When you’re packing for a 10-day trip to Israel, it’s hard to know what to expect. Were we going to be wandering in the wilderness tracing the footsteps of the Israelites, or was it going to feel like a scene from Aladdin? (Disney, of course, is a reliable source of what other cultures are like.) Now that we’re back I can see a couple of similarities between my life in Israel and Aladdin. The song in the beginning goes a little something like this:
“Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place,
Where the caravan camels roam.
Where it’s flat and immense,
And the heat is intense;
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”
Well, come to find it’s not actually barbaric, but it was our home for a while. And there were camels. We spent the first three days in Jerusalem, then traveled to the Dead Sea and finally to Tiberias near the Sea of Galilee.
I don’t categorize a lot of trips as life-changing, but this one definitely fits under that heading. It helps me understand why these study abroad groups get so close. Besides being in close quarters for the entire semester, they’re the only people who can truly understand the 10,000 emotions you experience when you visit these places.
You go with certain expectations and a basic understanding of what you’re going to see, but you leave with a new perspective and a realization of the significance of what you’re seeing. You’ve seen the maps in the back of your Bible before, but being there brings everything to life in a way I don’t think any of us expect. So many people go to the Holy Land to feel some sort of connection with God, but it made me realize that the purpose of everything that happened there was to prove that our God isn’t bound by those places.
It becomes more than just historical places and facts and dates. It’s about where we came from and knowing how that should affect our lives. I think of Plato’s allegory of the cave. He uses a depiction of a cave to talk about new ideas and philosophies. Once man leaves the cave and sees the sunlight, he can’t return to the cave because it will be too dark for him to see even the limited amount of light he could see in the beginning. We’ve seen a new light in what we’ve experienced, making it impossible to return to our lives before. There was no miraculous closeness to God when we went to these places, but being surrounded by that culture, we gained a new appreciation and understanding of the significance of what happened there. We’ve left the cave and have gained a broader perspective and can’t go back to the limited understanding we had before. The coolest part is that the understanding doesn’t really come from visiting these places—it comes from knowing that to be close to our God, we didn’t have to go there at all.
We’re all back safe and sound at the Artemis, and most of us agree we’ve about had our fill of falafel and schawarma. We welcomed back the rest of our HUG family and our bunks and Greek food with no reservations. The Artemis has never felt more like home. Regardless, it was a spectacular trip and there’s been a new level of bonding between everyone since we’ve been back. Between scary movies, hosting our very own Bison babies and throwing HUG’s first ever Valentine’s Day party, love is in the air. It must be something in the schawarma.
Next we will visit Peloponnese, and then midterms, an adventure I would not prefer to have in the itinerary. Wish us luck.
