Tuesday July 30
If we thought yesterday, with Yoshiyahu’s finding of the Torah, was big headline-news…today was literally history-making. We have skipped ahead and are now watching the Churban Bayit Rishon – our first Temple destroyed, and that means exile for our people. In our camp life what that practically means is: 1) We talked about loss and memory in shiur and studied Psalm 137 “Al Naharot Bavel” 2) We have had cardboard walls around our outdoor Beit knesset from the Chanukat haBayit, and they were taken down and burnt in a fire after lunch 3) Our mincha was sad, and that meant no singing Ashrei and no singing Aleinu – huge loss for the chanichim/ot who love the hand motions that go along to those songs each day. This day will not be forgotten – and if it is, may our right hands forget what they are supposed to do…
Again, in between all of this historical drama unfolding בימים ההם בזמן הזה , the bunks are having their full day of peulot which has started to include peulot in our “Village”. Each session, our Village – a special area in the woods in camp – is the home for woodworking, blacksmithing, glassblowing, baking in a brick oven (“sefardi-matza” this session) and many other activities which bring us into the world of the time period we are studying and experiencing. This session, our Village is called Tyre – and besides the projects your children are bringing home from glassblowing and the other “lost arts” featured there (these projects remain a secret for now), they are learning about Archimedes’ screw (a machine used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches, by turning a screw-shaped surface inside a pipe) with hands-on experiments AND dying material techelet (the chilazon snail was actually discovered in Tyre!) AND re-enacting a Greek Symposium AND learning about constellations in our planetarium!! (yes, we have a real planetarium!) When you enter the Village, it is truly stepping into another world. Look for pictures of bunks in the Village, enjoying these activities.
Kaytana learned about Yosef in shiur today. In order to see what a “coat of stripes” might have looked like, they did some tie-dying on a shirt they each received. They enjoyed a picnic lunch (like Yosef’s brothers did) and watched Yosef be thrown off the porch and (presumably, with one’s imagination) land in a pit. The Kaytana chanichim/ot went to Mitzrayim to reunite with Yosef – which to them was the berry-picking farm nearby – and started to put food away for the famine years (i.e. pick berries) 🙂 They also enjoyed a peulah of refet today, where they spent some time with the animals we have here in our small petting zoo.
Machal hiked a 6-mile trail called Heart’s Content today, had a sicha (discussion in groups) about what it means to be a chalutz (loosley translated as “pioneer”), and then returned to civilization for some bowling and a trip to Walmart, followed by a night’s sleep in their bunks in camp!!
