Trip of a lifetime

Seeing Israel through fresh eyes

April 13, 2010

NU Magazine – April 2010

Last December, 54 members of my extended family and many friends took a week-long trip to Israel in honor of my younger sister’s bat mitzva.

The trip of a lifetime would include a political and religious tour and culminate with my sister’s service at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem overlooking the Old City.

Fresh off the plane, our first stop was a biblical botanical garden outside Jerusalem for a celebratory tree planting ceremony. We said a prayer in honor of arriving in the Holy Land and a prayer in honor of planting the new seedlings. It was not only an environmentally friendly and economically sustainable act, but a true mitzva.

For the next few days, we explored the Old City of Jerusalem. We also heard from speakers such as Wendy Singer, director of the Jerusalem office of AIPAC, or American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, who talked about the Obama administration’s actions toward peace in the Middle East.

We visited the West Bank, and atop a lookout in a Jewish settlement, heard from Col. Miri Eisen of the IDF, who appears on CNN and Fox News, about Israel’s “narrow waistline.”

Another speaker, Col. Benzi Gruber of the IDF, told us about the daily ethical dilemmas “in the field” that Israel faces to fight terrorism, including the propaganda used by Palestinian terrorists to frame Israel as a “human rights abusing” country.

No matter who we were, how old, or how many trips we’d taken before, together we delved into the complicated history of Israel, searching its layers for truth.

We returned home feeling that we had accomplished something important; something that crossed our varying generations, all connecting passionately through our shared love of the Land of Israel.

Elana Widmann attends Newark Academy and is a member of Nu’s teen board.