Direct antenna to God
It’s safe to say that I will never experience another day as pivotal to my Judaism as Friday.
That morning we went to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where we watched a video on how Israel was created. Then, we went into the room where David Ben-Gurion announced to the world that Israel declared itself a Jewish state. The room, left as it was when the meeting was held almost 63 years ago, with microphones in place and placards denoting where every politician sat, along with two Israeli flags hung vertically on the wall behind the podium, was amazing in itself. But the most moving part was when a museum curator played a recording of Ben-Gurion’s declaration as we sat in the audience and listened. That was followed by Hatikvah, and I’m told that the soldiers in our group stood at attention and sang along. I didn’t see this for myself because I was in my own world taking in my surroundings and fighting back tears.
That evening, we had Shabbat at the Kotel. All that night and into the next morning, many people asked me what I thought of my first time there. My response was always, “I don’t have the words to describe it.” But during Shabbat lunch the next day, a yeshiva student (we were split up into smaller groups and had lunch at the homes of Israeli families) asked me not what I thought, but how I felt, which was a question I had not yet considered. After thinking for a while, I realized (and told him) that when I touched the wall and prayed, it was the first and only time in my life that I felt I had a direct antenna to God.
There are five days left on this trip, which is still plenty of time for me to learn and grow as a Jew. But either one of those experiences in themselves would have made my time in Israel well worth the journey.
