Summing It Up?

How, exactly, do you sum up the past 3 months living in Jerusalem? For that matter, how do you sum up the past 10 months living in Israel? How do you condense everything into an “elevator speech”, something that you can fire off without thinking when someone asks about your year abroad? How do you keep from chuckling when you are asked for the 400th time, “Did you have a good time?”

Did I have a good time? Well, OF COURSE I had a good time. I just had a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the chance to live and work in a country about as different and familiar to my own as you can get. I lived in a small city with 40 people I had never met who would become some of my closest friends, as we all found ourselves facing a culture shock that many of us had never imagined before. I lived in a town smaller than my college, speaking a language so different that it isn’t even read in the same direction as mine, and somehow managing not only to survive, but even to thrive. I lived in what may be the single most unique city in the world, one that has sparked countless wars as well as inspired countless dreams. I’ve met countless people from incredible walks of life, been to places I had only imagined, and had daily experiences that I can’t even start to describe. So… yeah. I had a good time.

The past few months, I’ve been living at Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus, while working for the Partnership Division of the Jewish Agency. It has been a great experience, especially due to the people I was working with. I’m not going to lie and say I did any sort of groundbreaking work – it was pretty basic office work, with a large part of my time dedicated to working on registration for an international conference last month. Like I said, the people in the office was what made the experience so great for me – I learned a great deal about the Partnership 2000 program, the Jewish Agency, and really even Israel as a whole. Seeing the dynamic of the office and finding my place in it made heading in to the office each day (with a real world schedule!) well worth it.

But now? That’s all in the past. OTZMA 24 has now been over for about 2 weeks, as hard as that is to believe. After a few final hikes, campouts, and swims in the Kinneret, we all said our goodbyes and parted ways, back to our respective homes. Some of us will eventually return to Israel as olim hadashim (new immigrants), some of us will stick around for a while to begin their rabbinical studies (cough cough Andi cough), and many of us will find our places back in the United States. But all of us will, in some way, find our lives affected by our year together in Israel. And really, I’m not sure I can explain it any better than that.

And as for that other question – no, I don’t know yet where I’m going to go from here!