dreaded college essay, and Saturday at noon my latest lead sentence demanded to know why it wasn’t being recorded in a “brainstorm” document. Shabbat felt stifling in its absence of action, a difficult time for the doers of the world.

In a lot of ways, Bronfman was my five-week Shabbat. We took buses, turned on lights, and spent money on falafel, so halachically speaking, not really. But it was a five-week break from reality, when we had no obligations other than to question, share, and disagree. The Torah as water analogy that we discussed feels relevant; our learning made the ink bleed on my mental to-do list, made responsibilities like summer required reading and college applications feel irrelevant.

Shabbat is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, our chance to “turn from the world of creation to the creation of the world.” Bronfman was a time to turn from to-do to to-deliberate, from act on this to analyze that. That is a lot more difficult to do at home without peers surrounding me who are eager to discuss prayer, spirituality, and egalitarianism.

Pirkei Avot teaches that learning is most important in that it inspires action. As I start to unpack and settle in at home, I feel ready to shift from discussion to doing, to begin planning my Ma’aseh project as a start. But I’ve also learned that study and action can and should co-exist. I don’t want to leave behind my ability to close my eyes, crumple up my sticky note lists, and slip into an existential question. In the past five weeks I’ve learned how much I can learn by putting away my pens and paper and rooting around in the filing cabinets of my mind. So next Shabbat once again I’ll be taking on the challenge of attempting to find meaning in the powering down of my laptop and the creation of a new world.

Drawn by Anna Meixler

Anna Meixler (White Plains, NY):

My duffel still sits like someone who’s all dressed up with nowhere to go. It’s a sorry sight, yet I prefer to see its olive canvas zipped tightly, bulging in strange places from the stress of my clothes. I like that my bedroom’s hardwood floor is littered with notebooks, voltage adapters, and toiletries. I enjoy that my jetlagged odysseys to the bathroom or the kitchen during the night are full of tripping and shuffling around the mess, banging my shins on my suitcase. The alternative is unsettling. I don’t want to unpack, to shake the Negev’s sand out of my shoes in fear that doing so will take me one step further from the night we sat in the desert, admiring its stars. I don’t want to wash my knee-length skirts, losing the smells and grime of the Old City in favor of Tide’s synthetic “Sea Breeze”. Unpacking means permanence; a tidy room says, “I’m here to stay and I want to see my floor and perhaps be able to walk in and out at night without risking injury.”

Drawn by Anna Meixler

I’m anxious without the smells and sounds and faces that grew so familiar and so beloved over those five and a half weeks. So I look at photos; I flip through my camera’s insides and am welcomed by waves of nostalgia and the smiling faces of Fellows. I draw people I’ve seen, hoping to solidify the smiling woman in South Tel Aviv and the ancient Rabbi in Tzfat. I try to bring these people closer, burning their eyes into my head and refusing to unpack and clean up as a promise that I’ll return soon. After all, I’d much rather unpack complex theological theories and sticky nutella sandwiches.

Anya (Likes) Tudisco (Seattle, WA):

A wallet is found
Oh goodie golly jeepers
Eat with happiness

A belief in God
Need not be so rational
God isn’t, is he?

I really like kids
Honest, fearless, quite funny
No, I won’t grow up

Sun shines clawing heat
I’ll miss you, more than you know
But clouds are waiting

A question at home
Not a six hundred ton stone
Merely a pebble

Feet on Goldstein floor
Never did wash these damn sheets
I like Nutella

Who are you to say
What holiness means for them?
Some more bias please

Stars, stone, and people
Past and present intertwined
History major?!

—————-

I am home again
Quinoa, hippies, and family
World away from there

“It was amazing”
Wish it was polite to say
“You can’t understand”

Thou shalt acquire
Thirst, a teacher, and a friend
Bronfman in three words

Two powerful fears
Satisfied complacency
Forgetting lessons

Can He find me there?
Walla, Walla Washington
Jews at a distance

An affirmation
I’m who I was beforehand
Just now I’m more me

Rich discovery
With an open heart, there are
No bounds to friendship

Madrichim sessions
Andrelle Eating Daniel- Yum!
Aching from laughter

Thanks to Assaf Snir
For finding all my lost shit
What a cool guy too

Eleven hundred
Memories of the summer
Captured in my hand

It will take decades
Unpacking this huge sandwich
Forever grateful

Ayelet Wenger (Columbus, OH):

It was the second day and a faculty member was instructing us on our next activity.

“We’re going to take you to the mini mall up the street,” he told us. “What you have to do is go up to people and talk to them.”

We gazed at him in blank amazement as the principles of parents and teachers revolted in our heads. “Don’t talk to strangers.” “Mind your own business.” “Don’t disturb that nice man, dear, he’s busy.”

“It’s a piece of cake,” our teacher assured us. “Find out what they think of Netanyahu. Get their opinions on the best cottage cheese brand. Walk up to someone on the street and ask, ‘Where do you come from?’”

