Leaning into history

I've previously mentioned my March of the Living trip in high school. This trip to Jewish sites and concentration camps in Poland coincided with and enhanced a developmentally normal but very intense period of my life of Holocaust obsession. I simply couldn't learn enough. 

And then some time after that, I turned away from the obsession. One of my memories of the trip was when Deborah Lipstadt  (one of my now heroes) spoke to our group and said, "Many of you here today will now embrace your Jewish identity because of the anti-Semitism that you've learned about here. I want to encourage you to embrace it despite that."

Connectedness

This post was drafted on July 29 but revised on August 10.

I'm sitting in Ben Gurion airport, wired with caffeine to help me through the time zone shift and distracting myself from the complicated feelings about leaving by writing this blog post.

LN read my previous post, appreciated it, and then we started up a back and forth about some of what she appreciated about her trip here. The word she used again and again was "connectedness." She used this word to describe both the way people communicated with each other on Shabbat as well as our everyday interactions with strangers. She also said she felt a sense of joy permeating wherever we went. It might be surprising to see that in a country at war, but I think she's onto something.