The Judean American Encounter - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

anyways this shabbat was quite a mix and it's really the mixes that are the most interesting rather than just having some demographic all of them just them the mixes are the most interesting they're the most beautiful because it's the it's the culture clashes you know not necessarily clashes but more like encounters right and this shabbat was an encounter that i really most noticed when i stood up to speak because somehow that became my role in the shul in the synagogue and when at night during services somewhere along the way i was unofficially appointed to give over the dvar torah to welcome people that are new to say hello a little joke at the var tour it is right so i'm that guy so uh so i was giving you know it's usually it's it's just a little speech a little torah idea between kabbalah chabat right what's kabbalach about the musical shabbat welcoming service and uh that leads into the uh evening surface which is our aveet or ma'arif and so i stand up right between those turf surfaces and i stood up at the house of prayer i just want you to be able to visualize it right there and you know it's this circular beautiful house of prayer it looks some people thinks it looks like an old mosque although the truth is jews have been building our synagogues like this since before muhammad was even in the third grade and we've just liberated the architecture but anyways i was looking around and it wasn't a melting pot it was a salad bowl right a bowl that hadn't been mixed yet with all the vegetables neatly organized in their own spots and so while i was staring at this special salad bowl i quickly realized that i was staring at the contrast between the branch and the stick which was manifesting right before my eyes and so and by the way i really hope when i say this i'm not offending anyone because i can tell you i very much look back in my life and spent most of it uh you know identify seeing myself as a stick much more than a branch i'm still working my way towards the branch from the state but anyways i stood up to speak and to my right were four high school kids that flew in from florida for a uh modern orthodox have you heard of the word modern orthodox before that's what i thought that's what i grew up believing my title was it was a summer camp in israel and in some ways they reminded me of myself at their age as i also defined myself back then as modern orthodox and would have found myself at a summer camp exactly like that i actually think i was at that summer camp just an earlier year the pre-trip to israeli so my friend toby i think i told you about him he's staying with his family his wife hai and his kids in jeremy's house while he's gone so he invited these boys over for shabbat he's always inviting people over he wants them to experience the farm and so to my right were these kids and to my left were about 10 no argv and again i hate labels particularly this one because there's a lot of baggage about it here in israel but newark vote it's literally translated as hilltop youth and they have these long peyote and they're rugged and they're sun worn and their clothes are usually torn and uh and we're just blessed to have them regularly come through the farm as volunteers they're just jewels that really they're hard workers they take the sheep out to pasture they build they irrigate they work the fields and the vineyards and i just love the fact that they're at our farm and that they exist and often when i look at them i really feel like i just see the light of redemption beginning to shine you know often i feel like i have a message for everybody i have something to say to everyone but them i'm often like what what do i have to teach them or to say to them other than saying look at me and i'm a relic of the past and you're a sign of the future i don't know they're just so uh unblemished and authentic and you know they don't have to try to sift through all the western cultural perspectives by the way some of which aren't necessarily bad right that we're supposed to bring those lights of of from from throughout the exile but it's there's a lot of bad in there a lot of stuff that's a guy like me is trying to work through they're just raw judean and so seeing them on each side of the room was just it was such a sight to behold right they were like these these four high school kids and these newer vote hilltop youth were like bizarro versions of each other and i was just picturing these kids you know changing their bieber-like haircuts to exactly like the the hilltop youth right because on the one side there were these indigenous looking judeans and on the other side the four high school kids good kids really great kids but they looked so western one of them had you know product like gel in his hair which he needed to apply in order to ensure that it looked like he had just rolled out of bed for the entirety of the day and then he needed to remain looking exactly like justin bieber it was the bieber look i don't even know what justin bieber looks like but that's exactly how i imagined him was the way this kid looked and you know another one had a little of these little pins that said things in his crocs and one said love is love with a rainbow background this kid doesn't know what he's just putting things in his crocs that he people put in their crocs i don't even know people put pins in their crocs anyways you know these two groups were just sitting there staring at each other and it was just so it was just so interesting i don't know there has to be a better word for it you could tell that they were that there was such a curiosity that they had about each other that they just wanted to engage one another but they literally couldn't one side didn't know a word of english other than very i don't know why it is that all israelis for some reason the go-to word for israelis that don't speak english is very right one of these kids i said to speak to this group that visited to the farm and he says i am very very very strong that was all he knew how to say strong okay so it was cute anyways the other side barely spoke passable hebrews so they were sort of just stuck looking at each other awkwardly and it was sort of funny to see and right in the middle sitting across from me as i was preparing to speak my message was shana's nephew our nephew but shane's nephew before i married shanna uh his name in america was avery right but he left college in the u.s after the first year there he came to israel and he joined the army and now he goes by his hebrew name which i think is his real name and he goes by avner which as you know is a very strong name as avner was one of david's strongest army generals anyways he was sitting right there in between both groups sort of a bridge between the two of them with a foot in each world this highlight was taken from the land of israel fellowship every week hundreds of families from literally around the world come together on our live 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