Nate's blog

Today I went to the tomb of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. He was a Rabbi. He was a Rabbi who lived during the 2nd century CE. He was a Rabbi who lived during the 2nd century CE and compiled the mishnah. Over all I did not like this trip. I really hate it when I go to a cemetery and I feel that the mood is not respectful. The grave of Rabbi Yehuda is definitely not a very respected place. Yes, the trees are all trimmed nicely, but all of the graves there have been removed and the whole ancient cemetery has been turned into a tourist attraction.

Afterwords we went to the ancient town of Tzipori, this is the town in which Rabbi Yehuda died. This town is also talked about in the Talmud a lot. This archeological site was cool because it was an example of how Jews lived peacefully with Romans. The Jews in this town even adopted some of the Roman culture. We went to the synagogue and saw a really neat and beautiful mosaic on the floor there. However, this got me thinking, exactly how much should Jews assimilate?

The more I thought about this the more I came up with reasons that Jews should not assimilate. I looked at how today assimilation has caused Jews to splinter off into different groups and how some Jews today don’t know any Torah. But there is also the other side, the non-Jewish world offers many improvements into our everyday lives. So over all my opinion is that Jews should assimilate but they should only do it as long as they still retain their Judaism.

 (yes you did just read a homework assignment.[I'm using my blog for my Journals. Journals are summaries that I have to write of each trip. In these summaries I am supposed to include my opinion of the things that we did. I get graded on Journals.])

Today I went spelunking. What is spelunking you ask, well it is when you go exploring in caves. Which caves you ask, well obviously it was caves in Israel… to be more specific the caves that we went to were in Bet Guvrin. These were the caves that the great Rabbis hid in during Roman times. It was cool being in these caves because they were exactly the same way when the Rabbis were there.

The other thing that I did today was go digging in an actual archaeological site. This was kind of cool, I didn’t really find any thing but Eric found a really cool piece of glass.

After that I went back to the dorms and the counselors had prepared activities for the guys and girls. While the girls backed cookies the guys went into a dark room lit candles and put facial cream on each other, it was very funny.

(Here is the part of the post where I would normally put pictures but I cannot because I do not have a working camera)

This Sunday I went paint-balling here. At first I was kind of scared and I was not sure if I wanted to even play the first game. But I got over my fear and I went out to play, and it wasn’t so bad. I shot 2 people in the first game and got shot after that. We played 3 other games and in the 2nd to last one I did not get shot at all. It was really cool. Over all my team won the most games.

However after all of this fun something awful happened(remember that the Internet makes you stupid). I dropped my camera. So, unfortunately I won’t upload any more pictures until I get a new one.

I just got back from Masada it was a very moving experience. I got up at 4 in the morning to hike up the snake trail. The hike up took about an hour and the view from the top was very rewarding. Because of the snow and rain from the day before there was still cloud cover over parts of the dead sea and Masada, but from the top of Masada I could still see Jordan on the other side.

Masada was my favorite trip so far. I had a lot fun learning about how the Jews lived and died there. My favorite part of the trip was at then end when we stood at the edge of Masada and yelled out into the mountains “שנית! מצדה! לא! תיפל!“(Masada will not fall a second time). This also happens to be what tank commanders yell out when they finish basic training on top of Masada. It has symbolic meaning for the state of Israel. The response that we got was very cool, it sounded like there were thousands of voices yelling back at us. A nice way to think of this was that it was the voices of the dead yelling back at us.

After that I went to the dead sea, it was not as moving as Masada but it was still fun. (Even though my legs hurt a lot when I got out). Here is a pic from Masada and the dead sea…