Kibbutz and the desert!

Hi! I only have a few minutes! No pictures, but much to say.  Here's what we have done the past couple days:

Yesterday we rested. We did some yoga (haha) and talked about current conflicts in Israel. There were a lot of rhetorical questions: was the state if Israel established because of the holocaust, or in spite of it? Does the existence of Israel as a Jewish state raise anti-semitism in the world? And there were a lot of answers I hadn't thought about: other countries did not want Jewish refugees; Jews were a burden rather than equals; is antisemitism a generational thing?

we also had a political discussion with Neil Lazarus, who was very interesting and charismatic and gave us the rundown of Israel's political situation. We think that the U.S. Is very politically divided, but here it is a hundred times more pronounced. We talked about Isis too. All of our Israeli peers knew someone who had been killed in a terrorist attack. It was very humbling to know that we are so protected in the U.S.  

So after that we closed out Shabbat and had dinner. I am focusing on the elements of this trip that i do connect to, and trying not to force a connection to the elements that I don't.

Today we went to Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial. We learn about the holocaust as schoolchildren, but in a very impersonal, removed way. This amazing museum really made the mass murder of six million Jews a personal matter, and I realized that the holocaust was a racial weight, not a religious one. Even if the Jews had converted, they would still be killed for their race. 

 The architecture was full of symbolism (I couldn't take pictures, not allowed) and the artifacts were very moving. There was a metal cart that corpses had been loaded onto for burning. There was a pit of shoes - real shoes worn by real people as they stood at the edge of a pit and were shot and killed, or gassed and suffocated; the same shoes that an SS officer had removed and taken; the same shoes I could now touch if I desired. The same Jews who had defended their home country of germany, served in the German army, and which country had turned against them. 

A little girl's braids were on display. Her mother had cut them off and given them to a neighbor for safekeeping in the hope that her daughter could pass for a boy and be spared for working. The mother and daughter both were murdered. Parents left behind their infants because they would be discovered immediately by a baby crying. The elderly in concentration camps gave the children their bread. When German soldiers began to show emotional trauma from murdering Jews by rifle, they began the use of gas chambers to kill mass numbers. Prominent Jews in ghettos were in charge of creating lists of pele to be sent to the gas chambers each day; many committed suicide rather than do that. Priests were hanged for speaking out against hitler. Refugees fleeing to Cuba were turned away, so the captain sank the ship rather than bring the Jews back to Germany. There was so much fear and terrorism that the citizens went along with the nazis. There was a photo of 64 family members at a wedding; only 10 of them survived the holocaust. 

There were heartening stories too: the Muslims in the Middle East refused to give up their Jewish refugees, who had lived alongside them as family. Isn't that amazing? The Danish hid all of their refugees from German invasions. And what of the Greeks? What if some distant relative from my mother's side had helped some distant relative from my father's side? Isn't that amazing? Unlikely, but heartwarming all the same. 

We visited mount Herzl today as well, which is a military grave site. There were graves of prominent political figures, graves from decades ago, as well as graves of soldiers killed very recently in conflict. Two stuck out in particular, of American Jewish men who were moved to join the Israeli army; both were killed at 24. There were piles of tokens on each one. Another one was of a 25 year old man who was killed this past January; on his grave was a photo of him and his wife on their wedding day, gazing at each other and smiling wide. How long after that photo was taken had he died?

It takes a really special kind of person to be willing to give their life for their country; I know I could not do it. And yet it is almost comforting to know that these men and women died doing what they truly believed was good and right. 

Today was emotionally and physically exhausting. There have been brush fires at Masada, so we are unfortunately not doing that tomorrow, or the Dead Sea. Huge disappointment, but I am lucky to have experienced as much as I have thus far. It's also 115 degrees again. 

We are now IN THE DESERT! We are at a charming kibbutz, which is like a little village in the middle of nowhere. We are staying in little houses. There are cacti gardens and stars all around us and I took a selfie with an ostrich which I'll post later. We are only here for one night, and tomorrow night we will be joining a Bedouin community (sort of like a nomadic Arabic tribe) and sleeping in a tent in the Negev desert!!!