Five weeks later I waved goodbye to the last Bronfman fellow and stepped on to my connection flight. As I thrust my boarding pass at the flight attendant, I had the swooping sensation of stepping off of the heady peak of an ivory tower. The three a.m. debates on G-d, the visits to tombs, walls, and ruins of the ancient world, the unending flood of brilliant speakers and teachers–all of these were gone, to be memorialized only in a facebook thread.

What had happened to me? Here I was, stuffing the ratty green knapsack I had come with into the baggage rack, lending half an ear to the same old airplane safety presentation that I had heard five weeks ago. The lessons that had appeared so concrete on the program appeared fragile and rootless now. Would I maintain what I had learnt, or would my newfound openness to the stories of others wash off as easily as the greasy stickiness of an overnight El-Al flight? Had I really learned anything?

A young black woman in a knee-length skirt sat down in the seat next to mine and pulled out a bible.

“So,” I began, “Where do you come from?”

Rafi Ellenson (New York, NY):

I don’t want to go to Jewish Disneyland again, my Jewish Observance can be best summed up by my celebration of Shabbat, what moves me more than anything else are my legs, and the decision to attend a secular high school was amongst the most challenging of my life.
Which became
Yes, I find gender studies to be a fascinating field, I’ve been reading a lot of Stanislavsky lately to learn about the process of directing, some modern values require disobedience to Halachah, and experience is different than discussion.
Which became
Who’s this girl who wrote the poem?
Which became
Hi, I’m Rafi from New York City, you invented a food preservation system?, when did you become a Ba’al T’shuvah?, and, as I thought to myself, everyone here is so nice.
Which became
Existential crisis, crisis of faith, gender norm crisis, and why is Israel important crisis.
Which became
Judaism is important to me because of its tradition and it defines me more than I define it, the Kotel has some sort of irrational power on me, feminism is as much about equality of both genders as raising up a formerly subjugated people, and Israel is the irreplaceable Jewish melting pot.
Which became the most intense 5 weeks of my life wherein everything was scrutinized, I befriended those I would have never otherwise, and I learned as much about other peoples’ views as I did my own.
Thank you.

Chava Lansky (Amherst, MA):

I’ve always thought of Judaism as cold. Not in a metaphorical way, but physically cold. Eastern Europe always seems cold. Fur coats, heavy hats, leather boots, wool stockings. In photos, my great grandparents are standing stiffly, layered in thick clothing. At Yad Vashem I saw photos of children ice skating across frozen lakes. The Yiddish language itself is heavy, garbled sounds coated with an everlasting cough and shiver. Memories of my childhood show Yiddish being spoken by my father and his friends around a raging fire, snow falls outside. Even my shul is cold, the air conditioning perpetually too high, huddling under my father’s heavy tallis for warmth. The places I go to experience more Jewish culture are New York or Montreal, and never in the summer. This is my Judaism, my Jewish identity.

Israel has skewed my idea of Judaism in so many ways, and now I realize that temperature is one of the many. For me, Jews don’t wear bathing suits, they don’t eat fresh fruit, they don’t sit in the sun. Middle Eastern culture has never been Jewish culture for me before, and now I’m attempting to understand both the dichotomy and the connection between my past and future conceptions, or even the past and future of the Jewish people.

Poem about James Turrell statue at Israel Museum

Concentric squares
Outer, inner, sky, stone
legs sticky on smooth benches
Quiet,
but for contented sighs around the periphery like irons releasing steam.
Above, the square
“plus magnifique.”
Blue like you can only find in a
crayola
box.
Unblemished, untouched, clean.
Pure.
Blue shining dawn, a single hue yet filled with light enough for a Broadway stage.
Awe.
The same sky seen always, but contained, the energy pulsing
shining.
An animal in a cage too small,
a child’s innocent hands bringing it
closer
to your face than possible
in “real life.”
Beauty magnified.
Shielding eyes from the light, eyes
blue
like the sky.
Bits of sky pulsing in my head, also contained, trying to get
out
and see the
world.
But, for now, containment suits me.
It simplifies and sorts out.
Allows me to make sense of the blue,
the sky,
the universe.
Allows me to manage the abyss.
At least just till I leave the comfort of squares:
The naivety
of
geometry.

Hannah Gorman (San Francisco, CA):

As the last Bronfman Shabbat came to a close, I find myself looking back with nostalgia on our previous Saturdays.

Though they are days of rest, Shabbatot on Bronfman tend to include our busiest and richest hours. Our practices vary from week to week and place to place. Sometimes we analyzed the week’s Torah reading, another time the nuances of the newest Harry Potter movie. One week we hardly slept at all, instead singing until the early morning. But one of my favorite Shabbat memories centers around some high-quality sleeping.

Chava and I stayed together last weekend with Adi, our sweet and energetic Israeli host sister. Shabbat afternoon, Adi’s father took the three of us and Adi’s little sister Dania on a driving tour of Tel Aviv. We then headed over to the park to play with hula hoops and paddle boats. But once we arrived, the “day of rest” feeling pounced: all five of us fell asleep almost immediately for a sunny hour on the grass.

As our 5.5 weeks draw to a close, I’m overwhelmed with a need to fit even more into every remaining hour in Israel. But Bronfman Shabbatot have taught me that with people this great, every minute is valuable – awake or asleep!

