At an early 8:30 this morning, we were uprooted from our all-American rooms. Although schlepping our luggage bags out of our rooms may have been a struggle, the exhaustion was overpowered by the excitement in the air. Today was the day that the Israelis were coming! After we had finished our breakfast and much of our cohort had left the dining hall, Rachel spotted the busses pulling in. After detecting our Karmiel-Misgav fellows, people began screaming to one another from afar. Within minutes and hundreds of hugs to each other, the entire two cohorts began to intertwine once again. For me at least, the mere two days of separation between us had felt just as long as the gap was between NAS (May) and community week (last week). The entire thing looked like a scene out of the parent trap.
After an hour of maagaling in our own Pittsburgh cohort, the opening ceremony commenced. We got a taste of what each partnership was like, and a vague idea of what was to come. After the ceremony ended, the programming began. The dynamic of yesterday's tribe was shattered with the introduction of 12 Israelis. In addition to the new faces in the room, a language barrier quickly appeared and so did new and different perspectives. Our tribe discussed and debated what family and covenant meant to us personally, and to the Jewish community as a whole. One of the Israelis in my room felt passionately that Shabbat was an integral part of their covenant, meanwhile others felt that being Shomer Shabbas was not even considered in their personal covenants with G-d. This is just one example of how our tribe now consists of contrasting opinions because of the Israelis.
After programming many of us elected to have dinner exclusively with our tribe-mates, which became incredibly interesting as we all talked about how our diller experiences had been very different, but very the same. After dinner and our second maagal of the day, our cohorts split off to socializing or to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
Lila tov,
Jonathan Schermer