By Ilana Sandberg
So here we are on Nachshon, a program made up of “camp people.” Let’s borrow a game from camp and play “word association” and all the sudden, we arrive at “campfire.” We also find ourselves using a great word for all of us Ulpan students: kumzitz. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word, it’s like the package deal of a campfire; you don’t just get the burning wood, you get the guitar, the s’mores, and the singing for one price (and half off for an end of the season sale if we’re feeling super Israeli)! This brings us to our motzash (post-shabbat) kumzitz on the beach of Caesarea under a blanket of stars, joined by Israel’s cutest YouTube sensation: Yoni and Nina, better known as Yonina!
We had the honor of meeting Yonina within a few hours of the close of our first Shabbat as a cohort. For any of you readers who have yet to experience a truly pluralistic environment, I’ll attempt to explain. It grows very confusing to navigate prayer space when you’re balancing the different styles of prayer practiced by such a diverse audience as well as the prayers themselves. On Friday night there were three options for services: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. The Reform service had fewer than 10 people, the Conservative had approximately 25, and those who desired an Orthodox setting davened with other people staying at Kibbutz Shefayim to make a minyan. Now of course, the services were vastly different and only slightly sampled the various ways the 33 fellows are accustomed to practicing. For some people, this divide felt unfair--they suggested that in future weeks, people sacrifice their own preferences regarding style of service for the sake of creating a communal space. In my understanding of pluralism, no one should be sacrificing their beliefs for the sake of community. No one should be forced to participate in a minyan in which they don't feel comfortable. I've been eating a lot of soup recently so here’s my soup metaphor: Pluralism should not be a puréed vegetable soup where all the vegetables blend into one taste, rather, it should be a soup where all the vegetables are cooked together and their tastes rub off on one another, yet each vegetable’s unique taste remains. The soup eater can still discern what's a carrot and what's celery but the carrot tastes different than it would if it had only been cooked with other carrots.
Returning to the more tangible, though, even singing on Friday night was an endeavor. Some fellows wanted to sing the longer Friday night zemirot to which they are accustomed. This presented an uncomfortable situation when team long-song was faced with shorter songs which other members of the cohort were more familiar. We were presented with a need for a blender for our soup rather than just a sharp knife to cut the vegetables. While in the abstract, pluralism sounds ideal, it creates a whirlwind of questions, problems, and hopefully not too far off solutions. In this first week, it was difficult to truly delve into the ideal “shabbat menucha” when faced with questions of inclusion and pluralism.
Now fast forward to motzei shabbat and in comes Yonina. They enter the scene with a guitar, a box drum, and a small string instrument only played by couples as perfect as Yonina. Yoni and Nina are ready for action and we can’t wait to start singing. Our various Jewish backgrounds are woven together by their enthusiasm for each song they play, by their shocking harmonies, and their excitement to be joining us, the Nachshon Project, on a perfect Saturday night in January. Somehow, no song seems too simple because Yonina infuses each song with meaning and purpose. I look around the warmth of the campfire and find everyone singing along with a grin stretched almost uncomfortably wide. They share new melodies with us, they share their own story with us, they share our first true sense of community with us.
