Written by Heather Shore
If someone walked into the community room at Kibbutz Shefayim around 8:30 in the morning on Friday, they'd probably think they'd just been plopped into some sort of bizarre playground. As he or she looked around, they'd see 21 college students energetically trying to figure out how to rebuild an 8 foot pyramid of interlocked rubber balls in one corner, reconfigure a chess board in the other, and somehow arrange oddly morphed animals into something that may have, at some point, resembled a puzzle in the middle of the room. What this onlooker wouldn't see is that this group of jet lagged, over caffeinated camp counselors met less than twenty four hours ago. For the past two summers I've worked with teenage girls at Eisner Camp. I, along with many of the other Nachshon fellows, are all too familiar with the archetypical teenage eye roll (which we, of course, have never done personally and have only ever witnessed from our campers) that seems to be the automatic response to any proposed activity. My first "aha" moment as a Nachshon fellow came that first day, when, at 8:30 in the morning the day after most of us had experienced 24+ hour travel days, we were given these crazy tasks to complete and not a single eye roll took place. Everyone dove in collectively, and regardless of whether individuals led from within by stepping back to observe or whether they took charge hands on, no one thought twice about how from the outside looking in it appeared utterly absurd that we were doing these activities. Without even the slightest hesitation, we embraced the silliness, we learned to balance each other's leadership styles, and to be blunt- we got stuff done. Seeing a room of strangers come together with this type of immediate excitement made me realize that I had made the right choice by joining this program. It didn't matter that we were from completely different backgrounds, camps, and schools of thought, because at the end of just that first day we had proven that none of those things make or break a successful team with a shared goal. What the confused onlooker from earlier wouldn't see is that mixed into this group of 21 camp counselors were hundreds of views on Jewish life, several dozen leadership styles, and one undeniably shared question: "What are we doing here?"
What are we doing here? As far a loaded questions go, this one is probably as heavy as it gets. As we moved from one activity to the next on that first morning and eventually as that first morning melted into the entire first week of memories the weight of that question dissipated. Our first day's team building activities showed us one thing: it genuinely does not matter that none of us have a concrete, 100% idea of what we, as pieces of the Nachshon Project puzzle will ultimately end up being, or how that hazy "Why?" will ultimately come into focus. It didn't matter that when we got to each of the stations that first morning, there was no immediately clear answer to "what are we doing here?" because what mattered was that we threw ourselves into things and learned to figured out that answer again and again as a team.The Nachshon project is new and perpetually in self-evaluating flux. Our first day of hectic team building activities proved that not only are we down for the ride, but that we're down for that ride together.
