Masa Israel Journey Blog

Published : June 26, 2012

By Arielle Wasserman, Midreshet Lindenbaum

It’s June, and the packing and planning for your year in Israel has begun in earnest. Running to Walmart and Target making sure you have enough toothpaste and socks to last you the full ten months- because, you know, it’s not like you can get these items in Israel. Obviously not.

It’s not just the physical preparations that are making you excited and terrified and breathless and have your heart pounding so fast and so loud you’d swear it’s about to come out of your chest.

It’s the mental ones too. The questions that keep you up at night. Am I going to change? Do I want to? Is the learning going to be too hard? Too easy? Am I going to make new friends? Am I going to lose my old ones?

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Homeland and Home

Published : June 20, 2012

By Jacob Siegel, Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies

I arrived in the United States early this morning, passing a team of Israeli shlichim from the same flight as me. Carrying my heavy luggage with me, I boarded a bus down the East Coast toward Washington, DC. I fell asleep instantly, and I woke up in the middle of the bus ride.

The bus was whizzing by green grass, tall trees siding the highway, and glimpses of furrowed fields beyond the hedge.

We stopped at the Walt Whitman Rest Area, in Cherry Hill. At this point we had been driving for more than an hour, past a pastoral painting of rural land. I recalled the long drive that took me, just yesterday, out of Israel – the taxi from Jerusalem up the highway to the airport, passing bush, shrub, bits of desert, bits of farmland.

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