Participants shared with us their feelings about being in Israel while we were at Mt. Masada.

StandWithUs Taglit Birthright Trip Winter 2008/09

This was the first day of our journey, where we were blindfolded and led to Jerusalem at sunset. We got to see the golden city shimmering with our own eyes. It was an amazing experience that we will remember forever!

By David P. Greisman
Sentinel Staff
Published: Saturday, January 24, 2009

JERUSALEM — We were in blindfolds, led off our bus one by one, watched over by a group that included two people carrying rifles. We knew we were in Israel, in Jerusalem, but had little idea of where, at present, we were going. We came to a stop. They spoke for a few minutes. Take off your blindfolds, they said at the end. We did.

There, in front of us, was the Old City, the Muslim Quarter, the gleaming gold Dome of the Rock, the land on which both the First Temple and Second Temple once stood.

They were our guides for what was to be a 10-day journey through ancestry, history and spirituality. The armed man and woman were our medics and security guards.

We were in the land where it all began.

The beginning, then, is the perfect place to start.

I am Jewish.

That label, that bare minimum, had always been clear. What that meant was not.

For the first several years of my life I thought I was half-Christian, half-Jewish. After all, we went to my paternal grandparents’ home for Christmas, while I joined my mother and her father for Passover.

Yet there was no Christ in our Christmas. The Greisman family instead looked at Dec. 25 as an American institution, a day when the family came together. We were ethnically Jewish. The choice to be religious would always be mine to make.

I went to the occasional holiday services. I tried fasting for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, once or twice. But I was never bar mitzvahed, and I knew no Hebrew beyond “shalom,” “mazel tov” and, well, “matzoh.”

Last month, at 26, I would find myself memorizing and singing “Hatikva,” the Israeli national anthem. I would have a bar mitzvah atop the ancient mountain fortress of Masada. I would swim in the Dead Sea, ride a camel in the Negev Desert and spend the better part of Hanukkah with so many who, like me, had stories behind their journeys.

There was the Internet business owner who cried nearly every day at what he saw; the convert who had just finished her first semester in graduate school for Judaic studies; the Persian Jew whose family had fled Iran and its war with Iraq and who still had relatives in that country.

We were on a trip called Taglit-Birthright Israel, an umbrella organization that, through donations, sends Jews ages 18 to 26 on a 10-day tour of Israel.

Our trip’s organizer was the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs, an Israeli advocacy group that sought to teach us about the country, about its origins and its peoples, its conflicts and its successes.

We filled two buses. I joined the older group, 41 people with disparate backgrounds. We came with various expectations. On the second day, with a little prompting, I came up with three goals: to be bar mitzvahed; to get a fuller understand of what Israel means to Jews; and to know that this trip was for more than tourism.

I received everything I asked for, and so much more.

But not at first.

Mere hours after landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv — named after the country’s first prime minister, the man who in 1948 declared Israel’s statehood — we headed east toward Jerusalem, a city with importance far beyond being the nation’s capital.

Along the way, our guides asked us a question simultaneously simple and weighty: “Do you trust us?”

They had a surprise for us. But we would have to close the curtains on the bus and wear blindfolds.

When the moment arrived, we stumbled, hand in hand, unknowingly walking on the Mount of Olives. Off came the blindfolds, revealing, below and to the west, the Old City of Jerusalem.

It comes off cliche, but a seemingly visceral reaction of excitement and emotion coursed through bodies and minds. I felt an initial rush of the former but little of the latter. Some cried. I felt nothing.

“I don’t really know what I’m looking at,” I said under my breath. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing.”

I could have been in any of the world’s great cities, opening my eyes to any of many architectural or historical wonders. But I was a Jew with other Jews in a land of Jews. Why was my experience already so different than that of others?

I kept quiet, listening as others spoke, mulling, attempting to reach an answer, a solution.

I confided in a guide. “You’re thinking about it too much,” he said.

He was right.

“Welcome home,” we were told on our first day. Each of those words, taken separately, would soon seem apt.

Yes, it was a free trip.

That spending 10 days more than 5,000 miles from home would not leave me bankrupt was quite appealing.

It was how we went. For an overwhelming majority of us, it was not why we went.

“For so long, Judaism had been in my past but not my present, and I was uncertain as to what role it would play in my future,” I wrote in my Birthright application back in September.

“My perspective changed a few years back,” I wrote. “I wanted my heritage to be more than a memory, more than an occasional part of my life.”

I had started attending the local synagogue, feeling comfortable there no matter how many times I found myself momentarily lost during services, I wrote.

“I am researching what it is to be Jewish,” I wrote. “But there is quite the difference between learning in books and experiencing in person.”

Truthfully, the research was a goal I had yet to follow through on. And while I could have immersed myself in history books, theological texts and assorted Web sites, it would be far more meaningful to be there, to see and hear for myself.

Yes, it was a free trip. But I applied to Birthright because while I knew that Israel was important, I didn’t quite understand why.

Even had I read about it for years, I still never would have taken from thousands upon thousands of pages what I took in over 10 days.

Ten days of whirlwind travel and heightened emotion. An itinerary that ranged from traveling to a pomegranate winery to sitting in a coffee shop once owned by an Israeli soldier killed in the Second Lebanon War.

Weeks removed, I can categorize everything we did.

History, ancient and recent. An archeological site where we pulled up pieces of pottery from a long-gone Jewish civilization. The Western Wall of the Second Temple, the closest Jews had been able to get to the former temple site for centuries. Masada, a desert mesa on which King Herod built a fortress. Israel’s Holocaust museum, where we followed the ordeals of Jews up to, during and after World War II.

Conflict, present and past. The military cemetery. The security fence and wall between Israel and the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. A kibbutz on the border with Lebanon that had fended off attacks from Hezbollah and had shrapnel in its buildings to show for it. The bombed-out former Syrian headquarters in the Golan Heights.

Culture, city by city, town by town. Markets, bars and clubs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. An olive oil factory and the pomegranate winery. Bedouin tents in the Judea Desert. Save A Child’s Heart, an organization where members of our group played with a young Iraqi child who had come to Israel to receive medical care.

We developed a connection to the land — what drew Jews back to the Middle East, what they confronted upon their return and what they continue to face. We learned why Jews from countries as different as Argentina and Ethiopia return to their ancestral homeland.

I had my bar mitzvah. I came out with a fuller understanding of what Israel means to Jews. And the trip had far more meaning for me than the typical tourist experience.

I also came out with something else quite unexpected.

A desire to go back.

And not just for another vacation.

I’ve had numerous urges and whims in my life, some I’ve ignored, others I’ve pursued to varying degrees of success. I’m not yet sure what this one will be.

Under Israel’s law of return, I could make aliyah, become a dual citizen, pick up and move and receive assistance for doing so.

Yes, I could have gone to any of the world’s great cities, opening my eyes to any of many architectural, historical and cultural wonders.

But I was a Jew with other Jews in a land of Jews.

That day I arrived, with the blindfold off, I felt nothing.

By the time I left, my eyes had been opened, and I felt like I was home.

For an in-depth, multi-day look at David Greisman’s time in Israel, go online to his Sentinel blog, “In the Kingdom of David,” kingdomofdavid.wordpress.com

I’ll leave you with a blurb for now as Shabbat arrives in Los Angeles: from dancing in the hills of Jerusalem, to hiking up the top of Masada, and relaxing in the warm blue waters of the Tel Aviv coast line – this Birthright has it ALL!

Photos to come…

Karen Klein
StandWithUs
West Coast Campus Coordinator
Karen.Klein@standwithus.com