By Shayna Roth
On Monday, January 23, we said a bittersweet goodbye to Shefayim; sad to leave the incredible week of learning and team building but excited to make Jerusalem our home for the next five months. The eager jitters among us were evident, and not even the large volume of unanticipated traffic seemed to be able to dampen that mood. At some point someone looked out the window and shouted, “We are here!” at which point everyone suddenly jumped to look out the window in awe. A few people started blasting “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and Matisyahu’s “Jerusalem, If I Forget You” on their phones, and our shared excitement was comforting and energizing.
This feeling among our group was consistent throughout the chaos that followed in the next few hours as we searched for our bags in a pile of over 60 luggage pieces, for our rooms and keys that (sometimes) worked to open them, for the Hebrew placement test classrooms, and for a concept of direction both physically on the university’s campus and mentally as we attempted to understand all that was going on around us in our new home for the semester.
We were finally realizing our lengthy anticipation of moving to and studying in the center of Jewish history and culture, an endeavor so significant it almost seemed as if the “normal life” we were setting up to pursue here was artificial. Each of us had our own unique emotional experiences while moving to Jerusalem, but the sense of community that remained consistent within Nachshon Cohort Three was the most remarkable feeling of all. In just one week, 33 college students with a shared passion for Jewish leadership had somehow managed to develop supportive bonds, genuine consideration for one another, and a lot of shared laughs. It is hard to move to a new place; it is hard to suddenly be surrounded by buildings that are unfamiliar and people going about their normal lifestyles in a bubble with systems totally unknown to you. However, watching the ways dependability among our group manifested in this situation on only the first day at Hebrew University was indicative of the incredible ways it would push us to support each other every day throughout this semester of learning about Judaism, leadership, the world, ourselves, and one another. I am so grateful to be apart of this budding network of incredible thinkers, leaders, mentors, and friends, and am looking forward to working together to navigate all we experience in the upcoming months in Israel and beyond.