Becca Bakal (South Barrington, IL):

This summer, one of my favorite ways to concentrate an experience has been to listen.  Sometimes I close my eyes and sit still, just hoping to absorb the moment.  Whether I listen to a political debate between Fellows, a whooshing air conditioner and the breathing of my roommates as we rest after a hike, or beautiful singing (everything from “Yom Ze Mechubad” to “Stacey’s Mom,”) I want to cherish the experience.

During the Mifgash with the Israeli Fellows, listening had an extra allure:  I could learn some Hebrew!  My Israeli friends gossiped in their home tongue or lapsed into Hebrew when they forgot an English word they wanted to use, so I tried to apply my rusty and limited knowledge of the language to the discussion.

However much I relished this opportunity I can only understand Hebrew spoken at a five-year-old child’s pace, so people quickly lost patience with me when I tried to conduct conversations in Hebrew.

One morning, I sat on the bus next to Oded Mazal, one of the Amitim, and requested that we converse in Hebrew.

Me: “Efshare daber b’ivrit?  Ani rotzah l’daber ivrit yoter tov” – Can we speak Hebrew? I want to speak Hebrew well.

Oded:  “Ken, blahblahblah” – Yes and he proceeded to speak rapid Hebrew

Me:  “Mah?” – What?

Oded: “I’ll just speak in English.  So, how are you?”

Me: “Tov maod. V’atah?”  – Good, and you?

Oded: “I’m good.  Where are you from?”

I spoke in Hebrew and Oded responded in English.  Occasionally, (although it probably seemed to Oded that it was frequently), I would ask him for a word in Hebrew, insert it into my speech, and then promptly forget how to pronounce the word.  I spent ten minutes trying to learn how to say Christmas (Chag Hamoled).

After all the great conversations I’ve had this summer – both in Hebrew and in English – I hope to carry some of the memories with me.

Daniel Liss (Silver Spring, MD):

I grew up on good bread. Crisp, fluffy, steam-infused, good bread. And, with stories of family waking up in the wee hours of the morning, trekking through sleet, fog, and often hail, you can imagine what launched my week-long quest for good bread – the type of good bread that the Goldstein Youth Village simply cannot provide.

Fellow fellow Becca Bakal joined the search early on. Apparently, she grew up with good bread as well, or perhaps she was persuaded by my forlorn bread-face.

Our first adventure began humbly, in the small mini-mall near the Youth Village, when a kind gentleman named Tsadly sadly explained to us that this counter only sold cheese. Bread and cheese, it turns out, are not as mutually compatible in Israel as they are at home.

Later in the week, Becca and I realized that we would need to jump back onto the proverbial horse to achieve our goal. We wandered through streets, stores, even private homes in the hopes of finding the bread that might remind us of home. When, at last, we discovered the small boulangerie situated in an easy-to-miss corner of the Old City, we practically dropped to our knees in a hunger to consecrate the moment. Unfortunately, the shopkeeper would inform us, dollar bills just don’t cut it in Israel. Our group needed to move on, so for now, the quest would need to remain an open adventure.

Our journey reached a culmination when the group visited Na La Gaat, an avant-garde acting troupe with the aim of conveying the humanity behind each member of its all blind and deaf cast. The cast began its performance sitting around a long workbench kneading dough. One by one, members of the cast stood up and shared some dream or personal anecdote. As the show continued, the cast deposited its loaves in ovens and continued to draw us into their individual stories.

They suffused our nostrils with the odor and fragrance of fresh bread. Finally, at the end of the show, the bread was ready and the theater company invited the entire audience on stage to break bread with the cast. Eating this bread and having this opportunity to interact with the bakers consummated our journey.

Dalia Wolfson (Bronx, NY):

I wish Yehuda Amichai was still alive so we could sit together over a cup of coarse Turkish coffee at café “Tmol Shilshom,” taking little bites out of dainty frosted pastries and discussing poetry. Specifically, I would bring a thin book of his poems and turn to “Tourists,” the very first creative piece we studied together as a group on Bronfman. In that work, Amichai pokes fun at the visiting foreigners, of their shutter-happy fingers and portable soap containers and typical historical tour routes.

After two weeks on Bronfman, I had already begun to feel at home in the Goldstein Youth Village, I had laughed “behind heavy curtains,” with candy-colored stripes and adapted to cooked vegetables with tahini on the side. I had travelled with the group to offbeat places – South Tel Aviv, a neon-lit Kurdish synagogue, the Israeli Supreme Court. But it was not until the Mifgash with the Israeli Fellows this week that I began to feel as if I had pulled aside the curtains of my tourist experience – the veil of estrangement that Bialik said is inherent in translation – and felt immersed in Hebrew.

The Mifgash was an opportunity to engage not only with Yehuda HaNasi’s tomb and the Trumpeldor Cemetery, but with the living souls that walk the streets of Israel’s holy cities on a daily basis. The word “mifgash” brings to mind an encounter that is “panim el panim – face to face,” and the last week has been one long, beautiful, direct conversation.