My Birth Right Trip
This story was submitted by Darcy Warren to the Stories of Travel collection as part of the May SEEQ sessions.
They say that everything that happens in your life is preparing you for something you will experience later. Over these last few years I have found truth in this statement when I reflect on and take myself back to the Birth Right trip took to Israel when I was 26.
I had recently made a huge change in my life. I left everything I knew and all my friends and close family to follow the man I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I moved across the country from Arizona to Richmond, Virginia. When my now husband told me, he was moving to Richmond when we were discussing moving to be with each other I asked, “Um, where is that?” (obviously I didn’t remember my history lessons as well as I thought). It was a big move. I lived by myself for the first time, I had no family close by and the only friends I had were the ones I met through my husband. I am an extravert by nature and usually very comfortable in most settings, but it took me a while to truly feel comfortable in Richmond, the social scene and my new life. I pretended I was fine, and I faked my way through it but as I look back now, I wasn’t. I was nervous and scared and trying way to hard to fit in.
I was hitting a bit of a rough patch in my first year here and two of my best friends from back home approached me about going to Israel with Birth Right. If you are Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 26 you can get an all expense paid trip to Israel. The idea of this was perfect because of a few reasons. I was 26, working in non-profit so I didn’t’ have a lot of money. Having a trip pretty much paid for was a god sent. I needed to get away to get my head straight. I was questioning if the move to Richmond was right for me. I missed my friends dearly. My friends who knew me and loved me for who I was. I had been feeling like I didn’t truly belong with my new social scene in Richmond, so this aspect was completely exciting. I also felt like I had veered away from my Judaism. My mother reminded me of it every second she could. I thought, I work at the JCC, how much more Jewish do you want me to be? But she was correct, and I knew it. I wasn’t connected to the spiritual part of my Judaism and what it meant to me. So, I signed up and headed to Israel with two of my closest friends from my childhood.
I was in Israel for 2 amazing weeks. It was an outdoor excursion trip, so we did a lot of activities that took us into the nature and beauty of Israel along with the typical, holly places. I floated in the dead sea, hiked to the top of Masada, was on boat in the sea of Galilea, saw the place where the last supper was held, prayed at the wall. You get it. We did it.
But the two moments that always stuck with me were these. We always had 8 Israeli soldiers with us for protection. I honestly never felt unsafe in Israel, but it was mandatory. They were there to protect us but also for us to bond with and learn from. One day we all (about 40 American adults and 8 Israeli soldiers) sat around and got into a deep discussion. The question was posed to us, “Are you a Jewish American or an American Jew?” Most of us, including me answered I’m an American Jew. It was how I identified at that point. By the end of the trip I felt different. The other question they asked us was, “What’s to say what happened in Europe wouldn’t happen in America to the Jews?” This question made EVERY ONE of us gasp. “NEVER in America would this happen.” We had very long discussions about why we felt this way. Our government would never allow anything like the Holocaust to happen. I was adamant we were safe.
Well, over the past few years I look back at this memory and I take myself back to the grass we were sitting on at the hotel in Tel Aviv and I can still smell the ocean. I can smell the Shabbat dinner being cooked and I can hear the busy sounds of the world around us, everyone preparing for Shabbat. The holiest day of the week. I felt safe there. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t know if I feel the same way anymore about our country. Or I guess I should say I don’t feel as safe here anymore. I can be logical about the realities and still have that optimist feeling that good would over power I’m an optimist. I will hope, and I do pray that the hate and negative energy I see around us will never win. But for the first time in my life I’m not as confident. That scares me. So, in times that I’m feeling sad or not as hopeful as I’d like about our humanity I go back to that place in Israel, where I feel safe and use it to motivate me to make this world better. This experience in Israel made me feel grounded and connected in ways I don’t have enough space to write at this moment. I felt grounded within myself when I left Israel. The experience made me feel more confident in myself and connected me to a culture I had been missing. It gave me a bit of purpose and helped me realize all I had to do was be connected to myself, be myself and the rest would follow.
