As I stood in the arrival Hall of Ben Gurion Airport, I began to spot them. Women, without the typical “been on a plane for way too long,” glazed look on their faces. Rather, with looks of excited anticipation, lugging colorful backpacks marked with the now all too familiar letters, JWRP.
Flash back to five months earlier. An enigmatic email: Would you like to go on an all-expenses paid trip to Israel? Contact the KC Kollel! Just hit reply. So, I did, as did a dozen or more other local women. There was an application process which thankfully I successfully passed.
Wow! So what exactly did I sign up for? What exactly is this Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project? At our first group meeting in KC, I looked around the comfortable room at the home of our fearless leader, Esther Sokoloff, and was comforted to see there were a few familiar faces. As we introduced ourselves we all had two major things in common. We were all Jews and we were all mothers. That turned out to be the common thread that bound the experience together for the KC Kollel delegation to Israel.
Flash Forward, Ben Gurion Airport. Cell phones are distributed, money changed, busses loaded. We are introduced to our guides and to the Denver delegation, with whom we would be sharing a bus for the duration of the trip.
Immediately games of Jewish geography commence. Of course, the first person I speak with happens to be best friends for life with a Kansan, whose sister I have known since our early teens.
Our first stop was Tiberius, the Northern-most point of our trip. Our first group event is dinner at Decks, a fabulous restaurant on the shores of Lake Kineret. This is where I get a glimpse of things to come. They begin by bringing course after course of beautiful salads and appetizers.
We begin to eat, when all of the sudden, music blares over the hidden speakers of the outdoor venue. Nearly everyone in the entire restaurant, packed by our group of 300, begin to dance to a spirit-lifting combination of disco hits mixed with familiar Jewish and Israeli folk songs. Women clasp hands and begin to whirl around the outdoor decks, until we collapse in our seats in a state of utter exhaustion. So began a unique adventure.
The JWRP was the culmination of a meeting of a handful of Jewish women brainstorming at a mountain retreat just a few short years ago. Since that meeting, thousands of women have traveled to Israel for the experience of a lifetime.
We were treated as a group of intelligent women who had a right and a duty to know what Judaism has to offer us. We were treated to speakers of the highest caliber and thought-provoking seminars on a variety of topics — raising children, assimilation, what our families and marriages mean to us and what we can do to make them better.
Highlights of our activities included visiting an army base to present soldiers with thank-you gifts, rafting down the Jordan River, camel rides and climbing Masada where some women chose and were given Hebrew names for the first time.
The most glorious moment for me came at our first Shabbat dinner. We sat in the great Hall at Aish HaTorah, the Talmudic learning center that hosted many classes for our group. The room was bathed in the glow of hundreds of candles, lovingly lit by 300 mothers from every walk of Jewish life, as the Sabbath was ushered in. The quiet hum of conversation was suddenly interrupted by the sound of teenagers singing at the top of their lungs. The doors bust open and 60 or 70 visiting college students — Birthright Israel participants — danced their way into the room. They wove in and out of the tables singing familiar Sabbath songs, but with such joy, we were transfixed. Shabbat had come to us and we felt it in a way I feel confident in saying, most of us had never felt it before.
This trip was coordinated locally by our Kansas City Kollel as an effort to inspire us to think about how we as Jewish women choose to lead our lives. It is about finding what, as a contemporary woman, you can do to give your family a chance to know who they are and where they come from.
We learned that the little things do matter, whether it is ensuring that your children have a Jewish education or lighting candles on Shabbat. The sad truth is that we as Jews are becoming more and more assimilated. But maybe, just maybe, in this new age of enlightenment we can take baby steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.
If you have the opportunity to go on this Kollel/JWRP trip in the future, you should certainly consider it. You will definitely get more than you bargained for!
