How Israel Changed My Life

My Israel Travel Experience

Years ago, I went to Israel with a group to celebrate my friend’s 40th birthday. A month before that, on my 22nd birthday, I fractured my ankle. So I convinced someone to help me cut off my cast (in preparation for the swelling during the flight) and set off to meet my friends in a city that had been bombed a week or two earlier. Sorry, mom! That trip and the experiences I had while I was there shaped my life moving forward profoundly. It was more than the location, although that was profound in itself, especially Jerusalem. It also wasn’t the first time I had traveled by myself. I had already met friends in Japan and Paris as well as various places around the United States.

There was something different about that trip though. It was the first time in my life that I had walked by a bombed building. We spoke to a woman who had spent time on the front lines during her mandatory military service. Even though I had traveled to meet friends, it was one of the trips I spent the most time alone on. I didn’t want to hold the whole group back because I had a broken ankle and I spent a day alone while they all went to the Dead Sea. According to reports, I never would have made it down the long rocky path on my crutches. I also spent some time walking a smaller circuit of Jerusalem than the others since I was starting to struggle to keep up. In these moments alone. I had some really interesting experiences that taught me a lot about myself and the nature of people.

One of my favorite experiences was one we experienced together as a group. One afternoon we were enjoying the beach and we were invited to join a group of Palestinians who were having a picnic. If I remember correctly, it was a group of doctors and nurses there for training. After hearing so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it blew my mind to see a group of Palestinians casually hanging out in Tel Aviv. Something shifted and I realized this situation, and therefore many other situations in life had a lot more nuance than is often presented to us. There were still members of these two groups coexisting in daily life without constant conflict, obvious anxiety, and even open hospitality.

However, the openness and generosity of the people there are what left the biggest impact on me. Despite all the terrible things that people were dealing with daily, there was more sense of community and hospitality than anywhere I had been. When our group of women was harassed by drunk tourists, a group of local men came out of nowhere, scared the other men off, and respectfully disappeared again. While walking around by myself on crutches, I was approached multiple times and offered assistance. On my way to the beach, someone offered me lunch. When someone popped up and snapped a photo of us talking, he joked that the press would have fun trying to figure out who I was. In Jerusalem, I asked a stranger for directions and ended up getting carried up about 100 stairs in the direction I needed to go. The man offered to take a photo of me at the top and left me on the much more manageable path down. That same day, I sat and spoke to a shopkeeper that offered me tea as I passed. When I told him I couldn’t buy anything, he said he was only interested in my stories I had. Never in my life had I put my trust in the universe like I did on that trip and it paid off tenfold in learning.